With a nudge from AI, ketamine emerges as a potential rare disease treatment • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by scythe » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 7:52 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #58

scythe wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>marijuana for chronic pain, mushrooms for depression, mdma for ptsd Is it that much of a surprise that psychoactive drugs treat psychogenic symptoms? In the particular case of pain, the two major available drug classes -- opioids and benzodiazepines -- mimic the activity of addictive recreational drugs opium and alcohol. THC is used per se instead of derivatives because of its price and safety record (contrast opium…

> Is it that much of a surprise that psychoactive drugs treat psychogenic symptoms? The surprising part is the growing narrative that these psychoactive drugs are basically miracle cures without downsides. Drugs like LSD are being explored as adjuncts to intense therapy spanning many sessions, but the pop-science portrayal of these drugs ignores that intense therapy and instead imagines that tripping on mushrooms or…

>we need to quit exaggerating their positive effects and downplaying their negatives.

Who is 'we'? Sure, the media exaggerates the benefits of psychedelics. You can also find plenty of stories exaggerating the benefits of electric cars, veganism, meditation, antioxidants, or martial arts, among other things.

The media loves a narrative with a miracle -- how is that the "surprising part"?

>the early days of opioids

The early days of opioids were in the nineteenth century. I certainly don't recall being bombarded with stories about them. The post-mortem of the opioid painkiller crisis (the "codones") focused on deceitful marketing from pharmaceutical companies aimed at physicians, not pop-psych puff pieces for a lay audience. There is no shortage of exaggeration in the cornucopia of cannabis clickbait, but the situation is not comparable.

Inaccuracy in pop-sci is lamentable, but not historic, and usually the only thing that comes of it are bins of discarded magazines.

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

#72

Post by amanaplanacanal » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 8:00 PM UTC

okareaman wrote: post #69

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 That's not true. The new idea was that a manageable addiction was preferred to chronic pain. The theory was that addiction to opioids could be managed. That turned out to be not the case. People started selling pills and buying street heroin and it spiraled out of control.

I thought the new idea was that people who took opioids only for pain relief didn’t get addicted, which in hindsight is absolute nonsense.

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

#73

Post by rscho » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 8:00 PM UTC

The video that explains it all for techies: https://youtu.be/d-Klzumjulo

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

#74

Post by okareaman » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 8:12 PM UTC

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #72

okareaman wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The opioid epidemic was largely caused by the idea of them being non addictive being heavy pushed by the pharmaceuticals industry That's not true. The new idea was that a manageable addiction was preferred to chronic pain. The theory was that addiction to opioids could be managed. That turned out to be not the case. People started selling pills and buying street heroin and it spiraled out of control.

I thought the new idea was that people who took opioids only for pain relief didn’t get addicted, which in hindsight is absolute nonsense.

People didn't suddenly forget centuries of experience that narcotics were addictive. They thought that making them time release and long lasting they could manage the addiction. Pharmacies did downplay the cleverness of people when they want to get high. People found they could crush the pills and snort them for a quick rush. Those who weren't addiction prone found they could sell their pills for $80 a pill. It was off to the races after that.

The real crime here wasn't trying to help those in chronic pain with a manageable addiction, it was the incredibly long time it took for pharma companies and govt regulators to do anything about the crisis, even as some pharmacies in Florida and West Virginia were selling millions of pills, far more than their local communities would warrant. The suspicion is that a lot of money was being made, so why rush to intervene.

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

#75

Post by chefkoch » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 8:21 PM UTC

elevaet wrote: post #30

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.

You have to take really large amounts daily to get bladder problems.

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

#76

Post by drooogs » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 8:32 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #47

irthomasthomas wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Please don’t glorify Kratom as some sort of miracle herb without downsides. Kratom is an opioid, full stop. People are under the mistaken impression that it’s less addictive because it’s less potent on a per-gram basis, but addicts simply end up consuming more grams to get similar highs. It’s not a “mood regulator” in any magical sense other than it’s an opioid and opioids temporarily put people in good moods. There…

opioids are a large class of drugs with widely varying effects and potential for abuse. for instance, the active ingredient in Imodium is an opioid, but you don't see a lot of recreational Imodium users.

kratom is certainly not a miracle herb, but its characteristics do make it a lot less addictive and lethal than its more popular relatives. it's not unreasonable to think it might be used in replacement therapy, similar to buprenorphine.

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

#77

Post by parineum » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 8:35 PM UTC

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…

>It is a herb harvested from the leaves of a tree

As opposed to heroin and cocaine right?

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

#78

Post by skulk » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 8:47 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #47

irthomasthomas wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Please don’t glorify Kratom as some sort of miracle herb without downsides. Kratom is an opioid, full stop. People are under the mistaken impression that it’s less addictive because it’s less potent on a per-gram basis, but addicts simply end up consuming more grams to get similar highs. It’s not a “mood regulator” in any magical sense other than it’s an opioid and opioids temporarily put people in good moods. There…

Compared to opioids peddled by pharmaceutical companies (who are, no doubt, responsible for the US pushing to get kratom banned), kratom _IS_ a miracle drug.

Edit: also, I'll bite on the r/quittingkratom link. The first upvoted thread I see is the following: https://www.reddit.com/r/quittingkratom/comments/ozuh1r/krat.... 90 grams per day for 10 years is an absolutely staggering amount of kratom to consume. (For reference, I would feel sick if I ate more than 4 grams at a time, and never felt the need to exceed 5 gpd.) And this person didn't even skip work during withdrawals. They claim the worst part is restless legs and not being able to sleep. Hardly seems comparable to a person quitting a heavy oxycontin habit.

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

#79

Post by edejong » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 8:48 PM UTC

cratermoon wrote: post #19

cortezdecoy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"just" is always a weird modifier in these kinds of conversations. Most things can be reduced to "just" some basic operation(s). What is amazing is the complexity that emerges from those simple operations at scale.

Granted that emergent behaviors are important. The reason for injecting "just" is to counter the AI hype. Imagine if the headline read "With a nudge from linear algebra, ketamine emerges as a potential rare disease treatment". Dropping the word AI in there, in addition to boosting the articles SEO, will suggest to those with a casual interest that his must be a big deal, because "I've heard so much about how AI is so…

Well, if you dive into data science and ML, you'll see it is much more than just a bit of linear algebra. Some topics (and as a data engineer, I am not an expert):

- Distributed computing

- Feature selection

- Budgeting / accounting of experimental design (these TPU clusters are not cheap)

- ML architecture

- Involvement of domain experts (multidisciplinary teams)

- Storage

The whole list is much longer, but just some topics to think about. For me the term "AI", although overly broad, come to mean the engineering and organisation needed to pull these kind of projects.

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

#80

Post by LordDragonfang » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 8:51 PM UTC

drooogs wrote: post #76

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don’t glorify Kratom as some sort of miracle herb without downsides. Kratom is an opioid, full stop. People are under the mistaken impression that it’s less addictive because it’s less potent on a per-gram basis, but addicts simply end up consuming more grams to get similar highs. It’s not a “mood regulator” in any magical sense other than it’s an opioid and opioids temporarily put people in good moods. There…

opioids are a large class of drugs with widely varying effects and potential for abuse. for instance, the active ingredient in Imodium is an opioid, but you don't see a lot of recreational Imodium users. kratom is certainly not a miracle herb, but its characteristics do make it a lot less addictive and lethal than its more popular relatives. it's not unreasonable to think it might be used in replacement therapy, simi…

Using Imodium as an example really hurts your case here. Loperamide (Imodium's active ingredient) isn't used recreationally because it's not psychoactive - or more accurately, it doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier. Meanwhile, you'd be hard pressed to find an opioid which does (as kratom obviously does) that lacks recreational users.