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How an Alzheimer’s ‘cabal’ thwarted progress toward a cure

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Re: How an Alzheimer’s ‘cabal’ thwarted progress toward a cure

#381

Post by not_kurt_godel »

wavepruner wrote: post #377
not_kurt_godel wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The first source cites his own talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBTr9iQQuq4 , in which he starts out with the disclaimer: > It [his cure for Alzheimer's] isn't a proven reality so if you're looking for double-blind clinical studies of this you're gonna be disappointed. But if you're willing to suspend your disbelief and try something as simple as giving your family member without Alzheimer's disease some…

There's a lot more to it than that. Did you watch the series of videos? The underlying mechanism of how mercury can induce β‐amyloid production and tau phosphorylation has been discovered. Perhaps this paper would be better than the videos. I posted the videos because they are easier to understand. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1471-4159...

No, I did not watch all the videos. It seems like they/you are proposing a hypothesis that mercury poisoning is responsible for a significant percentage of Alzheimer's cases? And reading between the lines on your other posts, you seem to believe that mercury poisoning is a factor in your own illness due to your perception of chelation therapy being effective for you?

Re: How an Alzheimer’s ‘cabal’ thwarted progress toward a cure

#382

Post by ubertoop »

nextos wrote: post #291
el_cujo wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been my experience more-or-less as well. Any graduate student that does anything even alzheimer's adjacent at the school I used to work at absolutely had to have a certain two researchers on their dissertation committee and they would 100% not let you progress without throwing a bone to beta-amyloid in your proposal (along with heavily pushing you to pander to some of their personal pet theories). It's a sun…

It's the same with autoimmunity. Some researchers are obsessed with genetics. But it's mostly about self misclassification due to infections and dysbiosis. Luckily, some top journals have started accepting this, but it's still an uphill battle against the establishment: * Type 1 diabetes: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2019.12.18.881433v1 * Multiple sclerosis: https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/10/462/eaat43…

Posts like this one are exactly why I keep coming back day after day to this forum. Thank you for this amazing informational share.

I've long wondered if infections are behind many of the unexplained mid and late life disorders. It's exciting to see that it's finally being recognized as a credible explanation in the literature. As someone with a family member suffering from autoimmune, I'm hopeful that this trend will continue and result in antigen mediation therapies that can help.

Worth mentioning that the family member I am thinking of developed these symptoms within a year after getting a bad stomach/GI infection.

Re: How an Alzheimer’s ‘cabal’ thwarted progress toward a cure

#383

Post by internet_user »

monadgonad wrote: post #339
internet_user wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The benefit is in punting off complicated case quicker, because the insurance pay out is the same, regardless if you spend 30 seconds or 30 minutes on the patient. There is often nothing you can do to help anyway, but you can certainly bill 250 bucks every 5 minutes, and many, many do so. In fact, some physicians will not even accept complicated cases, especially if they involve chronic pain treated with opiates, tha…

> And that is the reason why universal healthcare will fail, and why the NHS has a private tier, and routinely pays for treatments outside of the UK, done in private hospitals. This does not logically follow from what you said at all. The NHS has not "failed", nor does it have a private tier - it commissions some treatments from private clinics for purely political reasons. These treatments are still completely free…

1) I should've said the UK has a private tier for clarity.

You will get to see a private consultant a lot quicker, than the very same physician via NHS referral.

Quite literally you could wait months, or pay a few hundred and see the same exact person in a couple of days. In fact, when paying private - the private consultant himself will be treating you, vs. when on NHS - it will likely be his students/trainees that will be hands-on.

NHS hospitals are on a fixed budget, but of course cost controls means nothing - only putting patient interest first /s.

2) As for the insurance payouts - that was regarding systems where physicians bill on fee-per-service model, the most predominant setup in the US: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20467910

Re: How an Alzheimer’s ‘cabal’ thwarted progress toward a cure

#384

Post by qqqwerty »

ckosidows wrote: post #208
qqqwerty wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will acknowledge that those forces may be in play. But I will also ask you to acknowledge that oil extraction has and continues to make certain people, companies, and governments immensely wealthy and powerful and that those groups are very interested in keeping the status quo. Those people/companies/governments have the power and resources to finance research into climate change that would support their narrative.…

Does this argument prove anything? An enormous industry that wants to disprove man-made climate change science doesn't prove climate science is iron-tight. There are also many vested interests, at this point, in proving popular climate science to be true. This can be companies, politicians, and even just people who are invested in the hypothesis (either professionally or personally). There are industries who oppose t…

The key mechanism that enables 'group think' in academia is access (or lack of access) to funding for research. Generally, funding for research is fairly limited relative to the number of interested researchers (ask any grad student). The control over journal publications and conference speaking slots is only useful in that it enables researchers to increase their odds of receiving future funding. If one is able to get funding without those credentials, say by going to industry players with aligned interests, then the 'academic cabals' really don't have the power and influence to be a 'cabal'.

It is worth noting, that part of the reason the Alzheimer 'cabal' existed in the first place was because the pharmaceutical industry was willing to go along with it. And part of the reason the 'cabal' is finally falling apart is because the industry is no longer willing to fund the research.

Here is a fun question for you (or anyone who is skeptical). Can you name one example where industry and academics were diametrically opposed on a particular topic, and where it turned out that the academics were wrong? I can point out quite a few examples where the opposite was true, but I am struggling to think of a single example that would qualify the above prompt.

Re: How an Alzheimer’s ‘cabal’ thwarted progress toward a cure

#385

Post by anigbrowl »

dang wrote: post #371
anigbrowl wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really think it's better to defer to the original authors or the submitter on titles. Retroactive title changes have become common on HN and they're somewhat annoying. Certainly the original title upset some people, but perhaps that is a conversation worth having; Statnews isn't a frivolous news outlet, and the revised title elides the intradisciplinary conflict at the heart of this story, creating the impression t…

HN's way of dealing with titles has been around forever and functions surprisingly well overall. When grumblings come up they are usually reasonable and we usually react by changing the title until readers stop grumbling. But these cases are a small percentage of the total. Sometimes the community is divided about what's reasonable, in which case every title change generates grumbling and the process never converges.…

Thanks for your thoughtful response Dan. I guess you're right about how long it's been going on, I am probably mis-remembering practices from back when HN was much smaller than today.

Re: How an Alzheimer’s ‘cabal’ thwarted progress toward a cure

#386

Post by wtallis »

wavepruner wrote: post #378
wtallis wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're really not helping your case by citing two people who come across as even more shifty. Piling on more low-quality evidence like this just raises more questions and doubts, and gives the impression that you either cannot identify credible evidence or that none exists.

I posted the videos because they are easier to understand. The underlying mechanism of how mercury can induce β‐amyloid production and tau phosphorylation has been discovered. Here's a paper that discusses the same ideas: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1471-4159... And I'm not sure why you describe Boyd Hayley's work as low quality. The man has published a huge amount of work, much of which was fu…

> And I'm not sure why you describe Boyd Hayley's work as low quality.

I'm not saying his work is necessarily low quality. I'm saying that attaching his name to work makes it less credible from the outset, because his reputation is so thoroughly tarnished be things like his anti-vax positions. Likewise for Fowkes and poor credentials and track record. If you want to convince someone whom you've already given reason to be quite skeptical, you need to be able to provide citations from experts whose Google search results are free from such obvious self-inflicted problems.

Re: How an Alzheimer’s ‘cabal’ thwarted progress toward a cure

#387

Post by jessaustin »

igorkraw wrote: post #341
jessaustin wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another conspiracy theory: obvious morons like the racists are encouraged and publicized in order to discredit those who dissent from the established narrative in real ways that actually challenge TPTB.

Think of anything specific?

It's a conspiracy theory, so like you I hesitate to offer any "evidence". If you don't mind pondering some stray thoughts: Racism has taken on an outsized life of its own in USA, but that might have been a contingent feature of our horrific history. Poor whites have been brutal to blacks, but always with the approval and guidance of the wealthy. Their brutality never improved their own lot, but it did distract them... Now in the present, we've created a blameless class of authorities with "dangerous" jobs (well, not compared to pizza delivery) who are deputized to continue the racial brutalization we no longer trust "civilians" to provide. Meanwhile we export our (excess) brutality to brown populations in other lands but somehow this is never viewed through the obvious lens. DoD has "misplaced" trillions of dollars, and we have to learn of it through "alternative" publishers. Somehow, every time a non-white person is harmed without justification, someone makes money on it...

Re: How an Alzheimer’s ‘cabal’ thwarted progress toward a cure

#388

Post by ncmncm »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #217
superpermutat0r wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People living over 100 years old obviously have huge genetic factors that allow them to have unhealthy habits (or at least unhealthy for the normal person). I mean, there are people over 100 that smoke every day.

parent tried bolstering his claim by mentioning the Keys lived to 100. I point out that Kummerow who did good research outlived him. Seriously Keys work is garbage. Where the publicly unknown Kummerow's research was spot on. If you don't know who Kummerow is he's the guy that finally forced the FDA to ban transfats decades after they were known to be poison.

Thank you, Kummerow looks very interesting. I have some reading to do now.

Re: How an Alzheimer’s ‘cabal’ thwarted progress toward a cure

#389

Post by wavepruner »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #381
wavepruner wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot more to it than that. Did you watch the series of videos? The underlying mechanism of how mercury can induce β‐amyloid production and tau phosphorylation has been discovered. Perhaps this paper would be better than the videos. I posted the videos because they are easier to understand. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1471-4159...

No, I did not watch all the videos. It seems like they/you are proposing a hypothesis that mercury poisoning is responsible for a significant percentage of Alzheimer's cases? And reading between the lines on your other posts, you seem to believe that mercury poisoning is a factor in your own illness due to your perception of chelation therapy being effective for you?

Correct. Although, instead of saying a "significant percentage" I would just say "some", because there is no way of knowing if mercury is the sole cause at this point.

I think mercury is a major factor in many illnesses, and the root cause of mine. I did have some serious memory issues for a while, and my ability to focus was so bad that I could not watch a TV show. There are tens of thousands discussing the same kinds of symptoms and how they disappear with chelation.

I think the source of mercury exposure, duration of exposure, intensity of exposure, where the toxicity eventually settles in the body, and genetic factors all play a role in the symptoms that an individual suffers from. That is why one toxin can cause such a wide range of illnesses. The "radium girls" who were poisoned working with radium in factories is a good example of this.

Re: How an Alzheimer’s ‘cabal’ thwarted progress toward a cure

#390

Post by wavepruner »

wtallis wrote: post #386
wavepruner wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I posted the videos because they are easier to understand. The underlying mechanism of how mercury can induce β‐amyloid production and tau phosphorylation has been discovered. Here's a paper that discusses the same ideas: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1471-4159... And I'm not sure why you describe Boyd Hayley's work as low quality. The man has published a huge amount of work, much of which was fu…

> And I'm not sure why you describe Boyd Hayley's work as low quality. I'm not saying his work is necessarily low quality. I'm saying that attaching his name to work makes it less credible from the outset, because his reputation is so thoroughly tarnished be things like his anti-vax positions. Likewise for Fowkes and poor credentials and track record. If you want to convince someone whom you've already given reason t…

Great point. Thank you!
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