Get Healthcare, Not Sickcare: Monitoring your Health, WAY Before It Gets Serious

Traditionally, we go to the doctor's office when something looks weird on our bodies or when we don't feel so well.  Hence we typically go when we suspect we are suffering from some sickness that should be diagnosed and then cured.

That is the expectation at least.

We also go to the doctor's office for annual physicals... at least those of us that are 40 years old or more, simply because at that age, the likelihood of the doctor finding something bad growing inside of us or some systemic problem is rising.

Because of this behavior, trained into us from hundreds of years of medicine, most people loathe going to see the doctor.  However, if the doctor finds something wrong with us early, we're pretty happy.

Nowadays, thanks to the advent of artificial intelligence, diagnosis can change and, in essence, bring diagnosis into our homes and in our hands in such a way that we may not need to get checked up a the doctor's office.

The future of healthcare diagnosis is pretty bright in our near future in fact.  We're talking about AI (Artificial Intelligence) enabled handheld devices, smartphone applications and other types of applications that have access to hundreds of thousands of records for any particular issue and can "look" at a patient's body and be able to tell the patient directly, with as much or better accuracy as a specialist MD what's going on.

We're also talking about chatbots that, through text dialog with patient, is able to determine if the symptoms you describe are indicative of something serious, what it could be and what the next steps should be to get yourself better.

If something is uncovered, THEN you can go to the doctor for a second opinion and treatment.

This is amazing right?

I speak of this and the social impacts of being able to self-diagnosing ourselves effectively in the following video.

The point is, once people can easily do checkups for themselves at home or on the road on a regular basis, they can track any kind of problem very easily.  And the best part is that these tools and software as they do diagnosis to people can serve to add more data to the data pool needed for diagnosis in the first place.

You see, AI for diagnosis works a lot like a general practitioner does:

1. Take symptom information from the patient either by asking a series of questions, or using different tools to gather information about the body's condition (urine samples, stethoscope, skin and tissue discolorations, shapes etc....).
2. The doctor compares the information with symptoms and effects of different conditions, diseases on record.  GPs generally have enough experience in the field or from school and regular seminars to take educated guesses about what's going on from initial information, or barring that, they have to check with specialist colleagues that have more information or databases/books. 
3. Based on comparisons made, the GP or specialist will recommend a treatment for the condition or give you advice on health as a result, depending on what the available database of treatments says what has been effective in the past.  This may involve medicine, surgery or whatever.

Bottom line, the treatment people get is entirely based on the doctor's ability to "guess" with reasonable certainty what is the particular issue.  If the guess is wrong (it happens sometimes), then the treatment provided is unlikely to be helpful, and in some cases, it could be even harmful.

Hence doctors are very well educated and trained over many years before they can treat patients on their own.

There are two factors that technology can help to improve a doctor's performance in removing some of the guesswork or increase his odds of getting it right:

1. Getting more and better data on a patient's condition.
2. Being able to compare accurate symptoms from the patient with a larger, more up to date amount of medical data from around the world.

Fortunately on the first part, science and engineering efforts constantly create new methods to measure health points from patients, and faster.  Plus, all this is digitized today, so accessible through the Internet and computers.

Also, thanks to learning A.I. and computing, we are now able, like the technologies mentioned above utilizing A.I., to have intelligent software look through a constantly updating medical dataset and spew out results much faster than the chain of GP to specialist to database check used in the past. (and currently).

Since our smartphones have a bunch of sensors and it can have access to the database, it becomes a possible tool for self-diagnosis that can be quite efficient as an early warning system.  Other tools with more sensors can be used in a similar way as a sort of medical tricorder, to do a better job from home.

Ultimately, with these tools out in market today, people need not be afraid of the doctor because they can self-diagnose more and more from home and thus monitor their health instead of waiting until they feel really bad because "the pain just isn't going away" and potentially then have to tackle something serious that could have been identified way earlier...

Very cool stuff.  Encourage these developments and please start using them.  Some early forms of diagnosis devices have already shown that they are just as accurate as doctors in diagnosing problems, and they are available in your favorite app store already.

Good health to all!

First Real Anti-Ageing Treatment a Few Years Away ?

I've talked about how we'll be able to eventually live forever in other blog posts and videos and as I write my book I have also interviewed one of the foremost scientists that has spent most of his professional career working towards giving humanity just that:  Eternal Life.

During my interview with Dr Aubrey de Grey, it became clear that doing this will be a complex multi-step process.  However, according to his and other's research, there are really only 7 major steps to conquer, all of which have reasonably identifiable treatment potential.

Watch the complete video of Aubrey de Grey's 2005 talk at TED discussing this to get a better idea of the challenges behind the project.  

Here is the list of 7 problems that need to be tackled to completely eradicate the body's deterioration due to the ageing process:

1. Cell loss / atrophy
2. Death-resistant cells
3. Nuclear mutations and epimutations
4. mtDNA mutations
5. Protein crosslinks
6. Junk accumulated inside cells
7. Junk accumulated outside cells

Now, these problems are not simple issues to tackle but they are identified which is a great start.  Recently though scientists and clinicians have been able to find techniques allowing us to tackle 2 of those elements, namely the Nuclear mutations and epimutations and the mtDNA mutations.  Well, at least part of the way.

I spend a bit more time on the consequences of this in my Youtube video below:

In a nutshell, thanks to modern research on gene editing, how DNA behaves, how the body's natural DNA repair mechanisms work and how epigenetics works, we may have stumbled upon a very cheap treatment that would allow humans to live longer in the next few years.

The treatment involves giving NMN (nicotinamide mononucleaotide) to a person, possibly simply ingested periodically.  NMN transforms itself into NAD (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide), which ultimately keeps our body's DNA self-repair mechanisms active. NAD is normally produced by the body naturally, but the production decreases with age and without it, our mitochondrial DNA and nuclear DNA just gets more and more damaged, causing all sorts of problems, including increased chances of cancer and other cellular diseases attributed to the ageing process.

The researchers that are prime workers on this treatment, from Harvard Medical School and the University of New South Wales, have tested this fully on mice with great results.   The teams are hopeful that human clinical trials of this NMN treatment will start within the next 6 months.

Make no mistake, this is not the only team working on DNA repair or manipulation treatments of all kinds.  The search for eternal life has started to draw recently significant funding from very famous deep pocketed investors recently.  So we'll hear more and more about real anti-ageing treatments over the next few months and years, most definitively.

As mentioned in other blogs, we've started in 2016 doing some initial DNA type treatments using gene editing already, with the most recent successful story being what seems to be a highly successful treatment for sickle-cell disease, a currently hard to treat disease that affects 100,000 people in the U.S. alone.

So let's continue to encourage these treatments, our understanding of DNA and cell functions as well as fundamental research, and we'll soon all have the option to live forever without any age-related handicaps, if we so choose!

The power of Illusion and Consciousness

Its been really fun these last few weeks after I started to write regularly (weekly) in my blog, and getting a good amount of comments back from the community.  For the last little while, many comments were about people talking about experiences they had or they did that had serious effect on their health or friend's health, such as "miracle" cures.  Many even claimed they have been taking some medicines that are quite obviously, based on my research, ineffective in general to do anything positive for people's health (and in some cases, could be dangerous) and adamantly arguing that it helped them a great deal.

I absolutely have no doubt about people being helped by even the nastiest or fake medicine.  Even things I would consider unreliable poisons.

Why?  The mind is a remarkably powerful thing.

It is well documented in medical research that people who believe they are taking real medicine can get physically better just by the fact that they THINK they are taking helpful medicine.  And in cases where the fake medicine actually has no positive physiological effect in helping some people, many patients will believe they feel better anyway.

This is called the Placebo Effect.

I talk about it more in my Youtube video below for those who prefer watching and listening.

Placebo is boss
The Placebo Effect can give very interesting results.  In one study (from the link above), people that were given a placebo and told it was a stimulant saw their pulse rate speed up, blood pressure increase and had improved reaction speeds.  It was all in their head.  Conversely, people that were given the same pill and told it was to help them get to sleep, they experienced the opposite effect.

This is why, when you are looking for the next supplement or new cure for some condition you have, make sure this new age health treatment is associated with a double blind study that rules out the placebo effect as a cause;  too many people are duped every day by "miracle cures" and convinced that the medicine works when it is no better than a placebo (which means in some cases, the belief it helps you... will do exactly that).

Here is more research on how the brain actually works with the placebo effect.... clue: its all chemical.

A sidenote:  be aware that the placebo effect may give the impression of a cure to some people taking them, but it won't help, physiologically, people that have a core physiological problem such as a genetic defect where they can't produce a certain protein at all.  The placebo won't give the missing protein and though the patient may think he's getting better, and actually feel better for a while, he won't get cured since his body needs that protein.  Hence we have seen in the past many years of alternative medicine tragic cases of people dying by refusing to take modern advanced medicine while taking some homeopathic bogus med that just couldn't help.    Here is one regrettable case from the Internet.

Changing ourselves through conscious illusion
It is now clear that whatever our brain thinks or feels will determine how our body will react, and it will react by releasing whatever chemicals it needs to rebuild, treat, desensitize whatever part of the body needs it, in demand. 

This is really cool.

Since the placebo effect is very real and physical in many cases, people can use that consciously to get better and feel better.  All that is needed is to have confidence in your body's ability to heal itself and you can get the same benefit as the Placebo Effect, without the placebo.  You're your own placebo.

Belief that you will get better, will help you do just that.  You're giving a strong order to your brain:  get better, I love you!

Here is an article that points to various research studies that point to just how much our conscious actions affect ourselves and the world around us.

In a word, there is reasonable evidence in the scientific world that tells us that not only can we drive our own healing, emotions and behavioral patterns, but we can also influence the physical world around us, and other people, through our thoughts alone, and in a very real, physical way.  We observe the effects, but science is trying to catch up on the HOW of some of it...  but the effects are indeed real.

Happiness is a cure
Ultimately, and my main point here, is if you want to be happy, every person's main goal I believe, you simply need to CHOOSE to be happy, consciously, every day, and your brain will drive all the little chemical reactions to get you there.  At the same time it will also change the connections between neurons to facilitate this transformation so that the state of "being happy" slowly but surely becomes a default for yourself. 

After this transformation is done, you would become... you know, one of those bubbly people that never seem to be down, unlucky or unhappy about anything.  People that think everything has a silver lining and there is positive in everything and everyone.

Don't you hate those people?  If so.,you are jealous because everyone wants to feel that way all the time.

Well, here is your chance, now, to do it.  And the best part is you don't need any pill or any training to get there.

Got a health problem?  No problem, get yourself into the happy state.  The happy state will want your body to be healthy, because you aren't depressed and you will likely want to be more active in the world, being happy and all.  So as a result, you would normally eat healthier too, and likely less (most obese people eat too much because they "eat their emotions", are stressed or unhappy about some things).  You don't need all the homeopathic medicines or new age stuff.  Your body has the permanent "order" to make you feel happy and good, and it'll do what it needs to get there. 

Just be sure to take medicine to supplement your biology if it actually does have genetic deficiencies  (real modern medicine is needed here) and there is no harm in helping it out once in a while with extra vitamins, extra sun etc.... why not?... just more materials for the body to use in order to get the whole system floating on cloud 9.

In conclusion, DO use your imagine, your illusions of whatever you like, to transform yourself into a better being.  All you need is to focus, concentrate and be conscious of what you are doing for a while in transition to where you want to be, and your brain, and body, will change to make it happen.

Before I go, you can learn about how to be Happy like this, through conscious thought by watching videos made by my highest personal mentor, Rael, founder of the Raelian Movement (see www.rael.org for info on the organization itself).  Check out Rael Academy for the video teachings.

Peace, love and harmony to all!

Rael (www.rael.org)