14 karma · joined September 24, 2011
As for suspend and resume, it didn't become an issue until recently when my workflow became sit for half-an-hour to an hour, then pick up and move multiple times a day. Rebooting, opening all my programs again, etc. became tedious.
1) People born in northern latitude areas (europe, USA), who then move at a young age close to the equator.
2) People who live their whole lives in an area close to the equator
3) People who were born and raised in areas close to the equator then moved to northern latitudes in adulthood.
Compare to people who are more suspectible to MS:
1) People are born in areas close to the equator then move at an early age to northern latitudes
2) People who live their whole lives in northern latitudes
3) People who live their childhood in northern latitudes then move to the equator.
So there is a correlation between growing up, regardless of what happens in adulthood, near the equator (maybe from Vit D dosage) and having a lower risk for MS. Cool stuff.
So the drug is useful for inducing the symptoms, however once the drug is gone so are the symptoms. Schizophrenics have problems at some cellular level, be it receptor, transcription, translation, protein modification, etc that leads to their symptoms and the end effects that are similar to LSD. LSD causes the final step in the pathway, not the initial ones.
Likewise for your drugs, you named two dopamine blockers (one selective for D_2 and one not). these treat schizophrenia in the sense that they minimise symptoms since they are working at the final step in what is wrong with the patients. They are not "cures" because they don't address the initial issue, which we hopefully will discover.
They, in large doses, stop your breathing which is close enough and will kill you (like you later said), unlike, say a benzodiazepine which you can take to your hearts content and will just knock you out senseless without killing you (unless you add alcohol or another GABA receptor drug).
They also can send you into a hypotensive crisis if you're hypovolemic, which also will kill you. So I would really be hesistant to call them "quite safe, as drugs go" because they are definitely on the dangerous spectrum. We could list a ton of drugs I'd rank higher on the safety spectrum than opioids in terms of both short and long-term effects, with opioids only "redeeming" quality being their instant reverse agent (naloxone) or partial reverse agents (pentazocine or buprenorphine).
In Crohn's disease, our bodies, for whatever reason, seem to be skewed towards producing a really unnecessary Th1 response in the gut which causes our bodies to self-destruct the GI tract. By giving hookworms to a patient, the hope is that the needed worm-killing Th2 response (worms are too big for really an effective Th1 response and need to be coated in antibodies and essentially repeatedly nuked with cytotoxic chemicals) will shift the balance in the patient's gut from Th1 towards Th2, thus eliminating their Crohn's manifestations and symptoms. Really cool idea.