Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

statnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 140 posts

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

#121

Post by ryanlol »

jfk13 wrote: post #52
ctoth wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you're going to label scientific papers you don't like as a "wall of FUD" [edit: I see you've decided to remove this remark], I'm not sure there's much we can discuss further. I didn't say it should be banned. Or that it shouldn't. I don't know enough to form an opinion on the question. I just wondered how balanced and objective the post from irthomasthomas was, did a quick search for other points of view, and fel…

You didn’t link a scientific paper. You linked a government drug propaganda website.

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

#122

Post by sneak »

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 little reminder that the (legal) tobacco causes 7x more preventable deaths every day/week/month in the USA than the entirety of the opiate epidemic.

The policies that govern substances in the US are not based whatsoever on health outcomes, only money and racism.

That may change, but thinking of it as a one-dimensional pendulum is probably the wrong model for reasoning about it.

Effective treatments for difficult diseases always seem too good to be true: take paracetamol for an example.

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

#123

Post by bserge »

meowface wrote: post #120
bserge wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is this satire?

Of course it was. I edited the comment because my thoughts on this are not welcome in "civilized society". God forbid people have some personal responsibility instead of relying on a system that tramples on the minority. But hey, it's a small minority, so fuck them, right.

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

#124

Post by herbst »

bserge wrote: post #86
nicoburns wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Swiss here, it does for us. Most if not all heroin addicts I know had jobs and a normal life, no other opiods ever been a widespread problem here

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

#125

Post by meowface »

bserge wrote: post #123
meowface wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this satire?

Of course it was. I edited the comment because my thoughts on this are not welcome in "civilized society". God forbid people have some personal responsibility instead of relying on a system that tramples on the minority. But hey, it's a small minority, so fuck them, right.

I and many others definitely agree with you. I think we're just so used to the opposing view being expressed in full earnestness that the satire was missed by some.

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

#126

Post by sinuhe69 »

phist_mcgee wrote: post #111

On reading this article, it must be so hard for parents to see a way forward for treating their child's condition, but be roadblocked by either funding, or study participation criteria. If I observed my child have such a profound change as Mateo did, I think I might be incentivised to continue seeking these drugs for their treatment. I know that it would be absolutely a criminal act to purchase ketamine illegally and…

Yes, other fathers did

https://youtu.be/FSdjvEnyRzk

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

#127

Post by pas »

technothrasher wrote: post #53
ctoth wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The person you were replying to said nothing about banning it. They simply said that a little poking around showed the previous poster's description of it as completely harmless was possibly contested. Your knee jerk reaction that asking questions about a drug is the same as demanding a ban on it reveals a pretty strong bias on your end.

It seems to support the harmless claim. Basically water, coffee, red meat, sunlight and so on are more dangerous than kratom if you look at similar numbers.

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

#128

Post by pas »

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.

Managing acute pain is different from chronic pain. The 'new idea' you refer to is that people who get opioids in hospitals don't get addicted. Of course, the important difference is that when people get better after surgery their life is generally goin in a good direction. It's easy to stop using opioids when you are finally able to walk, work, move, live, love again.

Chronic pain is basically the opposite. Where depression is almost guaranteed, and susceptibility to addiction is very high.

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

#129

Post by mattmight »

rscho wrote: post #91
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…

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!!

Thanks for the kind words!

It's definitely a deliberate leap back to the old logical/symbolic era of AI.

Not mentioned in the article is that logic makes it much easier to emit "proofs" that end users like physicians can understand.

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

#130

Post by mattmight »

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…

miniKanren definitely exploits a lot of the syntactic dexterity of Scheme/Racket/Lisp to do some really cool things -- or at least to express them more succinctly.

Yes, it is always possible, in fact, since logical arguments can always be rendered as proof trees.

Post reply on HN