Researchers discover new salivary glands in the human head

I mean we know what they do chemically, but as you said we have no idea what serotonin does. (Which is not true, but it's so complicated that what we know just makes us exhausted thinking about how truly complicated it is.)

> We don't know whether the brain chemistry changes we see in depression are the cause of the disease, or just the way 'sadness'/'lack of motivation' looks like neuro-chemically.

Indeed. Though it's always both. And probably asking whether we could, let's say take a pill every day as prevention seems unfathomable, because so far - again, just as you said - we don't really know what is depression. It's basically too much of feeling down. Feeling down when you shouldn't really be feeling that down, at least somehow "compared" to other people. So it's hard to know when prevention should start and when it's just normal case of the mondays.

However, just as with the nurture-nature conundrum it seems natural to treat it as one thing very tightly coupled with the other. Which makes it likely that any kind of treatment and understanding has to always handle both in a lockstep. (Even if there are a lot of subgroups, some are more susceptible on the chemistry side, some more on the cognitive side, some are simply resilient enough to deal with it with some light touch counseling, some got a very bad ticket in life and need a whole support network to keep the darkness at bay, etc.)

The point I was making was that in our short lifetimes common medical practices have change directions 180 degrees. The guy who drank h pylori was in our lifetime.

I wonder what common problems and solutions we have today will be changed in the coming 30 years? Maybe there will be a cancer or fat pill and we can eat what we want. Maybe sugar will be banned. Maybe longevity might be conquered? Maybe covid-19 will be viewed like the black plague, which is well understood now.

BTW, have you ever thought about the fact that cancer deaths are still very prevalent despite all the hyperbole from thousands of researchers say since 1950—yes, hyperbole deliberately spruced up to attract funding and to gain newspaper headlines.

The facts are straightforward: had 0.1% of the promises about improvements in cancer treatments that have appeared in the many tens of thousands of professional research papers on the subject over the past 70 yeas had actually come to fruition, then the disease would have all but been eliminated by now.

You might say this was justified but it's turned out that this type of hyperbole is not befitting of science, and that it's been largely responsible for the enormous drop in the public's approval rating for science over this time. (I'm not saying it's only cancer researchers (although they top the list), essentially it's all researchers these days.)

Don't say this isn't true, do your research. In the 1950s almost everyone believed in and accepted science—even though this was the time of the A-Bomb and bomb development, back then, people could still differentiate science per se* from the bad applications of science.

Now, 60 or 70 years later, I know scientists who, when, say, they go to a party, will disguise their real professions, so bad is Science's PR. (I'm even in that league but I'm less sensitive about it than some.)

Anyway, I'd suggest to you that in comparison with these professionals, my hyperbole pails into insignificance.

Ha, so you reckon my hyperbole is dramatic and done only to fish for points. That implies you actually think about such matters and consider points important (most of my posts never make it even to two). Franky, these post would altogether be much better of without them. For the record, your assertion isn't true (not that I expect you to believe what I've said).

Real life is extremely fuzzy and ill-defined. Almost everything mathematical is a model and models are almost by definition, simpler than the thing they model.

I'd be glad to be proven wrong within my lifetime and have someone come up with the Fundamental Laws of History, for example, fully defined from a mathematical point of view.

new eye layer