Why I’m Digging Deep Into Alzheimer’s

I calculated 1-2 minutes per abstract, since abstracts are usually not more than 1-2 paragraphs?

There probably are that many worth reading in all, but remember I read in medicine as a whole with one particular disease as a touchstone and as stated, I read the abracts of 400,000 and took notes on over 100,000; so there were some worth reading, by no means all! It's amazing how much is published, and how no-one is paid to just go read and wander through them. If you decide to just accept the standard consensus view of any moment in time, that will of course be a remarkably narrow view compared to the actual empirical evidence and might be covered in a day, starting with Wikipedia 'cause stereotypes are like that. I was reading, of course, in order to avoid just that problem. Look at everything published in a month or week on a fairly narrow medical subject and lots of tangents from and to that, and your eyes will likely open wider, too.

Very important studies are usually unexpected - that's part of what makes them important so we're verging on a tautology, there. So it's a matter of hindsight, in every field which contemporary articles are in fact "the classics." Your certainty and trust in current authorities broad knowledge and open-mindedness is a product of not knuckling down to read the abstracts of a few hundred thousand unrecommended journal articles - as well as a profound ignorance about the history of medicine.

That history more than suggests that if you want quality>authority (of contemporary publications) you'd better start reading, and reading nearly everything.

It depends - maybe three quarters of the abstracts took about a minute, sometimes less, since many are unreliable reports of drug tests that are closer to ads than info; there's also citation mongering resulting in three articles from exactly the same study, by the same authors saying the same result differently; plus many studies are confirmations from one population to another or are unique to tiny genetic lineages without broad implications; also many are review articles just in a new language or me-too studies. Others concern such topics as patient education improvements as opposed to changes in base medical knowledge. As for preliminary studies, these were a good source of gems, but unless they said something truly interesting they were easier to click past since not all that reliable. Finally there were some "we didn't find anything new" studies published; but not nearly enough get published (which has helped to cause the replication crisis.) Still some do.

In other words, there's a LOT of dross, but there are real gems lying there unread and uncited, too.

So only one in ten or a hundred articles might take an hour or more.

Average for all but the vital or good articles (after accumulating a good background and vocabularly), when I timed it back then: 100 an hour without losing any significant information. The vital remainder of 100 abstracts viewed took me (more of a guess, now) on average not more than double that amount of time, again; perhaps less time. That varied a lot because I was looking most keenly for overlooked knowledge(studies) and pairs of studies that were significant only once linked. Therefore I sometimes was willing to follow tangents to tangents just in case and could speed up at that point because it was nearly all dross.

Back when I was in university supposedly studying the history and philosphy of science and language, I had to visit medical libraries and use the CD disks from the then-private company Pubmed, and walk back and forth to a large, printed medical encycopedia chained to a pedestal and the desk-sized CD reader Pubmed provided. I don't include that reading as I took no surviving notes and wasn't counting abstracts way back then. Being able to research online when I returned to medical reading a couple of decades later was an immense relief. Switching tabs to get to a medical dictionary isn't nearly as much exercise, but it is a lot faster. Printed medical dictionaries for professionals have a LOT of pages to turn, in addition to the walking.

You jest. Grab some of the estimates of just how staggering the costs will be to us of Alzheimer's alone; as for the third world chronic illness (obesity, diabetes) is already beginning to crush their nascent medical systems. As clearly stated above I contacted them re chronic illness as a whole, not Alzheimer's specifically.

>Death is terrible, and should be eradicated

I strongly disagree with this statement. We learn through death, and yet we don't know what death is. We do not know the fundamentals of death, yet it occurs on all abstractions.

I think of this poetically, because I don't understand death. But all things being relative, life does not make sense without death.

Edit: On this topic I would also like to point out the eagerness of the immortal mindset. We are living 30 years+ in comparison to our ancestors, but it seems we approach an asymptote. With alzheimers and other neuro-degenerative diseases, we lose our mental faculties. We lose memories, emotions, we lose everything. Yes this is the topic at hand, but does that not indicate something fundamental as well? We have a reached a point where living implies the dissolution of what we used to be, of what we spent so long striving towards the future to do. And at that point of degeneration, we no longer exist in that sense. We can no longer orient ourselves towards the future, and decay while living.

If there is something after death-- if whatever composes our consciousness is actually tangible, autonomous, and not an emergent result of our brains (similarly, if emergence itself is autonomous), then after the alzheimers individual dies in body, he/she will not exist in consciousness either. After this point, his/her consciousness will have dissolved.

And these are rather philosophical points, but this is how I see things. Science and philosophy, science and spirituality even, do coexist in my subjective experience.