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That's great to know.

It's unfortunate that there's an insanely high number of folks in the population that are taking FQs and running into toxicity without any hope of figuring out what is going on with their bodies.

It seems that it would behoove folks to be able to take the test and know whether they are safe candidates to take FQ antibiotics.

What's actually interesting is that there exists a model for solving obesity. Mostly it's a matter of having the will and prioritization to solve such a problem.

Japan has an obesity rate of 4%. By law they require every school to employ a professional nutritionist, which requires 3 years of additional training on top of their education degrees. In a particular example of 1000 kids, not a single child is overweight. Every nutritionist is required to design the school's food curriculum such that all meals are made from fresh foods and to be balanced according to all the food groups, and they forbid even the use of processed pastes. All meals are made from fresh foods on-site.

Then the kids are then taught how to eat well and to fully cover their nutritional needs from 6-18. This would be the non-ozempic way to influence a nation to eat well.

I'm a big fan of Attia and familiar with his work. That's fair that excess calories is among the major contributors to Healthcare and addressing that would probably be among the largest impact items we ought to tackle.

I wonder though if with the advent of GLP1 drugs, if obesity may already be a solved problem, but merely a matter of time?

I imagine, as with anything, perfect doesn't need to be the enemy of good enough. A huge multifaceted issue like obesity could be addressed from many angles.

Whenever I come across folk with hEDS-like symptoms, I always like to bring up fluoroquinolone (FQ) antibiotics, as a "btw do you know about this?"

I have a suspicion that some non-trivial amount of the non-genetic EDS folks may suffer from fluoroquinolone antibiotic toxicity.

Among the many effects of FQs is how it can cause a net-loss of collagen in the body. It increases MMPs that breakdown collagen in the body. Part of the reason FQ antibiotics have a black box warning for tendon tearing.

I have a family member that was sure they had hEDS, but it turned out to be FQ toxicity. 20-30 courses over years that would degrade their health, one small bit at a time, unbeknownst to them. While safe for many, for some amount of the population, it can cause what feels like every bodily system slowly failing.

The frustrating bit of it all is how resilient the body is, and most common blood work shows up "normal."

Curious if you've tried any harder core dietary interventions?

I don't think hypochondria is the problem as much as there is a degradation in the overall health of the population and they do feel unwell, but the system is unable to diagnose them because they aren't "bad" by any quantitative standards medicine operates on (ie bloodwork/weight/etc being off).

It's like how the tech world did not notice or address "the website is slow" in the 90s until folks started writing about how the 95th, 98th, 99th, 99.9th percentile times affected user experience. Once we could link 95th percentile page latency to revenue/profit, all of a sudden, investing in performance became a priority.

I'm not sure that we have managed to link and make a case of linking GDP (or some other metric) to overall health of the population at the fringes.

I had a conversation with my friend. "Look at this new, incredible CPU cooler tech! It's sooo good at removing heat."

"What if you didn't generate the heat in the first place?"

Personally, I have a hypothesis that there are systemic areas we need to address in our food supply to lower healthcare demand. This will sound kooky, but if we can get more sulfur and trace minerals into the food supply, we could improve the general well-being of massive amounts of the population. We really need to look at doing more research into additionally fortifying our foods.

Here's a nature article on the reduction of sulfur from the food supply: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-021-00172-0

NPK farming has ensured that the food supply doesn't have a rich set of additional minerals outside of (N)itrogen, (P)hosphorous and (K)potassium.

Then when looking at sulfur-containing molecules, the research on them tends to herald them as miracle-health molecules: MSM Taurine, B1, NAC. All bring sulfur into the body.

Then there's companies like Buoy drops that offer 87 different trace minerals and folks are swearing by the effects of them. Asian countries consume things like seaweed and get trace minerals like this from the the sea water, but a the standard american diet is really lacking in a lot of additional nutrition that would be productive to health.

A big challenge is that most doctors can't operate outside of the most common conditions and differential diagnoses of their specialty and have to punt patients.

Of course, to the doctor's defense, patients are not an easy population to work with, "Why can't I eat candy and cake 3 meals day and my diabetes is getting worse?"

As someone also in a similar position to you, I think the challenge for the non-medical community is that medicine/health frames things in terms of some entity, instead of failures in a systemic set of interconnected processes.

"I HAVE cancer. I HAVE this autoimmune condition. I GOT a cold."

So people are in search of a label and the "thing" to get rid or fight, but imagine if all technology problems were labeled similarly. Rendering-itis. Memory-itis. PCI-Bus-itis. Imagine someone coming to a person going, "I think I have keyboard-itis, because when I type a key into the keyboard, it takes a couple seconds for the character to show up on the screen." When in reality, as the engineer, your intuition is that there's something amiss in the auto-complete microservice. Perhaps that service needs to be scaled up or something else is DOS'ing the service, Perhaps the autocomplete service is running across the country instead of the same datacenter, so you know which tests to run to isolate and solve the source of the problem. Medicine is basically that now.

Medicine has developed to the point where they have several hammers where if bloodwork == X || symptoms == Y, then A or B or C drug/procedure. So doctors are mostly the level 1 engineer after the level 1 tech support rep on a script.

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Most medicine is merely a collections of latin labels, and unless the conditions map to well-known treatments, most doctors are in the dark. You were lucky that you responded to PPIs.

Gastritis is "inflammation of the GI lining" and the use of a PPI, is similar to a common second-line option like "reset the software settings" after the first suggestion of "reboot your computer." They scoped you, because they had no clue what was up. Scoping is basically like lighting up the debugger. They go in with a camera, and basically found nothing but inflammation, thus came the PPIs. They were mostly ruling out cancer or growths or other weird things like outside items. (ie ate a non-digestible item).

Basically, doctors are relying on pharmaceuticals to help out for a couple days/weeks, while the body addresses things on their own such that they don't become necessary anymore. That's probably most medicine. As most pharmaceuticals are symptom management, doctors really only have tools to help someone manage symptoms or alleviate the pain. They are just practiced in that troubleshooting process, the way tech folks get deep into the stack of the architecture of computing, networks, etc and can troubleshoot issues in the tech stack.

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The way that there's only a handful of the most brilliant engineers who deeply understand the stack top to bottom in such a way that they can thread their way to "that's a problem in this specific subsystem and the latest change now makes the datastructures exceed the L3 cache size of that node and that's causing an additional 10 millis degradation." There's really only a handful of doctors who are intimate enough with the all the subsystems of the body to be able to drill into what's going on with a person, otherwise most operate on rules and mentally null pointer when they run into something that doesn't fit into their flow chart.

Outside of very specific genetic conditions, incredible amounts of sickness out there could be alleviated by supporting the biochemistry (limiting reagents) of the body, so its processes can keep it in tip-top shape.

100%.

There is already some compelling anecdata that warrants studying.

Rat park is one, and the doctor who prescribed heroin in the 60s is another.

The jist of it was that addicts stopped abusing when there was something better to live for. In the absence of community, opportunity, and hope, abuse abounded.

The reality of some people's experiences though is that while euphoric in the beginning, long term use leads to an unpleasurable mental haze. The lack of clarity becomes its own hell.

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The potential solution is likely unpopular and likely difficult to implement. Investing into communities that promote community along with incentives for economically depressed areas to be rebuilt, IMO would likely reduce opioid abuse.

But that's not nearly as popular as the moral displacement schadenfreude the people get by being able to point the finger at the drug abusers.

Beyond meds and various coping skills that may be taught via therapy or advice on the internet, I have a nutritional approach that I found to be helpful as an adjuvant to meds. Meds like adderall or provigil tend to be demanding on the brain neurochemistry, so supporting the biochemistry becomes an important part of the strategy, rather than continually going back to the doctor to bump up the dose.

Mostly focus on Omega 3s (specifically DHA, cuz 80% of the brain lipids are DHA), Choline (via AlphaGPC or Phosphatidylcholine) and Magnesium Threonate (the only bioavailable form that can cross the blood brain barrier).

Other lifestyle aspects that are extremely helpful is exercise and focusing on high quality sleep.

Meds are great, but lifestyle is the other half of the equation that's too easy to overlook. I've gone from needing provigil doses at 200mg to about 1/8th of a pill these days and on most days, I skip it because they tend to be slightly too stimulating.

Non-Allopathic in my case means we’re not dealing with the traditional US medical system. We’re not engaged in homeopathy (microdosing random molecules) at all.

Perhaps what we are doing is still considered allopathic (most strategies are informed with research a la pubmed), with an osteopathic approach (whole body).

The difference here is that we’re able to eschew traditional means (dr appointment, lab test, drug rx feedback loop) of engaging with the medical system, while engaging with non-traditional health related businesses for our own care.

For example, we’re able to validate whether genetic disorders are at play by having sequenced full DNA and matching them against known genetic mutations.

We will order our own blood tests and pay out of pocket to quest, to drive decision making. Same thing a regular doctor would do, but in a far more expedited timeline. It’s a 1-2 day process test a vit D levels to determine and adjust dosing. An average doctor might be 3 weeks out for a 15 minute appointment to write that vit D lab script, then another week out from reviewing and writing the Rx for D.

4-5k a month is the cost of what someone with profound chronic illness ends up paying if they want to do their own R&D, deal with things on their own, in a manner that ensures timeliness and the best care possible. It’s a myth that access to the brightest minds (a la an institution like Mayo Clinic equals the best care, btw)

The money is merely the average in which to access the latest tests, as quickly as possible, medical equipment normally inaccessible to the general public and test and treatment options an engaged and highly trained MD that practices something such as precision medicine might suggest at the height of their careers’ charging power.

It also helps that the patriarch is a retired MD and can let us engage with the system out of band by writing scripts for medications that would be unavailable to the average public.

When lives and suffering are on the line, and we’re in these highly compensated roles, 4-5k/month is a privilege to spend for loved ones. Much of it may be lit on fire, so to speak, in personal r&d efforts, but each of them yields a win that gets us closer to a healthy baseline.

This is a random reply to a different comment Aerbil313 made for their benefit as their email in hackernews seems expired.

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I have a family member suffering from multiple exposures to fluoroquinolone (FQ) antibiotics. While the research doesn't understand the root-cause reason for how FQs cause trouble, my journey with dealing with my personal family-history of diabetes and my family's chronic illness has gotten me to go down a road of understanding how to solve some issues.

From what I understand, mitochondrial dysfunction appears to be at the core of many issues like I said. However, to expand on what I've found useful in my n=1-2 experiments, juxtaposed against much of the Phd/MD health podcast sphere information, most interventions like exercise and nutrition fundamentally are there to improve metabolic health. Many markers like VO2 Max or A1c are integral that gives a snapshot of one aspect of one's metabolic health.

In my family's and my specific journey, I've put together a variety of molecules/supplements we've found useful in their journey and framed it in such a way as to be actionable, but also presentable enough to the public.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Fo2F851i0OE4tIQb0hQ7...

It's a lot of information, but hopefully it would be useful for you and others. Feel free to ask any questions on my rationale, thinking, or reasoning behind why certain things are useful, and how I came to certain conclusions.

What's the best way to solve the engineering issue of high load on any given system?

Reduce or eliminate the load.

Of course insurance will reduce their load with tactics such as deny, deny. But systemically, there's a better, good-faith way.

IMHO, without getting into all the nitty gritty details, the good-faith way to improve a ton of healthcare is to extend the efforts of fortification in common foods, expand people's consumption of healthier foods (more plants that provider fiber + minerals), improve people's abilities and motivation around healthier lifestyle choices (exercise, sleep), and significantly reduce or re-engineer illness-causing agents (plastics, VOCs) in our daily lives.

The challenge is how to implement these things in a balanced and sustainable manner, while keeping most industries relatively happy. Of course this would take a decade or more, but the knowledge is out there from some very competent healthspan PHds/MDs and a variety of scientists.

In my personal opinion, if all we did was increase consumption of sulfur, protein (especially collagenic sources), we would improve a tremendous amount of health outcomes drastically. Asian countries are a great example where the food actually has sulfur and collagenic sources built into their culture. Koreans consume cabbage 3x/day (cruciferous veggies with sulfur) and traditionally consume a bone-broth (collagenic) type of soup with 1-3 meals on the daily. I could outline the science here, but a huge amount of chronic illness, such as the shooter's mother may have seen some relief with some of my aforementioned efforts.

The way we can take for granted iodine deficiency because they added it to salt, we really need to do that for others. Omega 3s within milk these days is also a good path forward.

Just because his family is wealthy does not mean that his mother was financially supported for her healthcare. It's quite possible that the family patriarch held the purse strings and deemed that health insurance was the line for their financial support.

I'm in a similar situation with a family member and we are spending around 4-5k/month in a variety of non-allopathic strategies for this family member's health care. However, the family patriarch has drawn the line where his financial support is in providing housing, so the 4-5k is picked up by other family members.

The problem with tribal (political) identities is that to hold independent and opposing tribal ideologies (ie pro-choice but also pro-gun) is isolating from all groups. Thus, many people end up choosing to belong at the expense of the inconsistencies in the respective group they have decided to be a part of.

I'd say that to hold anti-capitalist ideals while liking Musk is reconciled through varying lenses. Musk can be idolized for his impact on the environment and moving various initiatives forward such as self-driving. One could argue that Musk is capitalist, but it could also be argued that Musk would drive these "good" initiatives even in a non-capitalist structure, thus the respect.

I'm not supporting musk, but merely illustrating how a certain level of rationalization can take place, counter to your insinuation that "opinions may not be thought through." It's the same thinking that also gives way when understanding the psyche behind various voters in this recent election.

The amount of conservative comments stating to the effect of, "today I learned that I'm a left winger." would say otherwise.

As someone dealing with a similar health journey of loved ones as the killer's, it takes a tremendous amount of time and effort to finally come to the conclusion that the medical system as a whole isn't very helpful for certain conditions, before one takes treatment into their own hands.

Doctors fear of malpractice and pressure to fit in as many billable moments in a day means that there's really no deep "engineering" of someone's problems that doesn't fit neatly into their mental diagnostic flow chart. So it's presented as needing expensive diagnostic work, to which the insurance companies also put up their hoops. And doctors are also not trained in nutrition and its effect on chronic illness such as this shooter's mothers.

So what it ends up feeling like is that if only the insurance companies were efficient, we could have an efficient route to hope while the insurance companies block such efforts.

Healthcare in America is one of those areas where unintuitive solutions are needed, and I would argue that it starts at the lifestyle prevention level before it even gets to the medical doctors and insurance companies.

I'd imagine NYC to be worse than Miami.

Miami seems to share enough similarity in warm weather to SF to be a similar enough use case to expand while providing slightly different driving conditions to be able to dip ones toes in to the driving habits of a different city.

While insurance is absolutely a necessary component that needs fixing, I think we could do a far greater, aggregate good by addressing fundamental lifestyle issues.

Having doctors in the family, and having been on my own personal health journey, modern medicine, while incredible in some aspects, is profoundly rudimentary in other regards.

So many people in chronic illness communities finally get access to insurance with big hopes, and it turns out the doctors don’t really know what to do with health failures without any obvious blood markers or scans. So folks get shuttled from doc to doc to speciality to specialty with very little hope of improvement.

While I could propose a hypothesis, what we could use is funding and research that specifically looks at studying and deploying larger scale and better blood markers of health. Specifically intracellular measurement based markers.

Some useful areas that are likely profound, but not limited to, ought to be with plasma and intracellular anti-inflammatory markers, the molecular/nutritional components that drive said markers along with the ability to influence various food industries to then address these things in the food supply via various fortifications, similar to how milk has vitamin D added, and salt has iodine added to it. Now a days, we are adding omega 3s to milk as well, which is pretty crucial imo.

The challenges I see are multi-fold. We need better campaigns that make various nutritional knowledge more well known, so folks can be more informed. The food industry will need incentives to take on the cost of fortifying their foods with various vitamins and minerals. Then there is an aspect of having nationwide marketing to get folks out exercising more. Weights, sports, walking, anything such that folks are getting out more.

This would fundamentally start to lower the demand generated on the healthcare system for invisible issues that seem to have no solution.

Pharma and food will hate it. Medicine will likely embrace it. And the populace would absolutely take it for granted, but we would see many aspects of our nation get better. I’d be willing to bet that a concerted effort would improve the populations mental health, productivity, happiness, educational scores, reduce disability, reduce welfare needs, etc and every other measurable metric could become better.

It’s a bold claim, and I’m happy to get into the details as to why, but currently, only the richest folks that care can optimize their lives in these ways, but if we can accelerate the deployment of these things, there’s incredible gains to be had.

The site might be up, but my twitter app, even though updated, has been busted for months. Though that could be that I’m on the iOS beta.

I can’t even engage when I click on Twitter links cuz the whole link to app hijacking mechanism won’t even let me go to the website. Sure I can delete the app or copy/paste the url, but the fact that I have to do insane workarounds means, there’s whole sections of users that can’t use twitter even if they wanted to.

Abs I don’t care enough to actually fix this particular problem so, it stays broken.

When the incentives aligned. Pretty sure during the 90+% tax rate era offered insane incentives to reinvest into the business and employees.

I don't think we need to get rid of capitalism. The controls around capitalism like taxes, social safety nets, could use a little fine tuning.

Capitalism at its core is still pretty efficient compared to everything else. The hyper efficiency needs to not throw the baby (regular folks) out with the bath water(cutting expenses), that’s all.

Just downloaded the new classic version with ads and wanted to pass along a suggestion that Thor makes.

While I understand that you’ve gotta make a living, ads are far more palatable if the user can consent to them.

And the way to make the user a part of the process is to offer a trade for the ad, rather than obtrusively running them.

“Would you like 500 gold to watch an ad?”

Yes? Ad for in-game currency that provides powerups? That’s a great deal and it’s win/win.

No? Okay, no ad, but no power up.

Statistically, you almost always get a yes, but the players are 100x happier than the slimey games that force ads in unscrupulous ways.

People want to be engaged with the work they believe in. Students or adults.

Fundamentally, kids that are just trying to pass a class don't see the value in learning and it seems that the contributions towards the "pointless" school work are parts teacher attitudes, parts curriculum design, parts real-life applicability to the student's interests, parts framing.

We've been using tests and such for far too long as a proxy for competence, rather than developing the competencies in such a way that engages the kids.

I think we need to look at reframing fundamental parts of how education is structured. I don't think there needs to be drastic changes, just some small things that allow the education and curriculum to become more engaging.

This really needs to be broadcasted from the rooftops. Fluoroquinolones wreak massive havoc in their wake and should only be reserved for life threatening situations.

Basically, antibiotics are causal for leaky gut in mice.

Pretty compelling findings and the ramifications are huge!

I buy them in packs of 3-5 on ebay for $5-10. (no need to buy the really expensive brands) They are quick to replace, have a nice oleophobic coating on them, and can be replaced as frequently as desired.

I can see where my mental heuristic is informed that most chargers are bunk, so I never buy chargers on Amazon unless they are Anker or straight from Apple. Cables I will gamble on though.

Same here, but presumably, I have a feeling that I have a pretty good ability for discernment. Thinking of all my non-technical and even technical coworkers that fall for the monthly corporate phishing exercises, there seems to be a non-trivial amount of folks that haven't built up that discernment muscle.

When I visit my elderly mom after several months, I can't quite understand how she's purchased all sorts of bunk from everywhere, not just Amazon. From church MLM sales, to random youtube ads that take her to a store front. While the things she has purchased isn't an absolute scam, they tend to either be low quality or far overpriced for the purchased price.

I do think that there is both a tech privilege that our cohort shares in both high compensation and a better tuned intuition as we tend to be the creators of many products and have a good smell test when it comes to how the sauce is made. The high comp allows for us to purchase the high quality, brand-name version of many products. While understanding the sauce behind a lot of stuff informs my internal heuristics of price, pictures, marketing, 1,3, and 4 star reviews.

I do get the impression that those that are scammed on Amazon tend to be the cohort that is looking for esoteric goods, bleeding edge folks, or just the generally non-privileged folks that will gamble on a $7 Amazon item rather than a $100 version of the thing.

Honestly, the new, high quality Amazon is shopify.

Makes for using independent store fronts a breeze because almost every checkout experience through shopify shares a common login and CC info.