To my surprise, it has been my experience that this turns out to be pulmonary. It was always the chicken-and-egg of... breathing.
Seems like this has been my story:
Severe prolonged stress floored me. Turns out that the autonomous control of bronchoconstriction and dilation had gone out of wack, into dysregulation. My lungs were basically clamped shut. (Muscular tension and sundry dysregulation from severe prolonged stress makes sense, right? Applies to the lungs too!)
Exercise worked when I could get myself to do it... because exercise forces lungs to open.
And the nervous system and brain, well it requires lots of oxygen. In order to learn. And unlearn.
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edit: Also interesting: Ketamine therapy worked. And... ketamine is a bronchodilator!
That's interesting. I've noticed when I go for a long-enough run and my body warms up to an optimal state, breathing feels easy and effective. I wish I could breathe like that all the time.
It sounds like a hero story – it's not, it's more an existential nightmare and funny story? – but I kind of accidentally came to start reading all kinds of papers. Then fiancée was diagnosed with a severe condition. And just by having read stuff I found myself needing to interject doctors during her treatment, quite pointedly, to avoid risk of harm to her and unborn child – with my view being confirmed every single time by another doctor's second opinion.
It's mostly about reading fast enough, not actually requiring a feeling of comprehension. Skimming and going fast through lots of stuff. With extreme humility!! And then bit by bit an intuition kind of grows and you cut through the jargon and get a feeling for the core things. The mights and maybes and relationships in things. And then sort of learning to trust and not trust that intuition and have it guide your reading. It mostly shows up as doubt – an active doubt? – rather than an opaque sense of not having any feeling for things. Then that sometimes refines away from doubt into a sense of clarity towards some mechanism that's probably at play. Keeping absolutely humble towards it is suuuuuuper important, and it's always necessary to retain the perspective of oneself as limited and fallible.
It's also very hard to get this stuff into words. Seems more nebulous and "cosmic" than it is. It's just how our minds and reading comprehension work. It's about feeding the pattern detection systems with... substrate? A handle on things?
There are a few reasons why it works. "Works" as in is beneficial and useful to read, beyond just trusting doctors. (Do trust doctors!, –Jusr... help them help you. That's the thing.) One reason is that doctors do not have time to read, even if they'd very much want to. This is sort of force-multiplied?... with the personalization aspect: It is immensely valuable to read molecular biology from the personal perspective of operating and being inside a specific instance of that molecular biology machinery. The doctor's view is always more general (and is always a guardrail of safety, in part because of that). Then another reason is that there is SO MUCH actionable science out there. Just eminently safe and very, very actionable. It's so hard to get it across how it might be so, how it could possibly be, but it is. It really is.
Good question; It's also hard to get this into words.
Basically I'm fine but I shouldn't be, people are fine who wouldn't have been, lost one unborn child and the next one not; Got a pretty good handle on some significant sleep issues, pulmonary issues, one of the real autoimmune diseases, autonomic nervous system issues, recovery from a life-threatening endocrine issue, pregnancy and placental viability with same issue. All completely opaque to healthcare, all surprisingly mechanistic and actionable by just... reading. Very unbelievable but this is just how it's been.
It's not about me being special or a hero or anything. The gap between really truly actionable knowledge and medical practice is so big and generally so unseen that it's hard to talk across it. Classically maddening. So easy to get there though, by just... reading.
OK, I just read the abstract and conclusion of the NAC paper posted above. But then I saw a comment from Aurornis saying it’s not that good. Not sure who I should listen to.
Which ones? This one in particular is special? See the problem? I still need to trust some authority on which ones to spend time on.
I think the parent was implying that we should try to avoid bias by reading it ourselves, but I still need to trust someone, so still getting biased feedback. "reading the paper" does not remove the bias, because I still need to narrow it down to read only specific ones.
I’m inclined to believe that this happens because there are strong incentives to being able to add to your resume “Directed digital modernization of Museum of Note”.
Indeed. But that is a false equivalence - this is conflict of desires between small companies and creators and an AI-corp where the AI-corp wants to steal their content and give it to users with their shop branding.
The debacle of failing to convey the concrete reality of aerosol transmission and failing to convey the concrete reality of masks that gape at the sides (“surgical masks”) fundamentally and obviously not protecting against aerosol transmission while masks that don’t gape at the sides (N95/FFP2) fundamentally and obviously and provably do protect against aerosol transmission.
The thing with the masks is exactly the same as if public shopping efficiency authorities had consistently put out the large-scale message that “bags” work to carry groceries but conflating mesh bags with non-perforated bags; Yes, mesh bags do tend to get upwards of 30% of the objects you purchase to your home. There’s an underlying insult to common sense and people are actually not stupid.
Likewise, I would add "obviously": I have never seen "obvious" used to describe anything which is obvious, only things which are not.
The phrase "common sense" is even worse, as about half the time it points to claims that are in fact false.
So, in this case, surgical masks: you say it's "obvious" they're not good enough and compare them to a mesh bag. Perhaps they are that bad, but it's not obvious, and "common sense"* suggests to me that surgeons, who are necessarily working with unwell and often immunocompromised people, will desire something that doesn't let one of the surgical team put a random bacterial mix into someone's new kidney when they sneeze.
* I am aware of the irony; and yes, despite this I can also name a famous example where surgeons collectively were very wrong
Indeed!: The case with surgeons continuing to use masks which only serve the function of arresting kinetically emitted saliva droplets when they could be using masks which afford much greater protection against a categorically wider range of complication-inducing pathogens is part of the debacle.
I chose my words carefully. Those are actually the right words.
It is plainly obvious and indisputable that the academic record shows a swath of scientifically acquired data on aerosol transmission and masks-which-do-not-gape-at-the-sides. This basis would have informed a completely different approach and result to public health authorities’ education and emission of sensible information to raise common sense to an ethical standard, if public health authorities operated… non-debacularly, to choose a word.
It's more effort to do things that also make sense than only to produce the bullet point.
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