I tried all sorts of different things, but couldn’t nail down a pattern for years. Even worse, some days I could tolerate something and others it would blow me up. It wasn’t until I started telling Claude literally everything I consumed and how I felt that it dialed into histamine response triggering mast cell activation.

I started to realize that a lot of “low histamine” foods either build up histamines as they age (so leftovers kill me) and some “low histamine” foods actually cause the body to naturally liberate histamine (essentially mimicking high histamine foods).

It’s extremely hard to get a diagnosis because the triggers are seemingly random and don’t always correlate with common buckets.

Switching to a keto diet helped way more, though. I still get flushes, rashes, etc., but the severity has gone down to the point they are random annoyances that go away as opposed to medical events.

Cromolyn and/or ketotifen are the big guns for mast cell disorders, though.

Sad to hear that. You sound like a keeper. Anyway, are you free this weekend? ;)

I've been dealing with my symptoms for 17 years this year and Quercitin + Zyrtec + Pepcid is the first thing that's made a dent in it. I started a few weeks ago and it's been amazing but I'm not experiencing full relief yet.

This was the combo Claude recommended I start with for a trial, one message after I told it my symptoms. No doctor has ever been able to help.

Copilot recommended these supplements. Due to a lack of studies relating directly to the effect of these supplements on nasal polyps, it inferred they might help based on the known action of the supplements and the theorised cause of polyps, so it could all be nonsense. That said, both those supplements are considered safe at the doses I take and it appears to help, so even if it is a placebo effect I'm happy.

Reminder that he is the one who is ill, not his wife.

When you do cluster analysis of the symptoms of psychiatric patients, the empirical clusters don't match the DSM entries.

Schizophrenia is at least 8 distinct diseases (see GWAS), so orphaned that they don't have a name.

Psychiatry is an epistemic mess, and medicine uses it as a garbage bin for the patients it doesn't understand (because blissful ignorance is the norm over there).

I think multicellular creatures on earth are just so complex they are basically ineffable.. We can understand certain general principles and statistical trends, but the entire system holistically is incomprehensible for a human level intelligence.

Kind of analogous to ML, we absolutely understand how each neuron works, we built them! But we often dont really understand how the resulting model works.

I was in a similar situation where Claude finally helped me make a breakthrough. It seems that my issue is entirely related to histamine levels.

* H1 (like Zyrtec) help block the body’s response to high histamines

* H2 (like Pepcid) actually worsen my symptoms overtime because my body was readjusting baseline

* Quercitin and DAO enzyme help massively.

Also being extremely mindful of histamine levels in food helps keep my baselines low. This can be tricky because histamines collect as food ages (so two batches of something can lead to different responses) and some “low histamine” foods can still trigger your body to dump histamines (so they actually act like high histamine foods).

Human relationships are brutal sometimes. I still choose to treat others the way I would want to be treated, and some people _actually_ reciprocate, and you eventually learn who is who in your life, but this requires that you be open to the fact the majority won't, and that you will sometimes feel betrayed and used. You just have to accept that it's your decision to make, and decide what kind of person you want to be.

Other commenters are also probably right to one extent or another, the dynamic of the relationship probably changed pretty dramatically and that can create problems regardless.

Anyway, poor old AgentMasterRace probably feels like a depressing episode has turned into something they'd rather it didn't. Sorry for pontificating over your traumatic(?) event with allusions to my own. If I'm reading the meaning of their username correctly though, I feel less bad about it, lol.

Health issues can be immensely stressful, and what is required to provide the best logistical and diagnostic support is very different from what is required to be a supportive partner and emotional caregiver. Doctors often fall into the trap of treating the disease and ignoring the patient, but at least that aligns with their job description. It is quite easy to do the same as a partner, and that is NOT the job. For certain personalities, it can often be a massive relief to disappear into searching the web and poring over medical research studies -- the key word there is "disappear". Plus, if someone is suffering physically, you can't really require them to have (what you think is) the "appropriate" amount of gratitude for what you're doing for them. (And physical suffering is always going to lead to mental suffering unless they're a 1000-year old enlightened monk.) You can be quite proud of your savior cred, and your partner can very reasonably tell you to shove that pride up your ass.

It's not about whether you're good enough or not. We all start with woefully naive views of how robust our relationships are. We get together as certain people at a certain time. Living together deepens and widens the basis for the relationship, and we'll all fool ourselves into thinking that nothing can break that apart. But fast forward a decade or two, and upend one or the other of your lives with a health challenge or some major life event, and you'll soon discover that you're in new ground and have to learn a bunch of brand new skills that you never needed before. And there's no particular reason why this person X who you bonded with years ago in environment Y is going to be easier to learn with than some random person off the street now that you're in environment not-Y with a different person X2 who evolved from person X -- just as you've evolved (or devolved) into Me2 from the Me you were. Especially not with the added challenge of a long history together of frictions and irritations that never mattered enough to tip things over the edge but do now in the new environment.

For the record, I'm still married to my X2 in my very-not-Y situation. For now. But I've seen enough that I would never look down on or even be surprised by the dissolution of even the strongest-seeming relationships when a novel challenge comes around.

Back to fairy tales -- Prince Charming's main claim to marriagability was his willingness to make out with a hot living corpse. Are you so sure your own claim is that much superior?

Oof. That one resonates so much for me - even living in a country with far better healthcare.

There's a term I dislike but is apt: medical misogyny. Basically it's, "systemic, conscious, or unconscious gender biases [which] affect how a patient is treated by the healthcare system."[1]

Systemic in particular is that basically the vast amount of knowledge amassed in the medical sciences has come from studying men. Comparatively little for those not assigned male at birth.

One of my kids has complicated health issues, pretty much from the time they hit puberty. If they hadn't had me (someone born with a penis) advocating for them and attending most medical appointments throughout their teenage years I'm pretty sure they would be dead now.

My most appalling memory is a gastroenterologist who patronisingly told my kid with a diagnosed anxiety disorder which exacerbated awful gut pain from irritable bowel syndrome that, "If you weren't anxious all the time you wouldn't be in so much pain." We both had a good cry in the car park after that appointment. It certainly set treatment of their IBS back a couple of years at least.

(Fortunately after a string of bad ones, we found a GE that treated them with compassion, and not as a gastrointestinal tract with an annoying human around it.)

Whew, yeah, touched a nerve there. So, medical misogyny. It's a thing.

[1] https://australiainstitute.org.au/report/medical-misogyny-in...

In my case, the misdiagnosis up front was entirely reasonable. (EDIT: Well, maybe not. See below.) The generalized anxiety disorder diagnosis from my PCP made a lot of sense given what was happening. I hadn't had delusions yet at that point. It was... a mixture of panic attacks, night sweats, jaw pain and a greatly increased level of anxiety compared to my baseline.

My PCP did run a bevy of tests (chest x-ray, and took tons of blood) to try and rule out anything biological.

Given what was known at the time, I think my PCP did the right thing. And when my symptoms really escalated (delusions, suicidal ideation, falling and hitting my head), my PCP suggested going to an ER. And that's what we did.

I think it was the ER that really dropped the ball. Given the sudden onset of everything, the fact that they didn't get me in front of a neurologist is, in retrospect, really quite baffling. That's when I went to a psychiatric hospital, where I spent 3 nights.

I only got out of that hospital due to total luck. My neighbor was old college buddies with a neurosurgeon. (We had no idea about it. It just came up randomly when my neighbor was dropping my son off at home for us.) That was the critical connection because he ended up talking to the neurology department at Brigham and Women's, then talked to the psychiatric hospital and was the one who facilitated my transfer.

My wife tried to do it on her own but they wouldn't allow it because I had been medically cleared. She had to give 3 days notice to pull me out. Or otherwise, by default, I would see a neurologist after 2 weeks. According to the psychiatric facility.

I really don't know if I would have made it that long. The encephalitis wouldn't have killed me in that span of time, but I was in an extremely dark place.

I'm also really lucky that this is an autoimmune disorder that has a pretty objective diagnostic criteria: a positive antibody test in your cerebral spinal fluid. You "just: need to have your spine tapped to get that though. Fun times.

The problem is accessibility. Tech grew largely because of how accessible the technology is. Biomedical research is still very difficult to get into, and as a result seriously curtails the potential progress we as a society could make.

I don't know what the solution is but there's got to be an easier way to tinker, test, explore, and play around with biomedical things (cells, viruses, etc.).

Ideally it would be a purely software world where we replicate everything down to the DNA level so that you can test and play around with potential solutions...

Decompensating at an increasing and alarming rate, not typical from a psych perspective. Also not in a healthy young male with no history. My wife was able to substantiate this claim with my detailed timeline. (I had some emails and wrote a lot of stuff down, as is my nature, during this time.)

My left eye was "squinty."

I'm asking because I've had frequent encounters with doctors whose process seems to be, literally, "remember if there's anything like the described symptoms that I learned in medical school" which, if they were somewhat older, was probably 30+ years ago.

[1] - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/dvs/MortFinal2007_Worktable23r...

There were lots of reasons that went into me posting this.

First and foremost is that this is a disease of chaos that is prone to misdiagnosis. I want to shout this from the roof tops to spread awareness. I don't have a ton of reach, but I have some, and I want to use it to amplify things like this.

Second is that I'm somewhat naturally open about these sorts of things.

Third is I feel a responsibility to my projects and users.

Fourthly is that it's just practically useful to have a link to send to someone when I reference this time period in my life. :-)

> very new diagnosis

Yes! Discovered in 2007. Wild.

> so if you are reading this burntsushi, thanks for being open about something deeply personal, I hope I would have had the courage to do so myself.

<3 <3 <3

Even obvious things like “I can’t move my left hand after 1 hr of light typing” were excruciating difficult to get diagnosed by “board certified” specialists with 20 years experience. It’s not that they were wrong —- they flat out weren’t even interested in making diagnosis nor conducting a simple test that could lead anywhere. Financial costs and insurance requirements weren’t the issue either.

“My chest hurts after walking slowly to the mailbox. ‘Well, you waited 1 month for this appointment, we’ll do an ultrasound in 2 months, discuss it 1 month later, and then maybe figure out next steps “

I cannot imagine a more dysfunctional aspect of modern society. The Department of Motor Vehicles is a paragon of efficiency by comparison.

Imagine if I told my boss the critical issue escalated by a major customer would be handled that same way…

There are a lot of bad software engineers but they tend to get weeded out since most are employees. Imagine paying them 2x-3x the amount with no direct managerial supervision and even more poorly informed customers. The name for this is “doctors”. The game is played by not trying to be great in medical practice - instead the strategy is only to be financially successful.

I have a worsened lifelong issue because of repeated sub-optimal "solutions" to a problem, such that the best long-term solution was found by the THIRD doctor that looked at my problem. "Solutions" from the first two guaranteed my problem will forever be worse than it would have been (solely due to their treatments), if only the third doc's solution had been considered/presented first. Even worse, I was a teenager and young adult when dealing with the first two. My mistake for not doing my own comprehensive research, apparently -- the thing we entrust doctors to do for us...

Even the uncontrolled, daily falling.

It’s wild how much of a practice medicine is but people take the first diagnostic opinion because their profession

My doctor's diagnosis? Depression. Oh, and my foot arch must be getting higher.

My sister's best friend going up lost her dad because he was told that the pain from recent dental work couldn't be that bad and that he should just tough it out. The infection broke through into his brain and he died very quickly.

My dad almost died from lupus because doctors wouldn't test him for it because it primarily affects women.

Women, statistically, are more neurotic. I'm sure that affects how doctors diagnose them, and it shouldn't. However, I don't like things like what you're describing to be attributed to misogyny. It could be, but it also could just be that doctors focus way too much on horses when it could actually be a zebra. Hopefully LLMs will help with that - when GPT 3 or so came out way back when, one of the first things I did to test it was to give it what I knew about my condition at the time. It told me 3 tests I should have done, one of which was correct, and one of which I still haven't managed to get a doctor to give me after trying for many years.

If you blame it on misogyny the actual problem won't get fixed.

This is a loaded UK-centric policy/humanities term and I would suggest using sex/gender disparities instead which does not imply animus and is therefore much more useful for productive discussion.

Implicit and systemic biases in medicine are very real and supported by ample data.

> Systemic in particular is that basically the vast amount of knowledge amassed in the medical sciences has come from studying men. Comparatively little for those not assigned male at birth.

At least for the US this hasn’t been the case in clinical research for the past 15 years or so which in aggregate leans a bit more female than male if anything. Some specific fields still have sex disparity in clinical research for a variety of reasons but that’s the minority these days.

People with intellectual disability continue to receive substandard healthcare as program to train doctors risks closure

~ https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-03/intellectual-disabili...

in which an above average fitness footballer with Downs Syndrome has a lung infection ignored by doctors.

I was talking to a specialist in a field where a rare condition has started to trend on TikTok. It was also eye-opening to learn how much they're struggling under the weight of bad referrals for patients who don't have the condition they claim.

That's not to say they aren't sick. The patients are suffering from something. However between hours of TikTok and ChatGPT they can convince themselves they have a condition and learn how to convince their primary care doctor to put in the referral

This doesn't work as much for conditions that have objective criteria like blood tests, where it's easy to filter out the patients who have both negative blood tests and a PCP who hasn't tried to investigate other explanations.

An example of a popular self-diagnosis is MCAS: Mast Cell Activation Syndrome. MCAS specialists are overwhelmed by self-diagnosed patients trying to get appointments who have never even have a tryptase blood test. If you go on to any subreddit or forum for chronic health conditions you will find a large number of people there have been convinced they have MCAS, and new members are told they might have MCAS too.

This is creating a separate fatigue among providers who need to keep their guard up at all times so they can maintain focus on the patients who really have these conditions instead of letting their schedules get destroyed by patients who don't. It's a hard problem.

FYI I’m not American. Your medical misogyny comment is dead on, in my opinion. This sort of thing can happen anywhere.

There are going to be casualties of doctor's triage, and those stories will be beyond upsetting, but most would agree its better than an 8 month wait to get an MRI.

My brother last year went to the doctor with an ear ache. The doctor prescribed him some liquids and pills. Only after he left he realised the doctor never even looked into his ear!

Honestly, I think when you're facing any sort of potentially serious health issue you need a wingman coming to the appointments with you. Someone who can hopefully be a little more emotionally removed. Who can ask the questions you didn't think of to make sure you've covered everything. Who you can debrief with afterwards to make sure you've taken in all the important information you were just scrambling to wrap your head around while you were in the room. And sometimes to argue on your behalf.

Done this with my kidult for most of their life, obviously. Did it with my dad's oncologist visits for prostate cancer. Had it myself with cancer and other times. You just need someone you trust in your corner when you're vulnerable.

Yes, the implication of animus is the chief reason for my dislike of the term. The main failing of most alternatives is they don't roll off the tongue as easily or succinctly.

> this hasn’t been the case in clinical research for the past 15 years or so which in aggregate leans a bit more female than male if anything.

Oh yes, I didn't mean to imply the situation isn't improving (and an overcorrection in research at this point in time is probably a good thing, IMO (if it is in fact happening, which I struggle to believe (but that's my issue))).

The body of knowledge in medical science is a lot older than 15 years though, so I would think it will take a lot of time and effort to equalise.

Thanks for your response. I found it constructive and informative to my own thinking.

A negative Tryptase blood test doesn't mean you don't have it, it could just be that you're not having an active flare-up at the time. So they also prescribe high doses of H1 and H2 blockers and then you report whether symptoms have improved across 2 or more organ systems after a few weeks.

> FYI I’m not American.

Whoops. Guess that was an assumption on my part. Here I am, doing human things…

So you have had a life changing experience. I am really sorry for all the pain and fear this has caused you and your family. Iv ig is a miracle for autoimmune trainwrecks. It saved one of my loved ones lives too. I am so glad you are still here with us.

I know nothing about your recent reality. I can tell you this. Psychosis, immense fear, and near death experiences aren't something to brush off. Perhaps best not dwelled on, but I hope you either stay in therapy or begin therapy with someone who understands trauma. Not to discuss it as trauma, but to keep tabs.

You may be good to work! Good to be a kick ass dad! But if there are things you haven't dealt with here they may rear their head at a random inconvenient time down the road. Maybe you are all good, I bet you are. But please remember to take care of your mind.

Wishing you and your family the best. Stay well!

Be well mate.

We are going through one right now, just not so visibly. Many forms of cancer that would have killed you quickly at the turn of the century are now controllable, if not treatable. Coming up with a safe and working vaccine for a novel virus just a year after it emerges would be unthinkable 20 years ago. HIV went from a nasty death sentence to something you take one pill a day to keep control of within my lifetime.

We just don't like to talk about it because we don't like to talk about death and life stuffs.

What is funny about this accessibility and regulation point of view is I remember around 2021 and 2022 there is a hive mind of tech people who were paranoid about all the novel virus research, "gain of function" shit and want to preemptively ban it all. The same people who decry any regulation imposed on tech. Go figure.

We don’t have good ways to even start thinking about such simulations.

https://people.com/tech-pro-uses-chatgpt-to-create-cancer-va...

Sorry, my bad here. The timeline wasn't mine. It was Kait who had built it and took on the burden of sharing it with everyone she possibly could.

It all boils down on how deep a doctor goes diagnostically: for common diseases (1/100) an interview is enough, for rarer (1/1000) an MRI/blood test are needed and for very rare you need extensive and expensive genetic and immune exams. Because of cost, the 'art of diagnosis' is to be able to filter the cases that should be referred downward. Classic type I/II error due to binary misclassification happens all the time.

And even if I did have an MS, there are various sub-types that require going through something quite complicated call the McDonald criteria: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnosis_of_multiple_sclerosi...

This seems remarkably high.

> Seems like that virus in particular lingers and reactivates in many people.

Scary cuz it spreads from kissing / sharing fluid containers :O

So it's great that with anti-NMDA there is an actual singular test to determine this, but given it's so rare and little-known, getting to that point is very much not given :-(.

Thanks for sharing the story so openly! Sorry for everything you went through to get a proper diagnosis and treatment and for everything that the encephalitis itself inflicted on you. Glad you're doing better!

This is overly strong. X2 is likely similar to X and Me2 is similar to Me. X2 is certainly more likely to get along well with Me2 than a random, but far from guaranteed (which proves your point, but I wanted to rein in the pessimism)

Also, in this sibling comment thread[1] to yours I discussed with haldujai why we both dislike the term, specifically because of the animus is implies, which is inaccurate.

It is however, a term you will hear in discussions like this, so it is good to know what it means, and the fact that the problem as defined exists, no matter what you call it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48392371

In your example of MCAS, the solutions seems simple, do a blood test first, before really involving the specialist?

Really glad you can smell it on people, smell is a powerful diagnostic tool that few people are trained on.

I spent the majority of my career at a major tertiary referral center. One patient sent to me had all the signs and symptoms of Beçhet’s disease. To me it was obvious; but putting myself in the shoes of the rural primary care physician, who has never seen a case, I can imagine the constellation of presenting signs and symptoms would have been just a muddle. I can think of perhaps hundreds of similar cases.

I’m sure I missed important findings in my career. I know it. Much of what is missing nowadays is the time to listen deeply to what the patient is telling you and to think about it. If you have even rudimentary medical knowledge + time + humility and a willingness to constantly revisit the diagnosis, any doctor will do OK. But it’s a tall order in 2026. I’m grateful to have practiced at an institution that afforded me the time to listen and think. I gather that many physicians now are suffering from exhaustion of curiosity and maybe empathy.

Why do you think that isn’t happening? So many comments here make broad claims about fields where the poster isn’t familiar. Being a programmer does not make one knowledgeable about other specialized fields

Not going to happen with all the regulation. Plus, I think half of us techies got into it for games and boobs (bypass parental controls). Not a lot of that same adolescent motivation in that field.

* The web is pretty much dead. Time Berners Lee's ideals certainly are.

* Computing is dominated by completely evil megacorps.

* They are making a concerted effort to make people as tech-illiterate as possible and also make universal computing illegal.

* Theres been years where GPU's were being price gouged, 1st by crypto bros, then NFT bros, now LLM bros.

* Cant even buy RAM now.

* They put e-fuses into hardware now, comes right out of the factory as ready made e-waste that cant be repurposed.

* The biggest platforms, Android and iOS, are walled garden, locked down, corporate nightmare worlds. And there is practically no alternative.

* Social media is making people depressed and also very easy to manipulate en-masse by anyone willing to pay.

* Moore's law stopped and software bloat overtook performance gains.

* VR might have been cool but it was pre-enshittified in its nascent stages. Freakin' facebook bought Oculus before they had released a single headset.

That's not true unless HN readers are a representative sample of the overall 25-44 population, which they aren't. Higher-income/SES is associated with a lower mortality rate than the overall population average.

I feel like this should be a bit of a two way street. Is there anything we can be doing for you?

I see there's an option for GitHub sponsorship, would that still be your preference?

(My handle comes from graffiti I found on the booth of a hot dog stand in Worcester MA called Coney Island[1]. I thought it was a cute oxymoron and adopted it on a silly whim. I only later learned that some sushi is indeed cooked.)

[1]: https://coneyislandlunch.com/

> I noticed you said in another comment that you were treated with antipsychotics in the psych ward. Would you say they had any effect in lessening the symptoms?

Your intuition is right. The antipsychotic was actually prescribed by a psychiatrist during my second hospital stay at Brigham and Women's and not at a psych ward. (I would later enter another psych ward where the psychiatrist there prescribed a different antipsychotic and took me off of the old one.) I essentially begged for it because I wanted something that would help me that wasn't Ativan. Ativan helped a lot, but I was so concerned about it being a benzo and getting addicted to it. I wanted it to help me sleep too. The antipsychotic was prescribed in the window of time where they thought it was MS. I hadn't gotten the positive antibody test result back yet.

I'm being a bit vague here in terms of why I wanted it. I don't mind going into more detail personally, but it gets extremely dark and extremely intense very fast. I don't know if that's something I want to publicize yet. As bad as my OP sounds, it was in fact way worse.

> And, another thing. Have you ever tried dissociative drugs(like ketamine, PCP, DXM), and if so, how similar would you say your experience was to those drug experiences? Of course, feel free to tell me to fuck off if you don't want to discuss that in a public forum.

I have not. The hardest drug I've ever done was a few puffs from a vape pen of marijuana about 6 years ago. Otherwise, before the encephalitis, I would say I was a moderate consumer of alcohol and tobacco (via cigars, not cigarettes). Once the encephalitis started (early March) I went cold turkey on both alcohol and tobacco and did not suffer any withdrawal effects AFAIK. (This was a question asked by many doctors, many times, repeatedly. I was always proud to give a consistent, "Zero alcohol since March N. Zero cigars sinces March N.")

Prior to that I had considered trying LSD some day. After this, not a fucking chance.

If not, maybe op can reframe and grab life by the horns.

Primary care doctors don’t want to gate the diagnosis so they’ll send the referral over and hope that the specialist will do the work of filtering out the likely and unlikely cases.

The everything-is-MCAS people on the internet use the fact that it can be negative at times in MCAS patients as a wedge to justify ignoring negative test results. In practice it’s not that hard to give someone a standing order for the test and have them get the blood draw when their symptoms flare.

I have seen my current PC doctor for 25 years now and he knows me well enough to spot significant changes. But he's retiring in a few months and I have no idea how to find a new doctor. My current doctor has no recommendations for me. (I'm not asking here for any if that's what this sounds like.)

Whats that supposed to mean? Most countries have private healthcare too. Sometimes it is as popular as public i.e. Australia 45% is private vs 55% in US.

Why would a doctor pay another service to order labs for them?

Sadly there are a lot of clinics popping up to serve the internet self-diagnosers, but not in the way you're talking about. They're built around a single enterprising doctor who either believes the disease is undetectable by normal tests, or who is aware that they're stringing patients along but likes the money. If someone opens a specialty clinic for an internet-popular disorder, they have a perpetual line of patients who will gladly pay for a doctor to tell them what they want to hear.

“Normal ranges” in lab values are just confidence intervals of population means which by definition that some normal people will have abnormal values and some patients with a disease will have normal values.

The same is true for imaging. For example we use size criteria a lot. There is nothing different about 4.1 cm adrenal nodules and 3.9 cm nodules to explain why the former gets surgery and the latter gets called benign other than pre-test probability and acceptable false positive and false negative rates, whether this is measured by a human or AI.

I can understand being hesitant about sharing the details of why you wanted the antipsychotics. It sounds like this is your first(hopefully last!) brush with psychotic/dissociative states of mind. Though I can't pretend to know what it was like for you, I can tell you I've been in similar situations. I've had several cases of acute psychosis caused by drugs(sometimes stimulants, sometimes synthetic cannabinoids) and/or sleep deprivation in the past. I also experimented heavily with all manner of psychedelic and hallucinogenic drugs in my early 20s, and I'm a severe hashish addict(currently 2.5 years in remission thanks to a moderation oriented treatment program I designed myself). It can be profoundly and existentially scary. You encounter parts of your psyche that you may never have met before, and reality breaks apart at the seams. You truly learn the extent to which your perceptions, thoughts, and even intentions are at the whims of implementation details in your brain. If you want, I could share some concrete anecdotes from my own experiences. But the main thing I want to say is give it time. These things must be processed, and it takes time, but it will get easier. And in time you will emerge with a better understanding of what it is to be human, and of yourself.

As to your comment on LSD, I support that. Sanity is taken for granted, until you temporarily lose it. If at some point you change your mind on exploring psychedelics, my advice would be to ditch LSD and go with psilocybin mushrooms instead, for a number of reasons.

Psychedelics very rarely cause actual psychosis, but LSD should have a higher risk than most, because unlike psilocin(the active compound in mushrooms, which psilocybin is converted into), LSD has non-trivial activity at dopamine receptors, and importantly the D2 receptors. LSD is in some sense the opposite to an antipsychotic in that it acts on the same receptors as antipsychotics, but with an opposite effect. Drugs that act as agonists on D2 receptors(usually Parkinsons meds) are well documented to cause psychosis in some people, as are stimulants like amphetamine which increase synaptic dopamine levels.

Psilocybin mushrooms are also pretty safe in that as long as you've identified the mushrooms correctly, you know what's in them. LSD on the other hand, more often than not is not actually the "original" LSD these days, but some LSD analogue. Usually it'll be something very similar in structure and effect to LSD, but it'll still be poorly studied compared to LSD. There are also drugs which are substantially different from LSD being sold on blotter paper as LSD, and some of these can be quite toxic(25i-nbome), extremely long lasting(DOB, DOM), or both(bromo-dragonfly).

Psilocybin is also free of course, since it's bound to be growing someplace near you in vast amounts, though the specific species depends on where you live.

And finally, it's much easier to take psilocybin in small doses. I always recommend people do this when trying psychedelics for the first time. Try a sub-threshold dose first, just enough to feel a little "weird". See how it feels, decide whether to do more next time, or stop, etc. It's possible to this with LSD, but it's much trickier, because LSD usually comes on this tiny little blotter paper. You can cut it up into smaller pieces, but there's no guarantee the drug is evenly distributed across the paper, and it's also impossible to be completely sure how much drug is on the blotter in the first place, unless you made them yourself. Mushrooms on the other hand are usually measured in grams; much easier.

But yeah, I'm not recommending you do psychedelics. Especially not any time soon, while you're still healing. It's always good to have a stable baseline before you go stirring the pot, so to speak.

At the hospital, I saw a gastroenterologist who specialized in Celiac, because I had just been diagnosed with Celiac a year earlier and many of my symptoms seemed related to digestion. He absolutely should have done diabetes tests. On the last day of the 2 weeks I was there, he said "It could be type 1 diabetes... some people get that too" but didn't order any tests. When I was diagnosed at the ER another year later, my glucose was 650 (very high) and had been averaging 300 (it should be ~85). So yeah, the doctors were negligent, in my assessment.

If humans have different normal ranges, then the tests will be specific to the individual, based on their health history, DNA, tissue simulation in digital environment, etc. If adrenal nodules of similar diameter behave differently, then the tests will inspect more than just diameter.

The data to make the correct diagnosis is out there, we just don't have the tools or processing power to use it yet.

Thankfully it was only ever a passing curiosity for me. A bucket list kind of thing. I am now very happy to replace with many other amazing experiences I hope to have. :-)

it's an attempt to starve funding from the public system. (Howard was responsible for destroying the first universal healthcare system in australia before the later second attempt)

The private hospitals specialise in elective uncomplicated day ops because the returns from the medicare payment are better than complicated cases that get the same fixed payment. It's also why they transfer anything slightly complicated into public hospitals.

DNA is increasingly used in oncology, but is difficult to interpret elsewhere and in many tumors is not insightful.

> The data to make the correct diagnosis is out there, we just don't have the tools or processing power to use it yet.

Maybe, but we don’t know what or how to measure it.

> If adrenal nodules of similar diameter behave differently, then the tests will inspect more than just diameter.

Everything investigated so far such as: biopsies with histology, MR spectroscopy and measuring the diffusivity of water molecules has not been reliable in differentiating benign or malignant nodules so we still use size. These are nontrivial problems. There are technical limitations to our measuring tools.

I believe these are very difficult but not impossible problems. There are technical limitations to our measuring tools, but I am optimistic that future medical advancements (maybe far in the future) will provide ways of measuring and diagnosing that may seem like science fiction today.

I am not attempting to trivialize the work that medical professionals do, or fault doctors for being fallible. I am attempting to encourage the development of medical technology to cut down on what I perceive to be a high rate of misdiagnosis (10-15%).

But in modern times it's persisting much longer such that in our twenties there are still about 6% more males than females. Consequently, and in terms of actual coupling, this now means that even if every single female was actively seeking a partner, about 6% of men would end up alone. Homosexuality and other features may change the ratios somewhat, but it's probably again a fairly reasonable ballpark.

[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/sex-ratio-by-age