[ExI] Alzheimers again

[spike]

>... On Behalf Of Keith Henson
Subject: [ExI] Alzheimers again


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11280504/Has-Stanford-U
niversity-found-a-cure-for-Alzheimers-disease.html

>...Has Stanford University found a cure for Alzheimer's disease?..."Our
experiments show that keeping them on the right track counters memory loss
and preserves healthy brain physiology."...

Keith
_______________________________________________

Thanks Keith.

We all know it takes years to do a clinical trial, and even then medical
ethics notions prevent us from doing plenty of experiments.  I have an idea.
We know that Alzheimers is a special case from the point of view of
cryonicists.  Reason: the body survives as everything we care about is
destroyed.  In the case of the hardcore cryo-believer, Alzheimers is one of
those especially wretched conditions that kills us twice: once AD gets
through killing the body, the brain is scarcely worth preserving.

So here's the idea: we create a special pool of test subjects, cryonauts,
who take a different approach to medical ethics.  We recognize that if we do
human experimentation with some new therapy, we might shorten our lives, but
we also recognize if we do nothing, we already know what happens, and that
risk is higher than ingesting some Hail Mary chemical or therapy.  So we
collect some people like that, make sure they have solid arrangements for
cryonics, wait until they recognize they have AD and are willing to proceed,
then offer them the latest scientific shot in the dark notion.

Along with this pool of candidates, we set up some means to do objective
evaluations, done by volunteers rather than overworked doctors or
professionals.  We get people who are not emotionally attached to the
patients to do those, locals who can visit and comment on progress.  The
desperate family is too likely to report positive results when there are
none, as we saw in the bexarotene community.  

We know there are ethical problems here, but we also know that as soon as we
start seeing AD symptoms, there are plenty of us who will pick the most
likely treatment and go ahead and try it, even if it has known health risks.
I would join that.  I know what the quality of life is like for an AD
patient, and I don't want that; it is horrifying, expensive, lonely, boring,
hard on families, pointless and destroys any hope that cryonics may offer.

spike