I don't know about the VA system, but I personally use ketamine therapy and the process was much easier than I expected. I imagine the VA system is probably both slower and harder, as it always seems to be. MDMA therapy also has amazing results for PTSD and my ketamine provider thinks it will be legal within a year. It's exciting movement, but obviously for people suffering, too slow.

Yeah, that's where I was trying to go with it. Better than just giving "Africa" as a gigantic place aid, especially the various corrupt leaders who'll probably take much of it for them and their friends, help smaller communities get what they need to provide better for themselves. That's my belief anyway. I don't live in Africa but I do support a refugee group there, directly.

It's a reference to DeSantis receiving recently a snowflake art piece where every spike of it was a fairly hard to read text fascist that he took a picture with.

Yeah, it does and there are a lot of reasons. There's also the fact a lot of Africa is mostly small communities in sparsely populated but vast regions. Just "giving everyone all the food and water they need" from foreign aid really isn't a feasible strategy at least currently. Ideally, we'd help communities themselves get more self-sufficient than just send things constantly.

Other's gave the more relativistic/geometric explanation, but an easier ELI5 analogy I think is: imagine firing a bullet into the air. It'll fall back to the earth, unless you can shoot it so fast it can get past the gravitational pull back to earth. Imagine doing the same on a larger planet: you'll have to fire that bullet even faster to pass the gravitational pull. Now imagine a light gun, on a "planet" with so much gravity that even that light gun firing a bullet at the speed of light, it still doesn't have enough speed to escape the gravitational pull. Gravity bends the path of light, and while it moves at the same speed throughout, you don't have to slow something down to make it fall back in if you bend it enough.

I personally think the real solution in Florida is to just spay and neuter everyone at birth, and restructure down there so no child has to ever see a penis or vagina again.

Also African infrastructure outside of cities is very bad, making general distribution quite hard, while in many places with conflict, trying to do so might be dangerous.

So, I'll take this both ways. TikTok's parent company is in China, which the government has near absolute control of any company. In that way it is reasonable to assume any company in China can at least become a state actor at any point.

The other way is that, while it is probably reasonable for them and really any social media company at all to not be in government and/or private company devices that have access to private information, a bunch of kids TikTok with their personal phones really aren't giving China even in the worst case all that much more data than basic surveillance would.

Reminds me of the US politician who talked about Guam flipping over. Enjoy.

I'm curious what they did with regard to alcohol intake they measured. Not to invalidate anything about it, but one of the target metrics was glutathione, and the other two are also less affected by alcohol consumption but still are. Might be interesting to see if there's any correlation, as eating more healthfully in the west at least tends to also correlate at least somewhat with decreased alcohol consumption.

Collagen supplements usually don't have all the wonderful benefits people claim. You are correct that it will mostly be broken down into component parts before reaching the blood stream. It might have the benefit of having nearly the same ratio as what the body may need to synth it, but whether that matters much if you get sufficient general dietary protein is probably not all that likely.

It's also worth adding that people often put over emphasis on fever. It's generally also safe to let them ride unless it goes over 105 F, 41.5 C in which case it's getting close to being harmful, but suppressing also doesn't seem to have all that much of an effect on the course of the illness. It is possible that in severe illness before the development of modern medicine it was medically advantageous, but we now have better tools than fever to treat such things like antibiotics or other drugs depending on the illness.

Same. I'm not a sportball person, and I just don't get it. People will criticize me for being very into other things, when it's normal to basically lose your mind with sports. People are weird.

At least football is better than American football, where the name of the game is to be thrown to the ground and experience TBI. But hey, it's for the sport of it right?

That's interesting. There have been a few studies recently about the cannabinoid pathway being a useful target in cancer, but this is the first I've seen on the mechanism.

I'm personally thinking about writing a service to sell the data at something like 1/10,000th the cost twitter is charging or less. It'd cache most of the tweet data in LRU form up to a specific data limit in a central database, and dynamically grab new data in the case it isn't already there. There's also be a constantly running scraper for new data to throw it in the central DB cache. Only think stopping me is understanding the legal ramifications. On-demand access to historical data is too slow for large cohorts.

Sorry, I read that comment asking [low dose] daily MDMA, not yearly. That's my bad.

I do wonder the legality of offering a side market for buying twitter data scraped from what the website freely gives you. I'm sure those "hacker" forums still sell sock proxy lists on the daily. That plus beautiful soup and not being stupid in how you do it should be both a weekend prototype level project, and pretty cheap. It's been a while since I've done something like that, but socks proxies are a dime a dozen more or less. Now, you are probably utilizing hacked servers, but you aren't hacking them so pleading ignorance would probably do just fine. Plus, Twitter is hardly capable of keeping running now, not sure their scraper detection is exactly "state of the art".

Same, I have a mixed relationship with them. Sadly ketamine therapy has not been the breakthrough for me some people have had, though it has absolutely helped.

I'm very optimistic about the future of the field of psychiatry though with the movement beyond just the stuff that has helped somewhat but has been far from a cure for the last 40 or so years.

I brought dissociatives up as I thought that was where you were talking to bringing up NMDA receptors.

You are right that all of these things affect more than just the the primary target, that being the reuptake, release, agonism/antagonism of the primary receptor target. Any drug affecting a monoamine neurotransmitter is going to have downstream effects on others, and many receptors have specific action on regulating feedback loops on the other neuorotransmitters.

I was really only speaking to the direct effect for brevity if nothing else. I'm also aware that the down-regulation of the serotonergic system over time is considered a likely part of the antidepressant mechanism of SSRIs. In general, I agree with pretty much everything you said.

> "Also as of like, last month, “we don’t know how psychedelics induce this neuroplastic change” is an outdated statement"

I hadn't seen that. Mind linking the paper? Sounds like an interesting read.

I never said it wasn't questionable benefit to many people, I explicitly said that. We can cite study after study or meta-analysis after meta-anaylsis, but the fact is, SSRIs score above placebo in statistical significance more often than not, opinion on them notwithstanding. I work in I guess tangent to the field of epidemiology, but I write software for use by epidemiologists for after market drug effect statistical analysis, on algorithms we use to do that. SSRIs are well above placebo, doesn't matter whether you can cite criticism of them or not, and non-SSRI antidepressants almost all work on the serotoninergic system to some level. Ketamine and bupropion are examples that don't directly, or ketamine at all, but ketamine's MOA is not fully understood beyond that we believe the neuroplasticity change to be significant. Ketamine's acute antidepressant effects last well beyond the length of the drug or known medically relevant metabolites being in your system.

Unfortunately, people who had bad experience with SSRIs really love to make that known even if they know barely beyond an iota of knowledge in the actual science. Even if this is /r/science. And it's really frustrating.

NMDA antagonists are of interest, but not because of the NMDA receptor blockade. It's because of the increase in neuroplasticity they many induce, for still not well understood reasons. This is believed to be part of both ketamine and psychedelic therapy, but we really don't understand it well.

It's also worth noting that psychedelics and MDMA are also believed to work mostly through the serotonergic system, with traditional psychedelics being partial HT-2a and HT-2b agonists. MDMA is a serotonin reuptake inhibitor and releasing agent, as well as the other amphetamine effects. Serotonin is still believed to be the main cause of the empathogenic and mild hallucinogenic effects of MDMA, but it isn't an agonist or antagonist, just a re-uptake inhibitor and releasing agent. This means it floods neurons with more serotonin than usual through two separate mechanisms.

I don't disagree with the sentiment. They are not by any metric highly successful drugs nor is the side effect profile negligible. We also can't let personal experience cloud our analysis. They are not almost worthless in data. Here's a relatively modern meta-analysis: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5889788/. They are usually on the lower end of of the spectrum of the four main classifications that most anti-depressants fall into: MAOIs, tricyclics, SSRIs and SNRIs. They also are usually on the lower end of the spectrum in terms of tolerability. Tricyclics and irreversible MAOIs are generally more effective, but also more "dirty drugs" meaning a lower specificity in action. Some irreversible MAOIs are still used as drugs of last resort in treatment resistant depression, but they are fairly dangerous comparatively.

That's a bit of a stretch in the second paragraph. It is clear that serotonin is not the beginning and end for depression, but rather is a factor in many cases. SSRIs don't help much for some people, but they do have a statistically significant improvement over placebo at helping reduce the symptoms of depression in some. Given worse depression is correlated with worse QoL generally, at least in severe cases, they can help some people. The do have nasty side effects though as well.

For myself, I'm pretty much impotent unless I stimulate myself in specific ways that don't generally apply in the case of sex.

I'm personally pretty excited about the future of depression and other mood disorder treatment past the serotonin hypothesis, and including psychedelics and other such drugs. I myself am actually legally prescribed ketamine for ketamine-assisted psychotherapy as of a few months ago.

We're doing a lot more research in that sort of area than we have for the last 40 years, but MDMA has some potential issues for a daily regiment. Long term chronic usage of MDMA is associated with structural brain changes in both humans and animals. Whether this is the case in lower doses is not known, but it would need a good deal more study to ever get approval.

There's also the fact that most studies regarding drug harm for illicit drugs are done with people using street versions of the drug, so purity is pretty suspect, and other drugs cut in or uncleaned byproducts remaining could contribute to it as well.