> most people die because vitamins, minerals, amino acids deficiency every day
The most common cause of death globally is cardiovascular disease. The people buying supplements from him are buying his longevity supplements which likely have limited benefits to anyone.
He's going about this in the least scientific way, though. When n=1 and he has a million confounding variables, it reads more like fear of his own mortality than a meaningful research project. And this is a business for him now, he sells supplements through his Blueprint program.
Billionaires can spend unlimited money convincing people to oppose anything that benefits them, and we have an entire industry of social media influencers who get rewarded for stoking conflict. Citizens United passed in 2010 and everything has gone dramatically downhill since then.
I think they're arguing that a somatic cell from an older human contains mitochondria that's more degraded. Egg cells are all created before birth, and each is pre-seeded with a large number of mitochondria.
Most states had lotteries before this though. At least those brought in tax money and were designed to be relatively fair. Online gambling can shut down your account and refuse to pay if you get too big of a payout, and their money isn't going towards public schools.
They influence clinical decisions by adding to treatment options, but they do not make clinical decisions. If we believe that a drug's potential risks outweigh its benefits, clinicians will not prescribe it.
I can understand being frustrated and cynical with the pharmaceutical industry, but I have never worked with a single doctor that approaches patient care with the goal of getting them "hooked" on something for life.
The pharmaceutical companies are not the ones making clinical decisions - in this case, it's a shared medical decision between a patient and their oncologist.
Having seen how horrific pancreatic cancer is, how difficult it is to treat, and the decades of slow research done by academic scientists to get to this point, I am elated that we have a tool to give patients more time with their families even if their cancer can't be "cured" with this particular drug.
This may seem unsatisfying, but it's real, measurable progress. KRAS has been known about since the earliest days of cancer research, so it's a true breakthrough to finally have a drug targeting it.
I have a family member who works in estate planning. From all the stories he's told me, a lot of wealthy people compulsively screw over people / refuse to follow the contract they agreed to / etc, simply because they can and know that it is too expensive for most people to file a lawsuit.
LLMs can be a useful second opinion for a highly educated patient with good insight into their health and body, but this is not the average patient I see in an urban emergency department. Many patients can't give a cohesive history without a skilled clinician who can ask the right questions and read between the lines.
I am very skeptical of studies like this that don't adequately reflect real world conditions, but when I was a software engineer I probably wouldn't have understood what "real" medicine is like either.
We don't really have a good way to measure whether something has consciousness. Heck, we have pretty limited ways of testing how "intelligent" non-human animals are (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind_in_animals).
With that said, just because we don't have a great way of measuring it doesn't mean that we should assume LLMs are intelligent. An LLM is code and a massive collection of training weights. It has no means of observing and reasoning about the world, doesn't store memories the same way that organic brains do (and is in fact quite limited in this aspect). It currently isn't able to solve a problem it hasn't encountered in its training data, or produce novel research on a topic without significant handholding. Furthermore, the frequent errors made by it suggests that it fundamentally does not understand the words that it spits out.
Not really sure what you mean by your anesthesiology comment. Being able to intubate and inject propofol does not make you more of an expert on consciousness than neuroscientists and neurologists.