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With a nudge from AI, ketamine emerges as a potential rare disease treatment

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Re: With a nudge from AI, ketamine emerges as a potential rare disease treatment

#21

Post by irthomasthomas »

tomato-sauce wrote: post #12

It feels like in the last few years I have been constantly hearing about new research showing “fun” drugs as cures to a wide array of medical conditions. There’s marijuana for chronic pain, mushrooms for depression, mdma for ptsd, and now ketamine. They are often talked about as if they have little or no harmful side effects. I’m glad we are moving away from the incredibly destructive drug policies that have been in…

Sorry to burst your bubble but U.S. drug policy is not as progressive as you might think. Cannabis is still illegal under federal law. And right now America is petitioning the WHO for a GLOBAL ban on KRATOM, a herb which has been used in Asia for hundreds of years with no recorded deaths. It has been in use in Europe and America for a couple of decades and still there are no deaths recorded from pure Kratom use. Kratom can be used to treat or replace alcohol, cocaine and opiate addiction. It is a herb harvested from the leaves of a tree related to the coffee plant and has incredible pain relieving properties, as well as being a mild stimulant and mood regulator. For more info see this recent study https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6612999/

And please tell the FDA and WHO not to ban this awesome herb. The deadline for comments is August 9th. https://www.americankratom.org/

Re: With a nudge from AI, ketamine emerges as a potential rare disease treatment

#22

Post by civilized »

pizza wrote: post #4

> Proof-of-concept for reasoning over medical knowledge graphs, using miniKanren + heuristics + indexing. https://github.com/webyrd/mediKanren

GitHub says it's mostly written in Scheme and Racket! Would love to hear the story behind that... is this just one researcher's idiosyncratic choice, or are these languages providing some kind of material advantage in this application?

(I'm aware that Lisps have a long history in AI but I understood that to be kind of in the past at this point...)

Re: With a nudge from AI, ketamine emerges as a potential rare disease treatment

#23

Post by cupcake-unicorn »

I recently got my full genome sequenced via a website called nebula.org. I don't have any backgrounds in genetics but I was playing around with the raw data with some github apps. Thanks so much for this - I may be able to link this app in to my custom data. That would be so awesome if we could hook this up to personal genetics results. Even people who aren't sick do have mutations and it would be so cool seeing AI running some kind of search on their personal genome and suggesting a drug for that!

Here's the link to the github app they mentioned: https://github.com/webyrd/mediKanren

Re: With a nudge from AI, ketamine emerges as a potential rare disease treatment

#24

Post by tomato-sauce »

irthomasthomas wrote: post #21
tomato-sauce wrote: post #12

It feels like in the last few years I have been constantly hearing about new research showing “fun” drugs as cures to a wide array of medical conditions. There’s marijuana for chronic pain, mushrooms for depression, mdma for ptsd, and now ketamine. They are often talked about as if they have little or no harmful side effects. I’m glad we are moving away from the incredibly destructive drug policies that have been in…

Sorry to burst your bubble but U.S. drug policy is not as progressive as you might think. Cannabis is still illegal under federal law. And right now America is petitioning the WHO for a GLOBAL ban on KRATOM, a herb which has been used in Asia for hundreds of years with no recorded deaths. It has been in use in Europe and America for a couple of decades and still there are no deaths recorded from pure Kratom use. Krat…

Thanks for pointing this out. I don’t know enough about kratom to have an opinion on how it should be regulated. I will add a comment though. Just because I am fundamentally opposed to America regulating drug use outside of its territory.

Re: With a nudge from AI, ketamine emerges as a potential rare disease treatment

#25

Post by gunshai »

irthomasthomas wrote: post #21
tomato-sauce wrote: post #12

It feels like in the last few years I have been constantly hearing about new research showing “fun” drugs as cures to a wide array of medical conditions. There’s marijuana for chronic pain, mushrooms for depression, mdma for ptsd, and now ketamine. They are often talked about as if they have little or no harmful side effects. I’m glad we are moving away from the incredibly destructive drug policies that have been in…

Sorry to burst your bubble but U.S. drug policy is not as progressive as you might think. Cannabis is still illegal under federal law. And right now America is petitioning the WHO for a GLOBAL ban on KRATOM, a herb which has been used in Asia for hundreds of years with no recorded deaths. It has been in use in Europe and America for a couple of decades and still there are no deaths recorded from pure Kratom use. Krat…

Come to Oregon where we just decriminalized the party.

Re: With a nudge from AI, ketamine emerges as a potential rare disease treatment

#26

Post by nicoburns »

tomato-sauce wrote: post #12

It feels like in the last few years I have been constantly hearing about new research showing “fun” drugs as cures to a wide array of medical conditions. There’s marijuana for chronic pain, mushrooms for depression, mdma for ptsd, and now ketamine. They are often talked about as if they have little or no harmful side effects. I’m glad we are moving away from the incredibly destructive drug policies that have been in…

> The opioid epidemic was largely caused by the idea of them being non addictive being heavy pushed by the pharmaceuticals industry.

I definitely think the pharmecuetical industry pushing drugs is a big problem. But that doesn't mean we should deny people treatments that work. Instead we should fix the actual problem: innapropruate presceiptions. Note that opiods are mostly not a problem here in the UK for example. We're much stricter about when they're used.

In any case, I think there's much less risk here. Ketamine is a somewhat addictive, but nowhere near as bad as opiods, and cannabis and especially psychedelics are pretty much not addictive.

It doesn't seem too good to be true to me. It seems obvious that the chemicals which clearly affect the mind are the ones which are likely to have some use for... affecting the mind in a positive way. They've at least cleared the first hurdle!

Re: With a nudge from AI, ketamine emerges as a potential rare disease treatment

#27

Post by dghughes »

tomato-sauce wrote: post #12

It feels like in the last few years I have been constantly hearing about new research showing “fun” drugs as cures to a wide array of medical conditions. There’s marijuana for chronic pain, mushrooms for depression, mdma for ptsd, and now ketamine. They are often talked about as if they have little or no harmful side effects. I’m glad we are moving away from the incredibly destructive drug policies that have been in…

>I’m glad we are moving away from the incredibly destructive drug policies that have been in place for so long

The point of the polices was to counter the incredibly destructive result of the surge of cocaine, crack, heroin use in the mid 1970s and early to mid 1980s. And the deaths from the drug use and the gangs fighting over the spoils. It really was a war. Mexico didn't seem to make it, I think the drugs won.

I know for some people these days it's cool to poo poo the so-called "war on drugs" but to Gen X who lived through the surge it was not a great time. Every day some news of deaths, fights, we were constantly reminded of it. Something had to be done and the free-for-all didn't seem to be working. I guess just like psychology you hear of examples where the stern family raises a wild child and the carefree family raises a straight-edge child the program backfired.

Drugs are chemicals just as is water and yes if a drug is useful then study it and use them for good if possible. But to others it seems many view all drugs as holy and that they can do no wrong is ridiculous.

Re: With a nudge from AI, ketamine emerges as a potential rare disease treatment

#28

Post by tejtm »

tartoran wrote: post #3
loceng wrote: post #2

"The tool, called mediKanren, scanned millions of biomedical abstracts hunting for relationships between existing compounds and the gene involved in the disease." Is this AI or someone put the effort into compiling a database and added automatic search function?

Reminds me of minikanren and I think this may be related

indeed they do share Will Byrd as their author

Re: With a nudge from AI, ketamine emerges as a potential rare disease treatment

#29

Post by gunshai »

wyre wrote: post #20
tomato-sauce wrote: post #12

It feels like in the last few years I have been constantly hearing about new research showing “fun” drugs as cures to a wide array of medical conditions. There’s marijuana for chronic pain, mushrooms for depression, mdma for ptsd, and now ketamine. They are often talked about as if they have little or no harmful side effects. I’m glad we are moving away from the incredibly destructive drug policies that have been in…

Cannabis, psilocybin, and LSD have been used recreationally for decades with death rates approaching zero and there have been 0 cases of overdose. I was under the impression that these drugs were made illegal because their use promotes an anti capitalism mindset (see Timothy Leary being called the most dangerous man because of his research on LSD) and the medical industrial complex isnt able to extract as much money…

>Weren’t the Opium Wars started because China wanted Britain to stop selling them addictive opium?

Yes and out of the opium wars I believe is why the state of Hong Kong came into existence. China had contractual obligations to buy opium, I believe they ended up dumping it into the bay in sort of a Tea Party type scenario but it was the Chinese government who did the dumping.

The opium wars are pretty damn fascinating. OH and if I'm not mistaken it was a contractual obligations with the East India Trading company and the British government backed the EITC by making a trade blockade.

Re: With a nudge from AI, ketamine emerges as a potential rare disease treatment

#30

Post by elevaet »

tomato-sauce wrote: post #12

It feels like in the last few years I have been constantly hearing about new research showing “fun” drugs as cures to a wide array of medical conditions. There’s marijuana for chronic pain, mushrooms for depression, mdma for ptsd, and now ketamine. They are often talked about as if they have little or no harmful side effects. I’m glad we are moving away from the incredibly destructive drug policies that have been in…

One danger of chronic ketamine use is bladder damage.
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