The disclosure section in the cited research article may indicate a financial interest in the authors being able to say that Prozac is not effective:
“ MAH and JM are co-applicants on the RELEASE and RELEASE + trials in Australia, funded by the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) and the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), evaluating hyperbolic tapering of antidepressants against care as usual. MAH reports being a co-founder of and consultant to Outro Health, a digital clinic which provides support for patients in the US to help stop no longer needed antidepressant treatment using gradual, hyperbolic tapering; and receives royalties for the Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines. JM receives royalties for books about psychiatric drugs, and was a co-applicant on the REDUCE trial, funded by the National Institute of Health Research, evaluating digital support for patients stopping long-term antidepressant treatment. MP and RL have no conflicts of interest to declare.”
I would caution those in this thread who have never seen or treated patients in any psychiatric clinic or hospital let alone a pediatric one to be careful assuming that they have adequate experience to make sweeping judgements on the utility of antidepressants in children.
Looks like they are using molecular methods on post-mortem brains - all sorts of bugs can grow post-mortem and molecular methods can give false-positives as well as detect non-viable microbes, etc. But that's also based on a quick skim / haven't read the full paper yet.
Culturing from CSF in general will depend on the concentration of the microbe, whether they are viable, if antibiotics/antivirals were already initiated pre-collection, whether it's plated on the appropriate media (e.g. a rare microbe that only grows on one specific type of agar plate), etc. Culturing viruses is also hard/many hospital micro labs have moved away from that.
I think this study may suggest that we are failing to detect certain brain infections (and many are notoriously hard to diagnose if you don't catch them in the right window of time). But a brain microbiome sounds far-fetched. We even plate from brain tissue directly at times and aren't growing a bunch of organisms. I'd approach that claim with a healthy dose of skepticism.
plus we have the fact that the brain at night shifts the fluid to the periphery of the blood vessels to clear out the lactate bound NH4 which would impact any microbiome if it exists...
Maybe, but I think more likely is the time factor for med students. There’s really only time to find the major structures implicated in disease. Surgeons also not likely dissecting around the clitoris much. Wouldn’t want to risk injury obviously.
Strong work. Looking forward to / dreading the update with the 2023 and 2024 data that I've been more involved with. RIP to all of the young people in their late teens and 20s who made the mistake of using a road for anything other than driving. RIP to the older folks who got smoked just crossing the street. RIP to everyone else who didn't deserve to go. Hopefully there is traffic calming and reliable, frequent public transit in heaven.
Unfortunately this dataset doesn't include the, probably more frequent, severe TBIs. Surely wouldn't take many patients for the cost of a hemicraniectomy, 2 week neuro-ICU stay, trach/peg, and long term acute care stay to equal the cost of a few measures to slow drivers down. Not to mention lost earning/tax potential. Too bad it's not from the same budget.
Wear your seatbelt and a helmet and hopefully you can avoid the pain of your family having to have a surprise end-of-life discussion with me.
Honestly speaking, that's an incredibly difficult issue to try and optimize for. There are a ton of different measures you could implement to try and improve ambulance travel times, but they're the same street design choices that we know drastically increase accident rates and fatalities for drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians alike.
Wider travel lanes on normal streets? More signalized intersections with overrides for emergency services instead of roundabouts, stop signs, or other measures meant to decrease intersection accidents and fatalities? Removal of speed bumps, raised pedestrian crosswalks, etc.? Additional lanes so ambulances have space to pass other cars?
Sure, they could all ostensibly improve ambulance travel times. But they'd do so by dramatically increasing the number of fatalities on our streets. Not to mention the workload on those same emergency services. So while it can make sense to consider the impact on those services, they probably shouldn't be the driving factor. Or even a main one.
On the other hand, even if speed bumps and other measures cause minor delays, other changes might be able to balance them out. Dedicated bus lanes, for example, are basically exclusive express lanes you could choose to route emergency service vehicles down with potentially significant time savings.
In the Netherlands we have a completely seperated bus network. No speedbumps, traffic light priority and audible cue at the intersection. Works pretty well for emergency services.
You electrically stimulate around the spot with a probe where you’re planning to resect. If the patient can’t perform whatever task you’re evaluating then you know you can’t resect in that area. Generally looking for a 1cm margin between tissue you’re going to resect and a positive stim site.
Can’t undo brain cuts. CNS neurons don’t repair themselves like peripheral neurons or your skin. Generally not cutting glioma brain tumors out per se more likely to use ultrasonic aspiration to suck the tumor out piecemeal. Depends on the tumor though.
With our brain surgery robot the brain surgeon can definitely perform brain surgery on himself. Or invite a fellow brain surgeon over the phone, well a tablet might work better. Or better VR 3d glasses.
Amen. The American Hospital Association wields way more power now. Mergers between hospital systems have led to the large hospital systems being among the largest employers in many states, which means that senators and representatives are going to listen to what they want. Certainly more than they do to the AMA, which might only represent like 25% of doctors anymore.
Probably many people you know have seen a doctor for depression and gotten better, they’re just not telling that to the guy who says things like you did in your post… Very stupid take here man…
They tunnel it in the subq until the abdomen then they make a tiny incision in the peritoneum and depending on the neurosurgeon may have general surgery take a look laparoscopically to make sure there’s CSF flow then use the grasper to try to toss it in the right pericolic gutter over the liver.
Yeah sterile technique has to be meticulous in shunt cases. There’s evidence that the number of people scrubbed into the case influences the shunt infection rate so students like me occasionally would not be permitted to scrub.
The hard part in medicine isn't diagnosis and it's not performing the surgeries, it's disease prevention, it's working with patients to find treatment plans they can tolerate, and it's coordinating all of the moving parts (skilled nursing facilities, pharmacies, inpatient rehab facilities, outpatient rehab facilities, durable medical equipment, home health care, insurance companies) to deliver care that results in a good outcome. Where hospital care falls apart is when labs/tests don't get performed in a timely manner and when protocols/standardized treatments aren't followed. You don't need AI to make that work, you need wider adoption of checklists with workflows that are efficient enough to continue to deliver care to the same amount of people while they're being implemented so that hospitals are willing to adopt them. The diseases that can be effectively caught with screening tests - colon cancer, cervical cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer in high risk patients, abdominal aortic aneurysms, hyperlipidemia, hypertension, depression, etc. - already have screening programs in place.
Every dollar spent coming up with the next automated imaging diagnosis model would be better spent on a model that encourages people to get up and exercise 5x/week, quit smoking (or never start), and get their colonoscopy. Once the patient is presenting to the doctor with heart failure, coronary artery disease, carotid stenosis, COPD, colon cancer, etc. the battle is already lost.
Complain all you want about the healthcare system holding data back. You don't need the healthcare system to make the biggest impact on people's health.
—- I’ll add that your shamanism comment sounds like the typical bs that the 20-something software engineer, who thinks they know everything because they make more than 100k a year and have never had to go to a doctor for anything other than strep throat or generalized anxiety disorder let alone spent anytime in a hospital other than to visit family members, that are everywhere on this site loves to say about physicians or other healthcare workers to shit on them.
“ MAH and JM are co-applicants on the RELEASE and RELEASE + trials in Australia, funded by the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) and the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), evaluating hyperbolic tapering of antidepressants against care as usual. MAH reports being a co-founder of and consultant to Outro Health, a digital clinic which provides support for patients in the US to help stop no longer needed antidepressant treatment using gradual, hyperbolic tapering; and receives royalties for the Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines. JM receives royalties for books about psychiatric drugs, and was a co-applicant on the REDUCE trial, funded by the National Institute of Health Research, evaluating digital support for patients stopping long-term antidepressant treatment. MP and RL have no conflicts of interest to declare.”
I would caution those in this thread who have never seen or treated patients in any psychiatric clinic or hospital let alone a pediatric one to be careful assuming that they have adequate experience to make sweeping judgements on the utility of antidepressants in children.