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Comment by JimTheMan | Hacker News Reader

It's always astonishing to find that the envelope of cutting edge knowledge is sometimes far closer than you think.

IE, jaw muscles hadn't been figured out yet.

That really doesn’t help with my faith in medicine. It’s not that doctors don’t know a lot of things that work for a lot of conditions, but when it comes to knowing why something works, things get a lot murkier. I cut them a lot of slack because we evolved by chance and there is no design documentation or even clear requirements to work with.

,,That really doesn’t help with my faith in medicine''

Better knowledge of anatomy doesn't help medecine. Better knowledge of aging process and immunology is much more important for increasing human lifespan and decreasing human suffering, and the last 10 years gave us amazing improvements in the knowledge part.

That's a dismissive attitude of other people's suffering. I have never had debilitating migraines, but I feel compassion for people who experience them. I value any innovation that would alleviate their suffering, just as I hope others would feel about problems I have.

Research works by prioritizing it to places where people expect a return. My friend has a PhD in cancer research because this way she takes part in saving human lives with the highest probability/impact. She could of course go to study anatomy more instead, but as it has an opportunity cost of more people dying of cancer.

Not having faith in medicine, which had many breakthroughs in the past few years just because it doesn't prioritize low impact research is what I would call dismissive.

I kind of get a kick out of the idea that no one actually knows how anti inflammatory painkillers actually work. There are tons of mysteries in our bodies

We also don't really get how anaesthesia works. Like, the local pain interactions? All good. The general loss of consciousness? Nope.

Also asking for clarification here. We’ve made a lot of progress understanding the target nerve cell proteins of many general anesthetics. Certainly this is young research but I don’t feel like we’re completely in the dark - there’s been heaps of progress here just in my short, 30+ year life and even since I studied medicine last decade.

It's almost a tautology, but one that is adjacent to deep truths. We don't understand how consciousness emerges, so we can't explain how some relatively simple molecules temporarily suspend it.

We know a lot about local interactions, but the big picture isn't there yet. More, as you well know, is different.

Can you expand on what you mean?

I ask because we know NSAIDs’ impact on the cyclooxygenase enzymatic pathways and the corresponding impact that the reduction of prostaglandins has on bodily inflammation.

might have gotten my otc medicine mixed up, acetaminophen is the painkiller that's still unknown i think. i would say a google search is probably more interesting that anything I have for you.

Aren't there new studies emerging regarding acetaminophen destroying the empathy (is this parasympathetic, or sympathetic?), due to nervous system harm?

That’s really how it is.

Having lost someone to ILD and then personally going through increasingly debilitating and unnerving (ddx) occipital neuralgia/headache (is there even a difference) I’ve come to understand, however yet to accept fully, that we are on borrowed time that one should just appreciate the good fortune of, until one fine day we have to come face to face with the vast limitations/inabilities of medical science or go through its probability based guesswork while fluctuating between hope and despair.

I am not saying this pejoratively, rather just matter-of-factly.

It’s just sad and defeating.

That's why having TMJD (popping, clicking, dysfunction of the jaw) sucks so much. Surgeons don't like to mess with the jaw at all unless it's a last resort because it's not very well understood. Some of us have had it for years and the only "treatment" we can get is hot water bottles and painkillers. Hopefully this discovery will change things.

I find absolutely nothing solves the tightness/clicking like vaporized cannabis herb, or edibles.

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