Developments in Medicine discussion

I thought I'd make a thread to discuss recent medicine developments, please post any developments that you are interested in!!

I'll start with the development of new HIV treatments that can remove the viral gene from human DNA, decreasing the number of HIV/AIDS deaths significantly

I don't think you can claim a significant decrease in mortality rate from a treatment modality that is still experimental and hasn't been tested en masse!

That is true, I read an article though that said there has been an 88% decrease in HIV/AIDS related deaths in the USA since the recent research? Not sure how accurate this is though

Which article?

If you can talk in detail about how CRISPR/Cas9 editing might work for 'curing' HIV, that's certainly impressive, but from what I understand, it hasn't progressed beyond clinical trials.

Head Transplants by Dr. Frankenstein AKA an Italian neurosurgeon in China

jokes aside, I understand how controversial this topic is (I'm sure many would scoff at this in the comments) but nonetheless you have to admit something like this has massive potential
I've been following this for over a year now and personally have opinions on both sides of it
On the one hand 'Yaay' go cool science
On the other hand 'What is this guy, nuts?'

So basically I got the impression that it'll primarily be used to help millions of quadriplegics IF successful
There hasn't been much success in animal trials (pretty much no animal survived more than a year I believe) and this guy is planning on doing the first one on humans next month (unless the date has changed)
and even aside from the ethical dilemmas (which I'm not even going to touch) and I'm also going to leave the science for a second- How in the hell are they going to find a body, and if they do how will they just have a team of 120+ surgeons readily available, how is that even practical -but let's say they figured it all out- then what about the science there is very little success in the experiments on animals carried out- The main boundary appears to be getting the neurons in the spine to successfully join- Now this is the major barrier- Reattachments of one's own limbs is plausible but we're talking about attachment of A HEAD onto ANOTHER body- The drugs needed to suppress the immune response could practically kill the guy and then there is no guarantee that even if they somehow made neurons regenerate and bridge that gap that they would even attach properly

Also the argument could be made that humans are quite unlike mice (like 80% of mice trials are inapplicable to humans) and the procedure or consequences might be quite different in humans and that we won't know until we try, but how is such a procedure going to be justified in terms of cost (it's about 11 million euros or something- That money could be used to fund more promising alternatives (such as using organic fibers to aid neuron regeneration in spinal cord over site of injury or stem cells, etc.)

Overall it is quite theoretical as yet, but something like this does raise some interesting questions


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