the basis of modern virology

in medicine it is always enlightening to find natural controls. the Amish population serve as a human control --- but from a genetic standpoint, chimps serve as a control as well. chimps in captivity have an approximate 2% cancer incidence yet share 99% similar genetics as humans. either that 1% genetic difference accounts for all of the increased malignancies in humans or humans have done something to themselves that create all of the malignancies that plague our modern health. many will say that we get cancers because we live longer but captive chimpanzees live twice as long (15+ years more) than wild chimps so their lack of cancer is eye opening.

Comparative analysis of cancer genes in the human and chimpanzee genomes - PMC

Cancer is a major medical problem in modern societies. However, the incidence of this disease in non-human primates is very low. To study whether g...

People feel invigorated after an ice bath because cold receptors in your skin trigger sympathetic nervous system activation. Plasma norepinephrine and dopamine spike within seconds since your physiologic response is to "get out as fast as possible" Then your pituitary gland pumps out beta-endorphins to bind opioid receptors to counteract the pain of the cold exposure (just like a runners high) Vasoconstriction shunts blood to your core. When you exit, peripheral vasodilation creates a surge of oxygenated blood to your muscles and brain. Your cognitive override of all these systems trying to get you out of the bath is fed by a later dopamine reward and your normal warm environment then feels like a luxury.

the concept of the "6 month dental health check and cleaning" is largely a construct of dental insurance coverage. it was created as part of a pepsodent tooth paste advertisement in the 1950s and then solidified by dental insurance. when you sign up for a dental plan you are essentially prepaying for the teeth "cleaning". this is why if you are self pay they rarely ever call you to get your teeth cleaning since they know you won't want to pay for it if you haven't already prepaid via your employer plan. there has never been any scientific backing to visiting a dentist twice a year. is it a good idea...maybe but also is like visiting a mechanic when you don't have an issue...

this viral control study is the best modern one that I have read. They purposely inoculated people with H3N2 and then compared the transmission in masks vs no mask and unfortunately only one transmission event occurred. It was so hard to get people sick with H3N2 even when being quaranteened in the same room that they concluded that it must be the ventilation rather than then possibility that something might be wrong with the theory of contagion. https://files.ostermayer.co/contagion/ppat.1008704.pdf

not sure how function health gets their labs down so cheap but it is better for most people to get all their labs from them and then just take the results to their doctor for review if they have questions

Function Dashboard

It’s time you own your health. Function starts with 160+ lab tests and personalized protocols for instant action. Tracked over time in one secure...

i have helped run a wiki for emergency medicine since i was a resident and of all the things that I have done in medicine, bringing open access medical knowledge to clinicians around the world has brought me the greatest joy. No paywalls. No fees. Available at the bedside globally. at wikem.org we have created the greatest open medical textbook for clinicians. we are now using LLMs to translate every page into spanish at a speed i could have never imagined

right now healthcare practices make money when people get sick, imagine a healthcare practice that you pay for that keeps you healthy and sick visits are free. the physician has a financial interest to keep your healthy since the less sick you are the less time they need to spend with you in the office and the less time the patient has to take time off of work to see the doctor.

Futurism

Amazon Data Center Linked to Cluster of Rare Cancers

A sprawling data center in eastern Oregon has been linked to a huge rise in rare cancers, muscle conditions, and miscarriages.

ground water filtration is a time dependent process and data centers can very easily overwhelm that process high localized water usage essentially reverses the normal filtration process taking place with the soil. data centers aren't adding nitrates but are "hyper concentrating them" by using the water faster than normal ground filtration can support

perhaps we should be prescribing colostrum rather than the influenza vaccine https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epdf/10.1177/1076029606295957

here is an example of how a pharmaceutical company can create a trial to make a drug ( in this case xofluza) look good while being essentially useless. many urgent cares are giving flu patients this med to "treat their flu". first they create a primary subjective outcome (time to symptom improvement) that endpoint showed "29 hr time" benefit for symptom improvement but when looking at return to pre-illness health it showed no significant difference compared to placebo (126.4h vs 149.8h, p=0.46) they will choose healthy patients and exclude those who may suffer adverse effects - and they exclude hospitalized patients who may not even show a benefit they will also focus on surrogate outcomes such as viral load irrespective of symptoms correlated to viral load then they will bury a red flag deep in the paper where 9.7% of baloxavir-treated patients with H3N2 developed resistance mutations during treatment. then they will perform a modified intention-to-treat (mITT) analysis and exclude 2.6% of patients from non-GCP-compliant site to potentially minimize data on patients with side effects that prevent their trial participation all of this creates a publication that can headline as a great drug but really fails to improve patient health compared to placebo. https://files.ostermayer.co/ison2020.pdf

non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is a global problem. humans are turning into foie gras low carbohydrate high protein diets are the best way when paired with intermittent fasting to purge the liver of excessive fat deposits. then people can resume non grain carbohydrates once back to a normal body weight. https://ecodanusa.pt/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Riazi_NAFLD-prevalence-worldwide-2023.pdf

because type 2 diabetes is a function of mitochondrial dysfunction even though we talk about it as "insulin resistance" it makes physiologic sense that creatine supplementation improves glucose tolerance and fasting glucose levels in diabetics

Potential of Creatine in Glucose Management and Diabetes - PMC

Creatine is one of the most popular supplements worldwide, and it is frequently used by both athletic and non-athletic populations to improve power...

not that you really need a food pyramid but here is the new one https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/press-releases/2026/01/07/kennedy-rollins-unveil-historic-reset-us-nutrition-policy-put-real-food-back-center-health

a common refrain of preprint papers is that they "haven't undergone peer review"

medRxiv

Effectiveness of the Influenza Vaccine During the 2024-2025 Respiratory Viral Season: A Prospective Cohort Study

Background The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the influenza vaccine during the 2024-2025 respiratory viral season. Met...

this is a reminder to anyone who can read and understand scientific publications "WE ARE THE PEER REVIEW" here is my review of this paper: This prospective cohort study evaluates the effectiveness of the 2024-2025 influenza vaccine among 53,402 employees of the Cleveland Clinic Health System. Using a time-dependent covariate Cox proportional hazards model, the authors report that they were unable to identify a protective effect of the vaccine. There is a strong likelihood that the results are driven by unmeasured residual confounding, specifically differential healthcare-seeking behavior and detection bias. Ther defense against this bias (Figure 2 analysis) is not great. The authors admit in the results (are driven by vaccinated individuals being significantly more likely to undergo PCR testing than unvaccinated individuals. They argue that because the test positivity rate was similar between groups (Figure 2), the higher case count involves true infection rather than PCR test seeking behavior. If the vaccine has low or null effectiveness and the vaccinated population is tested at a rate 1.5x or 2x higher than the unvaccinated population, the observed incidence rate will be higher in the vaccinated group simply due to increased case ascertainment. A similar test positivity rate across groups, combined with higher testing volume in one group, means we would expect to find more cases in the high-testing group. The study is really just measuring the "incidence of detected influenza," which appears to be a function of testing and they were unable to adjust for "propensity to seek care." It is not possible to associated increased cases of influenza with vaccination but there is no doubt from this data set that the influenza vaccine had little to zero protective effects. and therefore raises the requesting of are potential adverse effects worth it.