OR we could simply give everyone free primary care. At the local clinic it cost me about $100-120 cash to see a physician (less for a PA or NP). This isn't some no-name crap clinic either; this is an ivy league affiliated institution. Where do people with no money or bad credit go for care? That's right, the emergency room where walking in the door with a runny nose costs $500-1000. This is where a great deal of that bad medical debt that gets written off comes from. I could go on forever but I'll give myself an aneurysm... we have so much administrative overhead and middle men it's ridiculous.

Yeah, I perform my own "perpetual" motion experiments, but I have never shared my inventions with anyone. I have a PhD... in pharmacy, but I've never seriously entertained the idea that I might succeed. My goal has always simply been to come close. We don't need true perpetual motion, for example, just something that doesn't need to be reset very often. If I only have to raise a weight, reset a machine, wind a clock, etc, etc, weekly who cares. It's a minor inconvenience. For some reason these machines are dismissed and treated as black or white; complete success or complete failure. I live in the grey area.

The "no news is good news" phenomenon is a plague. So long as the action does not result in a sentinel event (e.g. a crash, getting pulled over, an injury, etc) the experience is piled into the positive outcomes category in the brain. Over time one becomes overconfident. This can be applied to many things like driving, driving and texting, texting and walking, etc. The way to break free from this cycle is through objective feedback. Watch this for about 5 minutes starting at 18:15 and apply it to everything you do: https://youtu.be/gN40ddfEkoQ?t... for full nerd points watch the entire thing.

Standing desks are no better than sitting desks. Maintaining any position for a long period of time is harmful. They key here is movement.

I believe this "cure" for pain will fail, though it may be a more effective treatment than traditional opiates if it has fewer side effects. Why will it fail? Pain consists of TWO key elements. Element 1 is the physical stimulus or nerve conduction (this is actually the least important). Element 2 is the brain's emotional response to the stimuli it received. The brain is capable is experiencing pain even when no stimulus is received from a peripheral site. Phantom limb pain in amputees definitively proves this. The brain has a "map" of the body and is capable of experiencing pain even when a body part no longer exists. Therefore, anything that blocks nerve conduction (like a sodium channel blocker) will not stop pain in all patients. I'm not trying to say this new drug target will be useless; it might be fantastic, but it will not "cure" pain by any stretch of the imagination. I'm interested to see what kind of side effects are experienced when nav1.7 is blocked in HEALTHY patients.