2 May 2024

OHSU study shows that private equity is indeed pervasive in healthcare.  Dr. Zhu has written on this topic before. She touches on metrics like changes in number of visits, billing level, length of visits, charges per visit. But not much on quality of care delivered, which is what I would like to know.

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Well, OK. 20% of national raw milk samples contain bird flu DNA. But pasteurization eliminates it.

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Boost your vocabulary. Words I want to use someday.

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David Sinclair thinks he can reverse aging. And there are skeptics. Looks like he's still hyping resveratrol, which a declining number of people think is effective. And now he's selling dog supplements as a life prolonger. With celebrity endorsement, which is not a good sign.

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This seems like a joke. This AI app creates more mnemonics to help medical students learn medical facts. Medical students already have a whole slough of mnemonics, and the problem changes to what's the mnemonic I need to recall to help me recall the facts I need to know. 

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Asian Food Dictionary. I typed in "gobo" and "burdock" and these terms were not recognized. Fail! So, who's this dictionary intended to help, then?

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I already reported that AI can geolocate off your photos, so you'd better be careful. But here's an app that supposedly allows you to intentionally do the same.

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mRNA-based liposomal vaccines are showing impressive results against glioblastoma. These are similar to the COVID-19 vaccines, but the product doesn't contain cDNA (like the Pfizer products are suspected to contain). The mRNA is targeted against EGFRvIII, IL13Rα, Wilms’ Tumor 1, HER-2, gp100, or MAGE-1 and the special “onion-like” multi-lamellar RNA lipid particle aggregates (LPAs) increase the immunogenicity of the vaccine. The vaccine doesn't depend on HLA type and induces a massive cytokine/chemokine response and dendritic cell/lymphocyte trafficking. 
It's interesting that the authors say that regular mRNA vaccines depend on payload packaging into nanoparticle cores for Toll-like receptor engagement in immune cells. This is precisely what some are saying is responsible for the off-target immune dysregulation in the COVID-19 vaccines.

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Neotame is a second-generation sweeter analog of aspartame (Nutra-Sweet). This agent may cause previously healthy gut bacteria to become diseased and invade the gut wall—potentially leading to health issues including irritable bowel syndrome and sepsis.

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Why new weight loss drugs are out of reach for millions of older Americans. The reason is cost. It's too bad that older Americans are locked into the Medicare system, and it's Medicare that is unwilling to cover the expensive new weight loss drugs, because if they did, Medicare would rapidly lose money.  Because the older folks are commonly obese and are suffering from diabetic complications. They could benefits from these drugs. But such is the socialistic model of universal medical coverage.

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Is there a cosmic glitch at the end of the universe? Where Einstein's theory doesn't hold? Well, the glitch is "not yet conclusive".

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