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First-in-human implantation of bionic device to halt Crohn's disease (2023)

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Re: First-in-human implantation of bionic device to halt Crohn's disease (2023)

#81

Post by wholinator2 »

ibash wrote: post #35
cjdell wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for taking the time to reply and not just downvoting me. That is enlightening and I'm glad your relative is in better health now. I'm certainly not suggesting there is a single treatment plan that'll work for everyone. As I said biology is fuzzy and it annoys me when people try to debug health issues like they were pieces of software. Discussing these things openly does help however.

I have chrohns. The diet change recommendation is something we hear often. For me my doctor recommends a mediterranean diet and to avoid emulsifiers, but it’s definitely not a cure and not universal. If you go look at chrohns forums you’ll see a lot of experimenting and a lot of different diets because (to my understanding) chrohns has a lot of different and unknown causes. For me high fiber foods can put me out of c…

Yeah, there was a vegan girl once who heard i ha Crohns' and just would not stop telling me to go vegan. Apparently it had helped her IBD but she seemed incapable of believing that i had tried all that and that eggs and meat were the best diet for me. High protein, high calorie. I'll eat vegetables with make but always well done. If i ate vegan I'd probably be dead in 2 weeks.

Re: First-in-human implantation of bionic device to halt Crohn's disease (2023)

#82

Post by aeblyve »

lebuffon wrote: post #55

We have so many "bandaids" but very few cures these days. Perhaps AI systems will allow us to find root causes of these insidious diseases.

Scientific-ideological blindness, the kind that benefits General Mills et al., is a significant limiter. AI will not change that, if anything, only reinforce it.

Re: First-in-human implantation of bionic device to halt Crohn's disease (2023)

#83

Post by wholinator2 »

spondylosaurus wrote: post #72
lebuffon wrote: post #55

We have so many "bandaids" but very few cures these days. Perhaps AI systems will allow us to find root causes of these insidious diseases.

I mean, we have a pretty decent understanding of the causes and mechanisms behind Crohn's and colitis. The problem is that "your immune system is going nuts" is a hard problem to solve once it gets started, and the human immune system loves to go nuts on a moment's notice.

Genuinely asking, do we? Like, we might understand the mechanism but do we actually understand the cause, the "why" behind the mechanism? It was my understanding that there's practically infinite variety in which foods cause symptoms for different people, and that the specifics of each were still largely unknown

Re: First-in-human implantation of bionic device to halt Crohn's disease (2023)

#84

Post by aeblyve »

cjdell wrote: post #24

I initially wrote this as a reply to a comment by "NotGMan" mentioning fasting/paleo that got flagged. They could have approached the subject more delicately but I believe they have a point. About 3 years ago I had gut issues so bad I thought I was close to death. NHS couldn't see any problems and were basically telling me I'd gone nuts. They refused to do any further testing. After a year of suffering I tried a 7 da…

Indeed. It is difficult to have good-faith conversations about this subject with others sometimes because trust in "The System" (as it were) is often a core of peoples' relating to society. Western medicine does have excellent treatments for problems like appendicitis (in my case...), but is very much lacking in the holism that prevents the issues to begin with.

A quote from Ray Peat:

>“Besides fasting, or chronic protein deficiency, the common causes of hypothyroidism are excessive stress or “aerobic” (i.e. anaerobic) exercise, and diets containing beans, lentils, nuts, unsaturated fats (including carotene), and undercooked broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, and mustard greens. Many health conscious people become hypothyroid with a synergistic program of undercooked vegetables, legumes instead of animal proteins, oils instead of butter, carotene instead of vitamin A, and breathless exercise instead of stimulating life.”

We see that health-consciousness, when lead somewhere by ideology, is not in itself sufficient to make progress.

Re: First-in-human implantation of bionic device to halt Crohn's disease (2023)

#86

Post by arcticbull »

6177c40f wrote: post #38
epgui wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which drugs are you talking about? Pretty much all the biologics for CD have amazingly positive safety profiles…

All of them increase risk of cancer (EDIT: upon further review, maybe not all of them? Or maybe just with combination therapy?) and severe infection. Many of the biologics are also quite new, and the long term effects of taking them are not well understood. Plus, in some cases they don't work well enough alone and so multiple drugs are required (a biologic in combination with something like methotrexate or azathiopri…

> Many of the biologics are also quite new, and the long term effects of taking them are not well understood.

It's interesting that this has become a talking point now for basically any new therapy. As soon as something new and promising comes out, we "don't understand the long-term effects" -- but this discounts (1) the years and years of research and development that go into them (2) the decades of research and development that has gone into the underlying platforms (3) the trials that have happened and (4) the known and understood negative effects of the disease being treated.

The FDA tends not to yolo new therapies.

We see this with GLP-1's all the time. They have side-effects, what will happen later, etc -- as though obesity doesn't have side-effects, and predispose you to every disease known to man?

I feel like this all started during the COVID vaccine hysteria, but maybe it was always there and I wasn't paying attention? I feel like a decade ago when a new treatment for a chronic disease came out people threw themselves at it.

I guess maybe as a concrete follow-up question: how many years would it take before you felt comfortable with it, and why that number specifically? 10? 20? 30?

Re: First-in-human implantation of bionic device to halt Crohn's disease (2023)

#87

Post by ibash »

Khelavaster wrote: post #66

This is NOT to halt chrohn's disease. This is to reduce side effects from primitive colon-removal surgery to treat Crohn'# symptoms.

That’s not my reading. One of the main symptoms of crohns is inflammation that leads to scarring and then surgery to remove the scarred intestine.

If this stops inflammation/ scarring that’s a big part of it.

Or to put it another way: you get scarring before surgery, too. The problem is that overtime there’s only so much intestine you can remove.

Re: First-in-human implantation of bionic device to halt Crohn's disease (2023)

#88

Post by abecedarius »

loudmax wrote: post #37
cjdell wrote: post #24

I initially wrote this as a reply to a comment by "NotGMan" mentioning fasting/paleo that got flagged. They could have approached the subject more delicately but I believe they have a point. About 3 years ago I had gut issues so bad I thought I was close to death. NHS couldn't see any problems and were basically telling me I'd gone nuts. They refused to do any further testing. After a year of suffering I tried a 7 da…

I do want to offer a limited defense of the medical community's "lack of open-mindedness". By the nature of their job, their work is inherently life risking. Most of us working in IT can afford to make experiments that doctor's cannot afford. I may be willing to try some unconventional approaches if the cost of error is an application crash and nuisance to the end user. If the cost of error is death of the user, I'm…

I'd respect this defense of medicine if medicine had resisted the U.S. dietary guidelines, which started as pseudoscience chosen by politics in the 1970s. Instead of being conservative about evidence and risks, the profession mostly was conservative about questioning that imposed consensus.

Re: First-in-human implantation of bionic device to halt Crohn's disease (2023)

#89

Post by Centigonal »

hinkley wrote: post #85

> Australia has among the highest incidence of Crohn’s disease in the world We really need to look at supply chain and environmental factors.

IBDs like Crohn's and Ulcerative Colitis have increased in incidence (controlling for better diagnosis) as countries develop[1] [2]. People in developing countries have a lower rate of incidence, and if they move to developed countries, the incidence remains low. However, their children, born in developed countries, experience the higher rate of incidence. Something about being a child in a developed country increases your chance of developing an IBD

Several theories have been proposed, including hygiene hypothesis, lack of fiber in the diet, and pollution, but finding causality has been hard. Worse yet, nobody knows what causes these illnesses.

It's also interesting to note many food allergies have increased in prevalence in the last 30 years - although the causes for that might be different, they are both GI related auto-immune conditions.

[1] https://www.gastrojournal.org/article/S0016-5085%2811%290016...

[2] https://www.thelancet.com/cms/attachment/1bc07ee3-782c-4670-...

[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19917585/

Re: First-in-human implantation of bionic device to halt Crohn's disease (2023)

#90

Post by abecedarius »

spondylosaurus wrote: post #73
EdwardDiego wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My two half-brothers have Crohn's. My step-sister's two boys have Crohn's. I don't have Crohn's. She doesn't have Crohn's. There's research ongoing into the genetics of Crohn's. Changing diet can help ameliorate the symptoms, but it won't cure it any better than "taking the air" in Switzerland will cure asthma. And stating so boldly that a "wrong diet" causes it? Just to reiterate, of five kids raised on the same die…

Crohn's has very strong genetic links, so anyone blaming it on diet is very silly :P I'm guessing your half-brothers and half-sister's kids have the HLA-B27 gene, which is the big one for autoinflammatory diseases.

Very strong genetic links are not especially evidence against a dietary cause. An AND of a particular allele and a particular food would take that pattern, for example.
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