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More relevantly, the etiology is still a mystery, and nobody knows if the amyloid β is a defense, cause, mechanism, or harmless side effect of Alzheimer’s. Drugs attacking plaque have not made a difference on the disease in clinical trials. In fact the plaque theory seems to have been supported by fraud (causing a president of Stanford to be ejected) and distracted research for years.
People are working on other causes, most of which lately has focused on the tau protein.
That doesn't explain why shingles vaccinations are (somewhat) protective against Alzheimer's.
The mechanism is that people with the shingles vaccine are less likely to visit the hospital (because they don't get shingles). Because they have fewer hospital visits they are less likely to receive an incidental diagnosis of dementia from a hospital.
All of medical science still imagines a world where humans are in "God's shape", denying the fact that we are machines made of systems of smaller machines.
We could clone headless humans and have factories full of them. Transplants could cure all but brain cancer. Reverse aging too.
Every time I meet a postdoc biologist and hear them drone on about the limits of detection, I'm furious we are overlooking the obvious answer to everything. The mechanization of the human body as a plant and lab.
It's just going to take someone bold enough to do it, because people look at this as a horror. Like the first medical inquiry into cadavers being an affront to God.
It would fix everything and propel the biological sciences hundreds of years into the future.
We are dumb superstitious apes.
No, it’s that these systems of systems are so incredibly complex that we still don’t understand many of them deeply. And misunderstanding the relationships of systems leads to major side effects and unpredictability.
If we understood these systems then we wouldn’t have vague success rates on things like drugs or surgeries - we’d be able to say “based on all of these factors this is the treatment that works for you”. But we can’t do that, instead we have trials and shrug and say “it works for most people so it’s worth using”
We literally couldn't do this if we wanted to