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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

#81

Post by acchow »

parineum wrote: post #77
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…

>It is a herb harvested from the leaves of a tree As opposed to heroin and cocaine right?

To clarify for other users, heroin doesn’t come from nature: that’s morphine. We then take morphine and put it through a chemical reaction.

And cocaine? Why is cocaine worse than alcohol?

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

#82

Post by bserge »

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…

I dunno about illegal drugs, they're illegal for a reason.

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

#83

Post by mattmight »

civilized wrote: post #22
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...)

I'm the researcher mentioned in the article. We used Racket in part because before we transitioned into academic medicine, Will Byrd and I were in academic computer science with a focus on programming languages. Will was building up miniKanren to do lots of cool stuff in program synthesis and program analysis. When we jumped over, it felt natural to bring the power of relational reasoning to knowledge graphs over biomedical knowledge, and so mediKanren was born.

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

#84

Post by bserge »

funnybeam wrote: post #18
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…

A lot of the “fun drugs” were originally used for medical purposes and only banned because people started using them for fun

A real shame. But I guess if you let people learn personal responsibility they won't need the government as much anymore.

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

#85

Post by [deleted] »

pitaj wrote: post #33
nicoburns wrote: post #26

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. 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. W…

The US has been cracking down on opioid prescriptions to the point that a lot of people can't get opioids for when they really need them for chronic pain and even after surgeries! In the meantime, opioid overdoses have continued to climb. Turns out that forcing people into the black market to deal with terrible pain is not a good policy.

[deleted]

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

#86

Post by bserge »

nicoburns wrote: post #55
lumost wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one has had a good approach for opioid addiction since the first cases of morphine addiction a century ago. Banning opiate use results in deaths, restricting prescriptions moves addicts to the black market, the status quo results in more addicts.

Portugal seems to have found a decent solution: addicts can get easy access to legitimate supply, but non-addicts can't. Seems to have dramatically improved the situation there.

I'm sure it works as well as described. /s

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

#87

Post by irthomasthomas »

scythe wrote: post #64
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…

>Kratom can be used to treat or replace alcohol, cocaine and opiate addiction. This is a strange claim. Kratom alkaloids appear to be opioid receptor partial agonists [1]. De-escalation from opioids to kratom makes sense. Cocaine and alcohol addiction usually do not require "maintenance" post-rehab [2,3], unlike opioid dependence which is highly persistent [4], and this seems to muddy the story of a promising treatme…

Yep, addiction is a complex subject that we still know very little about. I recommend reading the study I linked to. And check out the kratom forums to read many personal accounts from people using kratom to quit alcohol, cocaine, heroine and more. Thanks.

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

#88

Post by irthomasthomas »

ctoth wrote: post #45
jfk13 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not familiar with that "awesome herb", so I wondered what other sources might have to say. While the numbers are small (unsurprisingly, if it's not nearly as widely known and used as some other substances), it may not be quite as innocuous as you seem to imply: > "A 2019 paper analyzing data from the National Poison Data System found that between 2011-2017 there were 11 deaths associated with kratom exposure. Nin…

This is the most reefer madness comment I have ever seen on Hacker News. Seven possible deaths with just Kratom and this justifies banning it? How many deaths and ruined lives will those enforcing a Kratom ban be responsible for? Perhaps we should consult the history of bans of other drugs to get some idea. Anyone claiming that their reason for adding yet another substance to The Forever War on Drugs is harm reductio…

I think the FDA are in this thread ;)

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

#89

Post by netizen-936824 »

LordDragonfang wrote: post #80
drooogs wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Occasionally people with opioid addictions actually do use loperamide at high doses to stave off withdrawals. But it does not have the same effects as ones that cross the BBB, correct.

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

#90

Post by acituan »

bserge wrote: post #84
funnybeam wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the “fun drugs” were originally used for medical purposes and only banned because people started using them for fun

A real shame. But I guess if you let people learn personal responsibility they won't need the government as much anymore.

> But I guess if you let people learn personal responsibility they won't need the government as much anymore

Addiction is not a mere matter of personal responsibility but a complex bio-psycho-social phenomena.

Oversimplified solutions from both sides of the argument does the most harm.

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