AI may produce a windfall surge in government revenues in 5 to 10 years. I want governments to spending a small fraction of that windfall on retroactively rewarding entities in proportion to how they have contributed to medical advances, measured by lives saved and suffering avoided.
Continue ReadingI’ve been using Modere’s Curb, a supplement intended to produce healthy GLP-1 levels.
I started taking it in late October, hoping to lose enough weight (3 to 5 pounds?) that I could stop taking Rauwolfia to handle my blood pressure.
My weight dropped 2 pounds in late November, to 149. Since then my weight has been more stable than before. Any remaining trend has been too small to measure. I suspect that the timing of my weight loss is due to getting more exercise than usual the last week in November.
Continue ReadingThe standout announcement from the recent Foresight Vision Weekend came from Openwater, who presented a novel cancer treatment.
I’ve been a bit slow to write about it, in part because my initial reaction was that it’s too good to be true, and most big claims of medical advances are not true.
TL;DR: They’ve developed a cheap ultrasound device that can selectively kill cancer cells by exploiting their unique resonant frequencies, similar to how an opera singer can shatter a wine glass.
Continue ReadingBook review: Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation, by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber.
Hobart and Huber (HH) claim that bubbles are good.
I conclude that this claim is somewhat true. That’s partly because they redefine the concept of a bubble in ways that help make it true.
Boom is densely packed with relevant information. Alas, it’s not full of connections between the various pieces of information and any important conclusions. Nor does it excel at convincing me that its claims are true.
Continue ReadingBook review: The Cancer Resolution?: Cancer reinterpreted through another lens, by Mark Lintern.
In the grand tradition of outsiders overturning scientific paradigms, this book proposes a bold new theory: cancer isn’t a cellular malfunction, but a fungal invasion.
Lintern spends too many pages railing against the medical establishment, which feels more like ax-grinding than science. I mostly agreed with his conclusions here, but mostly for somewhat different reasons than the ones he provides.
If you can push through this preamble, you’ll find a treasure trove of scientific intrigue.
Lintern’s central claim is that fungal infections, not genetic mutations, are the primary cause of cancer. He dubs this the “Cell Suppression theory,” painting a picture of fungi as cellular puppet masters, manipulating our cells for their own nefarious ends. This part sounds much more like classical science, backed by hundreds of quotes from peer-reviewed literature.
Those quotes provide extensive evidence that Lintern’s theory predicts dozens of cancer features better than do the established theories.
Continue ReadingBook review: Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World, by Nick Bostrom.
Bostrom’s previous book, Superintelligence, triggered expressions of concern. In his latest work, he describes his hopes for the distant future, presumably to limit the risk that fear of AI will lead to a The Butlerian Jihad-like scenario.
While Bostrom is relatively cautious about endorsing specific features of a utopia, he clearly expresses his dissatisfaction with the current state of the world. For instance, in a footnoted rant about preserving nature, he writes:
Imagine that some technologically advanced civilization arrived on Earth … Imagine they said: “The most important thing is to preserve the ecosystem in its natural splendor. In particular, the predator populations must be preserved: the psychopath killers, the fascist goons, the despotic death squads … What a tragedy if this rich natural diversity were replaced with a monoculture of healthy, happy, well-fed people living in peace and harmony.” … this would be appallingly callous.
The book begins as if addressing a broad audience, then drifts into philosophy that seems obscure, leading me to wonder if it’s intended as a parody of aimless academic philosophy.
Continue ReadingBook review: Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity, by Peter Attia.
This year’s book on aging focuses mostly on healthspan rather than lifespan, in an effort to combat the tendency of people in the developed world to have a wasted decade around age 80.
Attia calls his approach Medicine 3.0. He wants people to pay a lot more attention to their lifestyle starting a couple of decades before problems such as diabetes and Alzheimer’s create obvious impacts.
He complains about Medicine 2.0 (i.e. mainstream medicine) treating disease as a binary phenomenon. There’s lots of evidence suggesting that age-related diseases develop slowly over periods of more than a decade.
He’s not aiming to cure aging. He aims to enjoy life until age 100 or 120.
Continue ReadingThis is a tale of some differences between functional medicine and mainstream medicine in dealing with high cholesterol. Specifically, how I was treated at the California Center for Functional Medicine (CCFM) versus how I was treated at Kaiser.
Continue ReadingBioVie Inc recently reported some unusual results from a clinical trial for Alzheimer’s.
They report some mildly encouraging cognitive improvements, but it’s only 3 months into the trial and there’s no placebo group, so it’s easy to imagine they’re just seeing a placebo effect (Annovis’ results show a clear placebo effect, presumably influencing the measurement rather than the actual health).
What interested me is this:
Continue ReadingReduces Horvath DNA Methylation SkinBlood Clock by 3.3 years after 3 months of treatment.
I previously sounded vaguely optimistic about the Baze blood test technology. They shut down their blood test service this spring, “for the foreseeable future”. Their web site suggests that they plan to resume it someday. I don’t have much hope that they’ll resume selling it.
Shortly after I posted about Baze, they stopped reporting numbers for magnesium, vitamin D, and vitamin B12. I.e. they only told me results such as “low”, “optimal”, “normal”, etc. This was apparently was due to FDA regulations, although I’m unclear why.
I’d like to believe that Baze is working on getting permission to report results the way that companies such as Life Extension report a wide variety of tests that are conducted via LabCorp.
At roughly the same time, Thorne Research announced study results of a device that sounds very similar to the Baze device (maybe a bit more reliable?).
Thorne is partly a supplement company, but also already has enough of a focus on testing that I don’t expect it to use tests primarily for selling vitamins, the way Baze did.
I’m debating whether to invest in Thorne.