"Dilbert" Creator Gets Voice Back 344
Scott Adams lost his voice 18 months ago to a disorder called Spasmodic Dysphonia. One day, it returned. He is apparently the first person in history to recover from this malady. Read his account. It is inspirational. I can't find any other word for it.
ffs (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Elaborate ruse? Maybe not... (Score:5, Insightful)
In what way would pretending to have a rare illness and then pretending to be cured be satire? There is a difference between "lies" and "satire."
Re:WOW (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Dilbert is a one-trick pony (Score:5, Insightful)
Its basically observational comedy - standups do it all the time, and it works. Find something that people recognise and emphasise the parts of it that are dysfunctional. I suppose we laugh about it because we'd cry otherwise
There's a problem though (Score:3, Insightful)
Neural networks, as used in artificial intelligence, have traditionally been viewed as simplified models of neural processing in the brain, even though the relation between this model and brain biological architecture is very much debated.
Re:ffs (Score:3, Insightful)
Sometimes, the nitpickers are just annoying -- just get over it and appreciate the irony dammit.
What an inspirational story (Score:5, Insightful)
I really do like to be happy for people's good news, really, but listening to the way some folks say it just gives me twitches.
Re:Isn't it fascinating that we still know so litt (Score:5, Insightful)
Why?
I know this is offtopic, but what the heck:
As a physician I feel qualified to respond. Care to lend parts of your body for experimentation? I can't promise you that you'll survive. I can't promise that you won't be disfigured. And I can't promise that you won't die from the consequences of some unforseen side-effect. No? I didn't think so somehow. We're bound by ethics to try things only when we're almost completely sure they will work and "do no harm".
I find it amusing how you can compare say coronary artery bypass grafting, or a laparoscopic hernia reduction, with Egyptians drilling holes in people's heads. They did it, yes. Now how many people survived the procedure?
As for the X rays and film, I believe I can introduce you to the CT scanner, a device now so affordable that most hospitals have several - even one _inside_ the ER. The film is still used for a hard copy, but it's printed by computer. Oh speaking of X-rays, I suggest you have a look at all the virtual endoscopy that's being done now, with 3-D modelling software. I can see inside your blood vessels without even touching your body. Let's not mention MRI's or PET scans shall we? No X-rays involved there at all. Quite a bit of progress since 1800. Radiology is one of the fields that is booming. Those radiologists are going to put us all out of work, I tell you.
The most common method for curing infections? Actually penicillin is hardly used nowadays, at least not at home. I invite you to look into penicillin derived synthetics such as the cephalosporins, aminopenicillins, ureidopenicillins. Then we have entire new classes of antibiotics, from macrolides to fluoroquinolones to aminoglucosides. Never heard of imipenem and meropenem? Most people haven't. How about vancomycin, or linezolid for that matter? I just named almost a dozen different families of antibiotics, each with different biochemical mechanisms.
Pain relief? Aspirin you say? What about all the non NSAID analgesics - metamizol, acetaminophen. Or all the other non-aspirin NSAIDs - diclofenac, ketoprophen, sulindac, indomethazine? Oh and for pain relief we can even talk about tramadol, or the use of anti-epileptic/anti-depressant medications like carbamazepine and floxetine. How about newer stuff, like Gaba-pentin? Then there's the opiods. We used to only have morphine. Now we have demerol, fentanyl, and a host of others....
Why isn't medicine evolving as quickly as, say, computing has over the last 100 years?
Just because you can't see the progress doesn't mean it's not there. Today we doctors must stay current more than ever. Some collegues estimate that almost everything we learn in medical school is obsolete within five years of graduation. And the pace is accelerating.
There are lots of diseases we still can't treat or cure, but now we understand why. The cure, however, is sometimes impossible due to the very nature of the disease. Many diseases are the manifestation of intracellular problems: abnormal gene expression, deficient receptors or intracellular messengers,etc. There's no way we can reach inside every single cell and fix what is wrong. So we make do with medications that block certain metabolic pathways or receptors, increase certain substances in the cells or body, or decrease others, to compensate for the defect.
Yet people still die. We run into new problems as we push back the average life expectancy. And society creates new ones. You had a far far greater chances of dying of a heart attack 50 years ago. Nowadays the survival is around 90% provided you make it to a hospital in the first hour. However people are having heart attacks at far younger ages due to the western sedenta
Re:Elaborate ruse? Maybe not... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Isn't it fascinating that we still know so litt (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably the fact that we get to make up most of the rules in computing (catapults vs. cat's paws, etc).
Whereas medicine is essentially a constant process of reverse engineering and good old fashioned trial and error.
Hey, come to think of it, maybe computing and medicine aren't that different after all :-)
Therapy for anyone else?? (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps some doctors need to work with him and try to codify this a little and try to put it into practice. Something which nobody has ever been cured of, but which he managed to reason through and, well, remap his own damned neurons is something significant. I should think more than a few doctors would be trying to get this put into a case study.
I mean, trying to speak in foreign accents and all of the other things he did to fundamentally change the way his braing thinks about speech is amazing, both in its novelty and its apparent unique success.
Since it seems unlikely to be something completely unique to him, it definitely sounds like an avenue someone should be investigating.
(*) OK, I've been reading Dilbert for years, he's definitely a unique person.
Re:Isn't it fascinating that we still know so litt (Score:4, Insightful)
Allowing the original poster to go on his life in ignorance, using talking points he's heard from those who believe in god over science, that would be harm. Our dear doctor here has merely corrected his knowledge and allowed him to understand that he doesn't know everything in life, and sometimes the things people say are biased to support their causes.
Re:Enlightened (Score:3, Insightful)
No, that's stupidity and vanity. As Epicurus said, "There is also a limit in simple living, and he who fails to understand this falls into an error as great as that of the man who gives way to extravagance."