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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

#91

Post by rscho »

mattmight wrote: post #83
civilized wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bio…

Im a big fan of your work, Mr Might! I'm just an MD with a hobby interest in logic programming, but FWIW I think that you guys have really captured how to use current medical information, a thing that the statistical approach still cannot achieve.

Congratulations to you and your team!!

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

#92

Post by DoreenMichele »

"In these patients, that gene is sort of running at 50% capacity: One copy’s broken, the other copy’s working,” explained Might. “So the tool, when it sees that, says, ‘OK, well, maybe I can make the functioning copy work twice as hard to compensate.’”

Woo! Biohacking at its best.

I do something sort of similar by eating hot peppers regularly. It opens up a different chanel than my defective chanel and helps me keep my chronic edema down to a dull roar, among other things.

To prepare the kids and their parents, the Seaver center sent stickers to practice applying to the kids’ chests, so they could get comfortable with the sensory experience of ECG readings.

I like these people.

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

#93

Post by acituan »

bawolff wrote: post #49
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…

> They are often talked about as if they have little or no harmful side effects. Most drugs have side effects, including all the legal pharmaceuticals. E.g. normal antidepressants aren't without risk. Anyways, that's why its important to study them - see where they lie on the risk-benefit trade-off curve. > The opioid epidemic was largely caused by the idea of them being non addictive I don't know which idiots though…

> Most drugs have side effects, including all the legal pharmaceuticals. E.g. normal antidepressants aren't without risk.

Risk/no-risk dichotomy is misleading in that those categories do not consist of homogeneously comparable members. Nausea from an SSRI is not the same as triggering a first psychotic episode from psychedelic drug use, or pushing your neuroticism a standard deviation higher from stimulant abuse or getting stuck in opioid addiction.

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

#94

Post by civilized »

mattmight wrote: post #83
civilized wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bio…

Knowing nothing about miniKanren, I'm curious if you feel its essence much better expressed in a LISP than an Algol-like language like Python? And will relational reasoning increasingly require people to return to LISP as an AI language?

Another question - would it be possible to visualize the exact chain of reasoning used by mediKanren to link ketamine to this disease? It would be wonderful to see exactly what the tool brought to the table that human researchers missed.

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

#95

Post by monocasa »

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.

No, the messaging to the doctors was that there was essentially no risk of addiction.

> This pain population with no abuse history is literally at no risk for addiction

> There have been studies suggesting that addiction rarely evolves in the setting of painful conditions

https://www.statnews.com/2017/05/31/opioid-epidemic-nejm-let...

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

#96

Post by raphlinus »

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.

It is true. The claim was that the risk of addiction was extremely small. One of the ways this idea was pushed was cherry-picking a study that showed no addiction among 10k burn victims treated with opioids. Minimizing the risk of addiction was also a major component of the guilty plea and fine.

Obviously any reasonable person with a knowledge of opioids could see that these claims were BS, but it's remarkable what motivated reasoning can do, especially when there's profit involved.

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/

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

#97

Post by bserge »

acituan wrote: post #90
bserge wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What goes around comes around.

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

#98

Post by DoreenMichele »

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…

So far the evidence doesn’t show anything near this level of harm. I’m just skeptical of anything that seems too good to be true.

People with rare diseases (and their families and caretakers) get excited about anything at all actually helpful, especially if it comes through official, approved medical channels, because they suffer a whole helluva lot every single day while listening to the medical community promise "cures" that never seem to arrive. It's an amazingly hard psychological thing to live with.

On a Cystic Fibrosis list years ago, a parent said "My child turns 18 today. The life expectancy now is 36. When he was born, the life expectancy was 18."

So gains get made but these are people who need a miracle cure and needed it "yesterday" who are, instead, getting incremental improvements at what feels like a glacial speed while they live tormented lives.

So, yeah, they get excited. But that doesn't mean they are going to all throw caution to the wind and jump on the band wagon. Some that do -- or seem to -- are basically "already dead anyway" if they don't try something new and are happy to take a gamble in hopes of one last hurrah and at least it's more data for others like them if it doesn't help them.

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

#99

Post by chillwaves »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #51
chillwaves wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you ever compare the side effects of marijuana to the popular antidepressant, antianxiety and ADHD medications being given to children? > There is a growing mistrust of pharmaceutical companies and mainstream psychiatry that mirrors the rise of things like anti-vaxxers This statement seems to ignore the crisis brought by narcotic drugs. People should be skeptical of pharmaceutical companies. There is a long histo…

There’s a lot of “whataboutism” when it comes to marijuana, but it doesn’t negate the fact that heavy daily marijuana usage is a net negative for mental health and produces worse long-term depression scores than abstaining. And yes, she generally refers people to psychiatric treatment under the guidance of doctors who can monitor and adjust medications over time. Outcomes on mainstream depression and anxiety medicati…

> the fact that heavy daily marijuana usage is a net negative for mental health

citation required.

There is no comparison because you are speaking in anecdotes, not data.

Even if it is a "net negative" is it a bigger net negative than the cognitive effects of anti depressants?

How is it "whataboutism" when the two are being used to treat the same illnesses, but you only look at the negative effects of marijuana in a vacuum, while at the same time lauding pharmaceuticals.

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

#100

Post by rscho »

civilized wrote: post #94
mattmight wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bio…

Knowing nothing about miniKanren, I'm curious if you feel its essence much better expressed in a LISP than an Algol-like language like Python? And will relational reasoning increasingly require people to return to LISP as an AI language? Another question - would it be possible to visualize the exact chain of reasoning used by mediKanren to link ketamine to this disease? It would be wonderful to see exactly what the t…

https://youtu.be/d-Klzumjulo
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