[ExI] Jaw-dropping CWRU Alzheimer's breakthrough?

[spike]

> 2012/2/27 spike<spike66 at att.net>:
>> Thanks Tom!  That is exactly what I suspected.  Our litigious society 
>> goes to heck and gone chasing tiny risks, when huge risks result from
inaction.
>> I propose a class of medications in which we apply the shocking 
>> caveat that the patient accepts her own risk...


I perceive a massive sea-change in the medical establishment brought about
by the informed and empowered patient.  Compare now to twenty years ago.
Even that recently, the information about a new medication was all in the
hands of the medical community.  But now with widespread use of the
internet, everything is different.  As soon as the bexarotene results were
announced in the popular press, several of us ran with the ball, discovered
low cost sources of the active ingredient (by low cost, I mean about 2% the
price of the pharmaceutical grade) and figured out a way to deliver it,
worked out the chemistry for dissolving it, estimated the risks involved in
using reagent grade material and so on.  We found out there are several
research facilities looking into this class of drugs, and that Case Western
wasn't the leader in all this, nor was the Salk Institute (the jury is still
out on that one.)  We found out that apparently several different facilities
may have discovered the beta amyloid breaking characteristics of the
curcumin-class molecules semi-independently, and we found out that amateur
scientists may get ahold of curcumin, modify it in a home chemistry lab, all
of this being done legally, morally and ethically, and give it to mice for
instance. 

There are patient communities online as well.  The Alzheimer's online
community is huge, but it is a one-off: the patients themselves are often
not particularly helpful, for they live inside the partially disabled brain.
Clear communications must come from a family member.  But the point is, the
internet provides perhaps the most powerful weapon against disease ever
devised.

Medical researchers no longer have a stranglehold on information.  Regarding
my 1 to 10 thought experiment I proposed recently, this is a poster-child
example.  We can find out things so much more readily today than even twenty
years ago, I see it as a fundamental game changer.

spike