[AKN #57] Orange juice, Ivermectin, and Love
also the wise words of Keanu Reeves
Sup homies?
Got a big life update that I will be sharing in the LOVE section of the newsletter.
Feel free to skip right to it or to read about Orange Juice, Ivermectin, and Keanu Reeves before you get there.
Your choice.
On to the newsletter!
LIVE: Orange juice and Ivermectin
“What if the cure for cancer was simply drinking a gallon of orange juice a day?”
I remember having this thought as a kid.
It arose because I knew two things:
Cancer is basically being really sick.
Orange juice is “healthy” and contains “vitamins.”
So I remember thinking, “can’t we fix the bad stuff if we just dump a bunch of good stuff on it?”
This is a decent hypothesis if it were true that both orange juice had some magical healing property and cancer was just a form of really bad sickness.
However, these assumptions are obviously incorrect.
Orange juice is hilariously unhealthy. In fact, it often contains 6 teaspoons of sugar (!) per 8 oz.
Cancer is runaway cell growth. It is not an extreme runny nose.
So consuming a gallon of orange juice would never cure your cancer.
We know that without running a single experiment. Because orange juice does not induce a “mechanism of action” which would deter the growth of cells.
You cannot cure runaway growth without introducing something that stops the growth…
This is roughly how it works in research.
There are an infinite permutations of things you can try, however since we do not have infinite time, we prioritize treatments which have well understood mechanisms of action.
I can’t get no mechanism of action
Occasionally, researchers discover something that works, but they do not understand the mechanism of action all that well.
Instead they have a drug that seems to work and they cannot explain it. Which can lead them to cases where it’s like “Orange juice cures cancer? What?”
This doesn’t make sense so it derives a deserved amount of skepticism.
So to suss out if there is a kernel of truth to that claim, researchers run large experiments to see if there is an actual relationship or if they just got a lucky result the first time.
After running the study, it sometimes shows that strangely enough, yes. Somehow orange juice does this and we do not know why. But they stick to the data and it becomes the gold standard with no actual understanding of why it works.
Years later, they may develop the correct measurement tools to realize orange juice initiated apoptosis (programmed cell death) then all of a sudden the result makes sense!
How this hypothetical applies to alternative treatments for COVID
Note: It remains my opinion that you should just get the vaccine. But I also find the identification of other good treatment options a useful venture since there are certain people who cannot take the vaccine and others who will not take the vaccine. The more treatments the merrier in my opinion.
Perhaps you have been hearing a lot about non-vaccine COVID treatments recently.
Most specifically, you may have heard about something called “Ivermectin.”
And if you follow the US media, your opinion is most likely:
Admittedly, this is a funny take, but we often allow the joke to stop us from asking further questions such as “why were people taking horse deworming therapies to stop COVID?”
The short answer is that it isn’t simply a horse dewormer.
Ivermectin is an anti-parasitic drug (a drug that kills and erases parasites) that was discovered in the 1970s. Drawn from soil samples, Ivermectin is on the WHO’s authoritative List of Essential Medicines and its discovery won a Nobel Prize in Medicine. Ivermectin has been used for nearly fifty years in treating a number of conditions, primarily water-borne parasitic illnesses like river blindness, and is also a mainstay of veterinary medicine.
And people were promoting its use because a body of research supported the conclusion that it was a useful treatment against COVID including anecdotal data about how it was very effective in certain poor countries like Mexico and India during big waves of COVID.
All the while, we did not really have the best understanding of the mechanism of action for why this worked (Note: proposals for how it works exist).
So all of this is to say that it was a case where it appeared we had evidence that drinking orange juice (Ivermectin) cured cancer (COVID).
Unfortunately, recent revelations — including accusations of fraudulent data and recent studies timing out — have lead some experts to suggest that the evidence points to Ivermectin having no benefit in the treatment of COVID.
But in a funny turn of events, the same study that showed Ivermectin having no significant effect also revealed a new non-vaccine darling medication: an antidepressant.
Fluvoxamine — approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder and is used for other conditions, including depression — might be the first effective inexpensive widely available outpatient treatment for COVID.
Again, this doesn’t exactly make sense in the traditional sense.
No one thinks “oh this anti depressant will probably reduce the risk of this person with mild COVID from going to the hospital.”
BUT THAT IS ACTUALLY WHAT HAPPENED.
Super wild, but also worth noting that the evidence for including it in the trial was actually grounded in a proposed mechanism of action.
These developments serve as a helpful reminder that we are still learning a ton every single day about how to treat this virus.
In all, we need to just keep following the data. Keep running analyses. And most importantly not allow ourselves to get emotionally hijacked towards believing one hypothesis over another.
Memes aren’t the scientific method.
LAUGH: Keanu Reeves dropping wisdom
One of the weirdest things about post Matrix Keanu is coming to the realization that he is actually this awesome down to Earth guy.
Like in the middle of shooting John Wick 2, my guy is dropping these quotes:
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Love to see that.
LOVE: I got engaged
As I hinted at last week, there is big news in my life.
On August 20, 2021 I got engaged to the love of my life.
The whole story of the engagement is really lovely and I would love to repurpose it into content for my 10s of fans, but maybe everything doesn’t need to be shared.
Instead the story will remain as one to be told in person :)
Just know that I am stoked for many more years of happiness.
Closing time
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Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are strictly my own. Who else’s would they be?
So who's going to toast your wedding? You? Congrats <3
Congrats, Kevin!!!!