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Night of the living brain fog dead or how I hacked myself better via open source

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Re: Night of the living brain fog dead or how I hacked myself better via open source

#241

Post by hutzlibu »

sawyna wrote: post #237
lapetitejort wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share an example of an unproven treatment that works better than standard care?

I used to have pretty bad sinus. I used to take antibiotics for 10 days a month and would be good for 20 days and this goes on each month. After 6 months, my immunity has gone to shit. The doctor recommended clearing out my sinus by a surgery but apparently that doesn't solve the root cause. It can happen again and again. I tried multiple doctors, treatments, tips etc and etc nothing worked. I finally visited a homeo…

"homeo doctor"

Homeopathy doctor?

Re: Night of the living brain fog dead or how I hacked myself better via open source

#242

Post by agrue »

n8henrie wrote: post #107
agrue wrote: post #27

Sleep apnea is strange. Good news! We have a diagnosis, sleep apnea. You're bad at sleeping now, the thing everybody has to do all night long every day since birth. The solution is to wear a modern iron lung whenever you want or need to sleep forever. Many times it's because people are overweight but you aren't. Is that really all there is for treatment? No throat exercises or therapeutic sleeping positions? No diets…

To me, it certainly seems to suggest an environmental cause (or at least significant contributor). Certainly doesn't seem evolutionarily adaptive for such a large proportion of the population to live with profound mental and physical fatigue. Obesity is an obvious confounder, but these seemingly frequent front-page HN sleep apnea posts usually abound with anecdotes of normal / thin individuals with significant issues…

Thank you, this is what I'm driving at. The conversation includes very little discussion of cause or actual treatment beyond symptom mitigation.

Re: Night of the living brain fog dead or how I hacked myself better via open source

#243

Post by JoeyJoJoJr »

rolisz wrote: post #168

Anyone got any other experiences with things that cause brain fog? I don't think I have sleep apnea (my wife often falls asleep after I do and she doesn't report any kind of weird breathing issues for me, nor snoring). But even though I generally sleep 8 hours a night, I am quite tired during the day and I often have trouble focusing. At night, I fall asleep like a log and I don't wake up during the night.

For me the biggest causes are bread, pasta, and coffee.

If I eat a gluten free vegan meal for lunch I avoid the 3pm slump and the associated brain fog.

Re: Night of the living brain fog dead or how I hacked myself better via open source

#244

Post by hutzlibu »

version_five wrote: post #134
AbrahamParangi wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Experiments are science, and if we knew how they’d turn out beforehand they wouldn’t be experiments. Sort of definitionally you can get pretty weird or unsafe and if you’re comfortable with it not working it’s still a totally valid experiment.

No, experiments are really only science in the usual sense if you have an expectation of how they will turn out and you run the experiment to test your hypothesis. And properly constructing the hypothesis, to include past knowledge and some causal mechanism is vitally important, the causal part being often neglected even in "real" science. There was a lot of this during Covid (which I know is a bad example because of…

"so it's possible and a legit thing to do to run an experiment to see if it works. "

I think it is possible and legit scientific to run experiments on allmost anything, no matter how weird.

What matters is how you do the experiment and what is the result - does it work? And if it does, is it reproducible?

Thats the key difference between a scientific and a esoteric experiment.

But you totally can investigate whether divine blessed guano shit cures cancer in a scientific way. Most researchers just won't waste their time with it. Experiments are expensive. This is why most experiments are indeed only conducted, if there is a solid theory about the process and not a shot in the blue.

(And another actually sad part today is, that many new if not most scientific papers out there are actually not reproducible anymore (at least not with the data provided), but no one cares or does something about it, except complaining, because there is nothing to win, from redoing an experiment of someone else. Reputation and grants demand new research.)

Re: Night of the living brain fog dead or how I hacked myself better via open source

#245

Post by tjohns »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #150
meindnoch wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ventilator != CPAP machine

Oh, I know that! I'm familar with CPAP's and BiPAPs and ventilators, etc. I was a paramedic before I became an engineer. My point was just that, within the context of ventilators, I learned just how little I actually knew about the field of pulmonology and how many things I didn't think would be an issue are actually quite dangerous. What little I picked up would be enough to give me pause about the confident stateme…

Most CPAPs prescribed these days are Auto-PAPs that self calibrate as you sleep.

They often don't even do a titration study to figure out the right pressure range anymore. They just give it to you with a reasonable default setting, let the machine figure things out automatically, and tell you to come back in a month to check the logs to see if your apnea got better.

Re: Night of the living brain fog dead or how I hacked myself better via open source

#246

Post by plagiarist »

015UUZn8aEvW wrote: post #176
jrm4 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. I've also dealt with the whole CPAP thing, and the extent to which the whole industry is obviously infantilizing-for-profit is infuriating. Over the years, it's gotten increasingly difficult to just "buy the supplies yourself," (aka easily and/or cheaply) and the extremely condescending "reasoning" we get is "oh, it's medical equipment and therefore dangerous so we get to control it." And here , having…

One way that you can identify rent-seeking disguised as safety is to compare the degree of risk considered acceptable across industries. For example, you can buy and use a chainsaw and similarly-dangerous power tools with basically no constraints whatsoever. But chainsaws are definitely more dangerous than CPAP machines or many prescription-only drugs. I'm sure that professional tree clearing companies would like it…

I think it is extremely important that medical devices are open, especially data, to prevent rent-seeking on the people who need them to live.

However, if I manufactured, say, an insulin pump, there is no way I would allow it to ship with user-configurable settings in a country as litigious as the US. CPAP seems less risky, but not worth chancing anything. The US market seems to be the primary target for many medical devices, the UK might be receiving CPAPs developed primarily for the US court system.

Re: Night of the living brain fog dead or how I hacked myself better via open source

#247

Post by acomar »

ignite wrote: post #236
agrue wrote: post #27

Sleep apnea is strange. Good news! We have a diagnosis, sleep apnea. You're bad at sleeping now, the thing everybody has to do all night long every day since birth. The solution is to wear a modern iron lung whenever you want or need to sleep forever. Many times it's because people are overweight but you aren't. Is that really all there is for treatment? No throat exercises or therapeutic sleeping positions? No diets…

There absolutely are therapeutic sleeping positions. Sleep on your side. Google it for yourself or https://www.sleepcycle.com/sleep-apnea/optimal-sleep-positio... .

this worked for me for a while but in the last year, I've started getting episodes even though I've taught myself to sleep on my side, breathe through my mouth, keep my airway open by tilting my chin away from my chest, etc.. these kinds of techniques only work so well.

Re: Night of the living brain fog dead or how I hacked myself better via open source

#248

Post by pbourke »

rolisz wrote: post #168

Anyone got any other experiences with things that cause brain fog? I don't think I have sleep apnea (my wife often falls asleep after I do and she doesn't report any kind of weird breathing issues for me, nor snoring). But even though I generally sleep 8 hours a night, I am quite tired during the day and I often have trouble focusing. At night, I fall asleep like a log and I don't wake up during the night.

> Anyone got any other experiences with things that cause brain fog?

Vitamin B-12 deficiency due to lack of intake (a risk for strict vegan diets) or pernicious anemia, an autoimmune disorder. The former is addressed by over the counter supplements and the latter by injections.

Deficiency can be diagnosed through a blood test.

Re: Night of the living brain fog dead or how I hacked myself better via open source

#249

Post by pengaru »

If you share a bed with someone you don't need any of this tech b.s. to know you're choking yourself awake dozens of times an hour.

Listen to the people you actually share a home with if they inform you you're not sleeping well (and are probably interfering with their sleep too).

- Someone who grew up in an utterly dysfunctional household in the sleep quality department. Denial so deep, unreliable "science" would be abused as "proof" of there not being a problem.

** hearing loss is another one; if your hearing has become so bad you mishear much of what your family is saying to you... esp. with a bias for the negative/combativeness, often promoted by consistent lack of sleep (surprise!), get an effing hearing aid already. You're destroying your relationships with your family.

Re: Night of the living brain fog dead or how I hacked myself better via open source

#250

Post by acomar »

aszantu wrote: post #153
elkos wrote: post #128

I'm a sleep technologist by trauning and profession for the last 18+. I wish all our patients were so much aware about their conditions and our doctors had the opportunity to spend enough time with those that would.

do you know, by any chance, about the connection between eating vegetables green and onions seem to trigger sleeplessness? I think it's a gut issue, but I can't find any doctor that knew this yet

might be FODMAP sensitivity.
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