“My hearing is shot. And I’m hoping that chickens will help me”
medium.com
medium.com
About 13 years ago, I opted to get a cochlear implant in my left ear and my left ear only because, on the recommendation of my hearing specialist at Hopkins, I wanted to save my right ear for future advances like this (thinking that a surgery-scarred cochlea might not be usable).
Since it's been 13 years and nothing has come, I've started regretting that decision a lot. Since I live in a city and work with a lot of people around me, I could really use implants on both sides to hear from all directions.
On the other hand, these things are EXPENSIVE to keep/maintain. So I suppose it's just as well that I only have one.
So, this has not been a focus of mine but I make sure to eat magnesium rich foods when my medical condition does certain things to my hearing and I know my son suffers less from buzzing in his ears and that type thing and it was magnesium rich foods that helped.
Unfortunately, I don't have the background I need to know if that would be directly related to this man's issue. My focus has mostly been on other things.
Most cochlear hearing loss is symptomatically similar, although a degree of disorientation is more common in non-syndromic loss due to SNPs, but because the causes are so diverse what works for one person--even granted there are such things--will be completely useless for most others. It is very important to keep this in mind, because you don't appear to have more than incrementally useful evidence that your son's milder tinnitus is due to magnesium rich foods. A single case is simply not very useful for increasing the posterior plausibility of the claim "X causes Y".
Remember, reasoning is fundamentally Bayesian, and Bayes' rule is:
p(X|E) = p(X)P(E|X)/P(E)
where in this case p(X) = prior plausibility of claim X that "magnesium rich foods reduce tinnitus", P(E|X) = probability of your son's tinnitus being reduced given X is true and P(E) = probability that your son's tinnitus wouldn't be so bad anyway. p(X|E) = posterior plausibility of the claim X given your observation that your son's tinnitus is not so bad and he ate lots of magnesium rich foods.
Your prior p(X) will be different than mine: plausibilities are subjective, unlike probabilities, which are objective... it could hardly be otherwise as plausibilities are degrees of belief and you can't have a belief without a believer... that is to say, a subject. But what matters is the ratio P(E|X)/P(E), the ratio of probabilities. Let's assume for the sake of argument that P(E|X) is 1-ε, as high as it can be. If "magnesium rich foods reduce tinnitus" is true, your son's hearing would almost certainly get better.
But here's the question: what is the natural variablity of tinnitus? That's basically what P(E) depends on. If tinnitus varies a lot due to time or circumstances, the P(E) is also going to be pretty high (well aboe ε, at least) and therefore the posterior plausibility p(X|E) is not going to go up by much (a factor of two is incremental: interesting arguments and evidence involve many orders of magnitude increases).
So although it isn't obvious (and forgive me for belabouring the point... I just got hooked on this example) when you claim "it was magnesium rich foods that helped" you are actually asserting "I know what the natural variability of tinnitus is", due to the argument above.
And my question to you is: do you? If so: how?
I've gone through this in detail here because this kind of reasoning is incredibly common, where a person pulls a single fact out and presents it as "proof" for some proposition (and you may not have meant to do that here, but it's what I'm reading into your words and I don't think I'm wrong in suggesting others will read in the same thing... my apologies if I've taken you wrong!) When someone says, "I did X and Y happened so I know X causes Y" they are saying, "I know what the natural variability of Y is".
I would encourage anyone on the receiving end of such an argument to ask them what the natural variability of Y is, because if they do not have that knowledge, they do not have a legitimate--which is to say, Bayesian--claim on the conclusion they wish to draw.
Yes, I do know this (that the magnesium makes a difference). Unfortunately, I probably cannot prove it. However, I am somewhat compulsively helpful. I hate seeing other people suffer. So I foolishly continue to try to help other people, in spite of a long history of being pilloried for trying to share what I know.
Here is my story and how I know, which I am fairly sure won’t convince you of anything:
I have a form of Cystic Fibrosis, as does my oldest son. I nearly died just about 14 years ago, at the age of 35.5. Ten weeks of ear infections turned into pneumonia practically overnight when I tried some "home remedy" that had been suggested to me. I then spent about 3.5 months bedridden and was finally diagnosed with CF just short of my 36th birthday. I had already started looking into alternative medicine because doctors were not being very helpful. Also, given that I had lived that long without a diagnosis, I felt confident that, armed with the information about exactly what was wrong with my body, I could certainly improve on my track record.
The home remedy that made my condition dramatically worse overnight was acidic in nature. I have since learned that acidity promotes inflammation, CF is an inflammatory condition and it slowly makes you way the hell too acid. I thought this was a big epiphany that would revolutionize treatment of CF, but everyone already knows this. They just don’t think it is medically significant and mostly don’t bother to treat it.
I recently spoke with a knowledgeable person from the CF community and explained that my best understanding is that the mechanism behind CF is that the interior of the cell becomes both increasingly too acid and gets out of whack in terms of salt and mineral balance, and this is the underlying mechanism behind "the normal progression of CF" and reversing that is why I have been able to not only stop the progression in myself and my son but actually reverse our symptoms and gradually get healthier. It creates a positive feedback loop of the worst kind: More acidity and mineral imbalance leads to increased misfolds of proteins (including the CFTR, the defective protein in our genetic disorder) and more misfolds leads to the cell being too acid and more imbalanced in terms of minerals. It is known that the cells of people with CF hoard both calcium and glutathione, a powerful antioxidant. I believe our bodies do this as a means to buffer the cell against these chemical imbalances.
So this knowledgeable individual, who is well respected in the CF community and has apparently written some papers on the subject, told me “It can’t work that way. That would kill you. A cell has to maintain a pH balance within a very narrow range in order to sustain life.” I wrote back and said “Given that CF kills people, often at very young ages, I don’t think that’s a good counterargument.” She then began looking up articles that support my hypothesis instead of shooting me down. It turns out there has been actual research on this idea as far back as (IIRC) 2008 but it isn’t getting much press and isn’t being seriously pursued as a treatment modality.
So I have spent a lot of years talking with people with various conditions and the detail that magnesium helps with tinnitus is well known in at least one alternative medicine community. That was where I got the initial information on that. I know it to be true because anytime I throw up a lot or run too much fever, I start having issues with noise sensitivity and the like and the thing that consistently helps it every single time is eating magnesium rich foods.
Of course, it wasn’t as simple as just feeding my son magnesium rich foods to help with his tinnitus. We were also reversing the high acidity of his cells. This is related because magnesium is an alkaline mineral. People with CF are prone to getting osteoporosis as early as their teens. I saw some show a long time ago that indicated that life did not leave the ocean until we had bones not just for the infrastructure it provides, but because the calcium is critical to mediating the blood balance. Sharks and other sea creatures don’t need that. The mineral rich ocean water keeps their blood balance on an even keel. But land creatures need a large store of calcium to draw upon because if your blood leaves a very narrow range of pH, you die. And you die pretty darn quickly. When diabetics are diagnosed with ketoacidosis, they typically are promptly hospitalized because it can kill you within three days. (I know this in part because I worked for an insurance company for over 5 years and read medical records all day long as part of my job.)
So it is very well established that acidosis is a bad thing. It is very well established that CF makes you too acid. If you become suddenly and extremely too acid, they hospitalize you. But if you have CF and you thus become slowly, gradually, inexorably too acid and they know you are dying from your genetic disorder, they completely overlook the connection between this known acidosis and the fact that you are dying and if you are patient who thinks that is medically significant and something that needs to be treated as a cornerstone of dealing with the condition, the entire world will advise you that you are nuts and will do all it can to issue you a gag order and give you hell (ie if you are me).
So while I think the cochlear hearing loss issue is no doubt more complicated than just “take magnesium,” given that I regenerated my lung tissue and no longer have a hole in my left lung and magnesium deficiency promotes acidosis because it is an alkaline mineral…etc…etc..etc.. compressing 14 years of research and trial and error into a short post for HN comes out as a suggestion that I think that antibiotics that cause magnesium deficiency might be a clue as to what the best direction to take future research might be for this hearing loss issue.
However, that’s sort of an educated guess. I don’t actually know which antibiotics are known to cause this issue. I was just being stupidly compulsively helpful. As soon as I am done getting myself physically well and off the street, I plan on getting that compulsively helpful personality defect dealt with.
Have a great day.
Edit: I appear to have left out the detail that magnesium deficiency and calcium deficiency are interrelated. They work hand in hand and the body needs BOTH (plus a few other things, like vitamins D and K, which people with CF are routinely deficient in because they are fat soluble) in order to properly process them. So if you are deficient in either of them, you can pretty much bet that you are deficient in both.
But this comment is already overly long and it probably makes no difference how well I state my case.
https://medium.com/@Amp/cant-you-just-turn-up-the-volume-4ec...
It's been tried (appropriately enough, with guinea pigs) and there was no inflammatory response, even from xenotransplantation... however, it was also not very effective.
I mean, way to look past differences, disband stereotypes, etc and unite people for your cause.
To the Republican chairman of the Senate Environment Committee, science is irrelevant.
Do Republican senators as a whole actually support scientific funding substantially less than Democrat senators?
You can only believe that if you don't actually listen to them or pay attention to what they do. There's a reason Bob Dole acquired the reputation of "Tax Collector for the Welfare State", and for current events, look no further than the Republican Senators like John Thune who are salivating for an increase in the Federal gasoline tax, more tolerable now that prices have dropped. And why the Republican establishment's loathing of the "Tea Party" vastly exceeds that of the Democrats (.e.g ask the primaried Republicans who are now spending more time with their families, especially once powerful ones like Senator Lugar or #2 in the House Cantor).
You're confusing general propaganda against Republicans vs. what they, professional politicians, say, vs. what they actually DO. Believing either of the first two is unwise.
To end with some inconvenient facts, it wasn't Republicans who killed the Superconducting Supercollider, it was Republicans who funded the James Webb Space Telescope (started in a Republican Congress), and Reagan (and I think both Bushes) signed off on increases in the non-defense science budget. NIH funding is a good proxy for that, e.g. look here: http://officeofbudget.od.nih.gov/approp_hist.html