Meat allergy from tick bites is on the rise—and US doctors are in the dark
Meat allergy from tick bites is on the rise—and US doctors are in the dark
arstechnica.com
Meat allergy from tick bites is on the rise—and US doctors are in the dark
The allergy, called alpha-gal syndrome, came to light a little over a decade ago.
Interesting read. A few years ago I developed, seemingly overnight, an intolerance for red meat. Which sucked cause I really like it. But I developed it while working in the arctic, where there are no ticks (but like trillions of other biting insects). Doctors just did the usual rotation of antibiotics and then said IBS and patted themselves on the back. It was a terrible cop-out, but when living in the arctic you don't get much choice for doctors. Over time the problem largely tapered off and I'm no longer a firehose an hour after eating meat. I feel for anyone who gets this.
I'm hoping that AI really helps within the field of medicine. Doctors cannot be expected to know every possible cause of every illness -- they're human after all. But I'm hoping that the weird stuff can be detected and at least diagnosed properly.
I'm so mad at Elizabeth Holmes. Any startup in this space will face such an uphill battle.
you should see what the eczema community put up with. Essentially it’s a community of just talking each other out of committing suicide because of how much pain they live with every day and the entire medical industry has failed them so miserably by dismissing them.
“Try the elimination diet” is the best they are given with absolutely no “why” or extension to find a better solution to allergies than either avoid the triggers (if you’re even lucky enough to find out what they are) or try a life threatening injection if your allergy gets severe.
Then you have the celiac community and what they have to put up with doctors: “eat gluten for 3 weeks without killing yourself so I can diagnose that you actually are intolerant to gluten”. The community has lovingly referred to this now as “the gluten challenge”….. which the medical community went as far as to take offence to the name. I wish empathy was taught as part of the curriculum for being a doctor.
I work in drug development, and have done a lot of work in topical drug development, specifically for skin diseases. Psoriasis gets most of the attention, but there's a lot of work being done on other skin diseases, as well
"Eczema" is kind of a catch-all term for a group of diseases, which is one of the reasons treatment is so difficult. One kind is often mistaken for (or even indistinguishable from) another. The most common, though, is atopic dermatitis (which is hilarious when you look up the etymology).
So that said.... Have you tried JAK inhibitors? Ruxolitinib is one of the best ones, formulated as a cream called Opzelura. It's at least good for flare ups.
Unfortunately, there aren't really any good drugs for preventing it. If you want company on that one, talk to the asthma community.
But.... There is work being done. I've worked on it. I've had companies spend millions on the work. I haven't seen anything very promising, but maybe you can take some comfort that there are frustrated scientists working on it, and pharma companies poised to take all of your money once something is found.
Eczema: For years I was dependent on prescription topical steroids. Then I tried giving up soap. I no longer suffer from eczema.
Briefly went back to using soap during COVID. Had a flare-up within a week. Haven't used soap since, except in the rare occasion I have something specific on my hands (machine grease or something) I want to get off.
I had mysterious rash outbreaks for half a year... I shudder to imagine a lifetime of something worse.
I feel for you and anyone suffering with a meat allergy, but I dunno how much I'd trust AI for any serious purposes after seeing the garbage it can spit out.
Seriously, I've managed to get AI to write me instructions on how to inflate a phone and how to shave alligator hair. Rather that say "I'm sorry, that doesn't make any sense, but here are some related topics", instead it literally wrote out actual instructions for that nonsense LOL!
So yeah, I have no reason to trust AI for anything serious, it's about an ignorant joke of a language model is all it really adds up to.
That's specifically for a LLM which would probably not be the best AI base for medical uses.
In a use case like this, AI would be less about a final diagnose and more about getting the doctor or patient pointed in the right direction, especially with rare cases that few doctors are aware of. You no longer need to visit a hundred specialists in the hope of finding the one person who's seen something similar to your case before.
Yeah, I'm not talking about a language model AI. But rather something like the stuff the insurance companies are using to assess risk -- they take a lot of data in and cluster them together. Humans are sometimes really bad at recognizing patterns if you don't have enough data. A pattern that goes: "oh, all these people in this region with this specific digestive problem spatially maps to this insect" is the sort of thing ML should be good at. But where it will be really good is in turning proteins into diagnosis: "if this protein is detected in the blood in an general scan, combined with symptoms, then diagnose X" -- right now you only get tested for the things the doctor orders. Even more promising yet: with enough data, the AI should figure out which proteins actually do specific functions in the body, which will advance the research side (see, for example, Alphafold).
Pattern recognition is something modern techniques are very good at.
ChatGPT isn't that. It also isn't intelligent and doesn't know anything. It's basically a jacked up parrot blindly throwing words together.