The messy quest to replace drugs with electricity | Hacker News Reader

The messy quest to replace drugs with electricity

technologyreview.com

55 pointssharpshadow20 comments

I know some families that swear by their Healy, a MLM-marketed device that claims it can help ease muscle tension and a whole swath of other health problems, using electric diodes or even just resonate frequencies over the air.

While I think there's something to it, after seeing the app, though, I question its legitimacy. It claims to scan your biosignals by placing your thumb on the phone screen and it has a progress bar that variably increases at the exact same bezier curve rate every time, and then it computes the optimal vibration program for you. But phones don't have hardware or at least the APIs to do that, I'm pretty sure?

But I can't argue that it has seemed to help tame migraines, placebo or not.

Lmao a phone definitely can’t scan your “biosignals” through the screen, seems like obvious mumbo jumbo

Yeah its an obvious scam https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_Y5kdEpcu4

Placebos work.

I guess they have double blind trials to prove that it works?

If not, it’s a scam. Not even a chance it’s not a scam at that point. What you describe is a medical device, according to the FDA, so if it actually worked they’d have certain approvals. If it does anything and it’s not classified by the FDA, it’s illegal.

—

From https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/classify-your-medical-de...

Per Section 201(h)(1) of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, a device is: An instrument, apparatus, implement, machine, contrivance, implant, in vitro reagent, or other similar or related article, including a component part, or accessory which is:

(A) recognized in the official National Formulary, or the United States Pharmacopoeia, or any supplement to them, (B) intended for use in the diagnosis of disease or other conditions, or in the cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease, in man or other animals, or (C) intended to affect the structure or any function of the body of man or other animals, and which does not achieve its primary intended purposes through chemical action within or on the body of man or other animals and which is not dependent upon being metabolized for the achievement of its primary intended purposes. The term "device" does not include software functions excluded pursuant to section 520(o).

The most you could possibly get out of the screen is maybe contact patch size of the finger, as a proxy for pulse rate. Maybe.

It's almost certainly complete bupkis.

Not just "electricity", constructive and destructive interference. Pulse modulation, standing waves, directed patterns, there's a whole new language life speaks that 'electricity' is only a bridge medium. Sound too! We're instruments, and much of our ills come from poor tuning.

‘Body Electric’ is a great read on how electrical the body is, such as with wound repair. I wish the medical sciences could look at the body’s domain from an electromagnetic paradigm to understand the electrostatics of drugs, but better yet, map the bio electronic circuits completely. That will go a long way of being able to duplicate them for body tissue reincarnation and then “self-migration” into a fresh body with the equivalent neural networks in tact. The body reincarnate.

Regardless of how outlandish this seems, this idea and the similar idea of uploading yourself into an exact digital copy to live forever don't seem too appealing to me, for the obvious reason that it's a copy of you, you (the original) would still exist, and die, so what's the benefit to you?

I don't think I'd like knowing that that there was an exact copy of me living on while I (the original) dies. And it seems incredibly egotistical that you would think this is a net good for anybody, that it's worth having a clone of yourself (no matter how exact) living on, and taking up resources etc.

the issue is how would you define consciousness? if you killed a program and ran it again, it would still be the same program with the same bugs, i/o etc the only changes would be the memory addresses the program runs on & it's PID. But it is still the same program

I think there are net positives to this idea, but the concept is too dystopian for our generation to accept it (if its even possible). I dont think human consciousness is like a state machine, but if it was a copy would not be a copy if you are dead, it would be the canonical verison of you

Great book and influential to Levin as well. I agree this is where we're headed

Not too far, there's also microcurrent to interfere with bacterial biofilm growth.

https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_m080YJset14k...

Also see Greg Egan’s Clockwork Rocket, where this is a key plot point.

Somewhat related:

Toward AI-Driven Discovery of Electroceuticals - Dr. Michael Levin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pG6V4SagZE

tldr; non-neural bioelectricity can enable novel bioengineering techniques.

Who the hell pays $80 dollars a year to read this stuff?

probably mostly MIT grads.

MIT grads get it for free.

An education at MIT is hardly free.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com