Future Medical Technology
 

There's a lot of new things in the pipeline. Like always, it's a matter of when.
Maybe this is the answer, for parents who feel their children are pissing away their education. :haha:

Pee brains.

Retroviruses? That's so 70s.

Neural cells are what we would need to cure spinal injuries. This is damn cool.

We've also recently made mouse kidneys from mouse skin cells.

Well, that great news for mice, does their insurance cover that, though?

Republicans would mock research with mouse pee. So China is doing it, and getting terrific results. It won't be long before we're pirating China's innovations.

Yeah, what if they're piss poor?

You gotta be kidneying me.

Nah, I'm a liver, not a fighter.

it's a hoax. remember, they warned us in grade school.



Me Chinee, Me play joke. Me put Pee pee in your.....brain.

Chinese
Japanese
Dirty knees
look at these

Worm Therapy
 

Worm therapy... shudder

The theory is, as we've cleaned up our act, you know, sterilized our environment, over the past few hundred years. We've mostly eliminated these parasites, and that changed the zoo in our guts, which led to other problems.

Whipworms! Hookworms! Agghh .... *shudder*

I'll pass, thanks. I just can't see that we need parasites to balance our intestinal flora. Bleargh.

I agree, yuukkk.
But the MS reduction of brain and spine lesions intrigued me.

The 72% remission in Crohn's is an amazing number. That can't all be attributed to the worm, right? Does Crohn's go into remission on its own all the time? How did the control do?

Edit: Here's an article talking about a pig whipworm Crohn's study that appears to be happening now.

That makes sense to me. Aren't there a number of parasites and insects that inject some sort of enzyme or something that shuts off the host's immune response in order to create a more welcoming nest for itself?

Apparently the good (or bad?) thing about the pig whip worm is that since humans aren't its normal host, it can't survive for more than a couple weeks in our guts, so you gave to keep re-ingesting them. I guess that's good because you don't want them taking your body over, but it would be nice if you could get the treatment and then be done with it. But it looks like you need to be doing it forever.

Now might be a good time to get into the pig whip worm production business. You just have to figure out how to wash the eggs out of the manure and sterilize them efficiently.

This has been floating around for awhile as a do-it-yourself non-FDA-sanctioned treatment for a number of autoimmune diseases. I know parents who buy them online and give them to their kids. I'm glad to see they might be able to get a prescription for it someday.

There's a chance that if this treatment is frequently used, we'll get a human-tolerant variant at some point.

Whether that will be good or bad is another question.

Hmmmm, good point. Life ..... finds a way... Put a gazillion pig whip worms into human guts, one of those worms is going to suddenly find it fits in.

It all depends on whether Monsanto gets involved.

Bill and Melinda Gates have been spending enormous sums of $ fighting malaria worldwide.
But...

There are reports of drug-resistant strains of malaria appearing in some villages
where treatment efforts had been sufficient to reduce the incidence of the disease.

But also, with some success in treatment also comes complacency.
Funding for the bed-nets has dropped so primary prevention will drop too.

Were I to be one to approve mega-funding for malaria, I'd look to the geneticists
who are developing the "one-size-fits-all" influenza vaccine containing
all of the various mutant genes that are in the flu genome.

In any case, I hope but doubt malaria will be "conquered" in the lifetime of any current generation. :(

At the risk of sounding like a eugenicist, diseases play an important part in keeping a species strong. We are essentially breeding drug resistant bugs while making our own species generally weaker by allowing members who would otherwise have died to pass on their less vigorous genes.