Protocol M

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But who is the real you? Plastic Alter Ego is a collection of songs about the people who don't quite fit in to the "normal" world, either through choice or circumstance. They move through a world parallel to our own, either together or alone. Some are lost, some are found, and all have a bigger story to tell - if only we would listen.

The MEND™ protocol for Alzheimer's disease: Functional medicine on steroids? | ScienceBlogs

This album was written and recorded in various locations around the world, wherever I could find the space and the time. The majority was recorded at home, with some songs written in the loft, some halfway up the stairs, and some on a chest of drawers in the bedroom. Others came from rehearsal studios in London and Swindon, and some of the darker songs were started during holidays in the sun. Magic Mile is a real place in Brisbane The Magic Mile of Motors , although the kids in the song are entirely fictional.

The music was written 5 minutes walk from this location. End of the Line was written in Cyprus, in the blazing sun, beside a swimming pool. Final mastering of the album was the only truly professional stage of the process. All tracks written, performed and produced by Colin May.

Purchasable with gift card. Plastic Alter Ego Gunshots and Violins Dressed to Kill The Cat's Mother Still Life and Moving Pictures Over the Counter Culture On what rationale was that intervention based? I have the same questions regarding fasting and the vitamins. Basically, reading the relatively vague description of the MEND protocol provided here, I see nothing that requires all that fancy systems biology and those computer algorithms touted by Muses Labs. Another failing of this writeup should be obvious to anyone who routinely reads and especially to anyone who participates in clinical trials.

What were the objective outcomes? Even in a case series, there are usually some objective outcomes examined. For example, did they do various tests of cognitive function before and after, in order to determine if there was any objective improvement.

How was the diagnosis of cognitive decline nailed down. This case series really needs some meat on its bones before it will persuade me that there might be anything to this protocol. As it is, it sounds like one of any number of studies and case series published in CAM journals: Long on description, short on concrete reporting and controls. As a pilot study, this sounds on its surface mildly promising, although it is really hard to tell given the lack of description of anything resembling something a clinical scientist would want to know to judge if further study is needed.

Another disturbing thing about this paper is that there is no mention of institutional review board approval, making me wonder if this was IRB-approved. Maybe this protocol is worthy of further study. Whatever the case, however, I can be convinced, but not by this thin gruel. Oh, and try not to fetishize computer algorithms and systems biology so much. What is "pre-symptomatic cognitive decline? One, I don't think "data driven" means what they think it means.

How do they get any kind of statistical power to determine whether the methodology works better than a control or placebo? I'll grant that it makes it impossible to disprove their hypothesis, but in medicine the burden of proof is or should be on the researcher s investigating a prospective new treatment.

Pre-symptomatic cognitive decline could be detected by neuropsych testing, I guess. As long as the person does not complain of memory problems, they have no symptoms, by definition. Perhaps what they meant to say is "mild cognitive impairment," which is worse than normal age memory loss, but not full blown dementia. It is all part of a spectrum. Well, the case study mentioned, the patient begins this protocol at age 67 and doesn't follow all the dictates in the program.

So if the patient doesn't comply with the full program, how can we evaluate it? But what I don't see is, how did the patient's course compare to the course of similar patients with Alzheimers? Yeah, she reported some cognative improvements over a couple of months but how do we know that's not the placebo effect?

Alzheimers develops over a long period of time; where will she be in three more years and where is she now? Oh man that guy!! He really came across more as a snake oil salesman than a scientist with his mysterious step protocol or whatever it was. Orac, this post is - in my humble opinion - wanting in its level of insolence. The whole thing seems to be a word salad. How does one determine if synaptic reconstruction and maintenance is needed? How does one then reconstruct a synapse? And how might biological mechanisms be administered? How does yoga block prionic tau amplification - or is it the veggies that do that?

Maybe yoga is more involved in inhibiting beta-amyloid oligomerization? And this is being made available to real patients on the basis of 10 case studies which don't even include objective tests of cognitive function. It's late, I'm tired and maybe I have my cranky pants on, but "the MEND protocol might not be quackademic medicine, but how it's being sold sure feels like it" seems too polite.

I'm not a neurologist or expert on Alzheimer's, and, unlike the case with vaccines, I haven't studied the issue to be as confident discussing it as I am discussing vaccines. So I toned it down a bit, in case I was in error about anything. Remember, a man's got to know his limitations:. I also didn't know that Bredesen was so full of woo, but I should have suspected it and spent some time Googling his name and reading some of his stuff.

Another thing I had wanted to look into was the journal, but it had an impact factor of over 6, which makes it seem unlikely to be a truly woo journal. Actually, the head honcho's woo is remarkably similar with a few differences: About the 'pre-symptomatic decline': He gets people to label normal everyday forgetting I studied this stuff- believe it or not as precursors to dementia.

He usually tells and re-tells a story about a wealthy friend who didn't follow his advice and who keeps asking the same questions over and over; in addition, he has a testimony from a supposed professor of art history who has 'advanced AD' and whom he 'cured'. Unfortunately as well, my friend just had to fly to Ireland because her sister, not at all aged, developed AD - seemingly mild- but died of pneumonia within 6 months. Dan Olmsted has responded to me at the most appropriately named, " A particularly odious antivaccine 'warrior' He doesn't like experts it seems.

OT but it's Friday and getting later all the time, there are more than 10 comments and I have to leave soon because of an appointment I would guess NOT. There will be a follow-up about pesticides. I can hardly wait. No mention is made in the paper of any ethical review.

What's worse, cognitively impaired individuals are considered vulnerable populations. How on Earth do you do that without installing profound dyslipidemia? Heck, I've never seen a researcher actually knowing what was in that polymorphism that did not prevent metabolic function but created the early-AD phenotype. Bredesen has a new paper out. There's a link for it in this article. He's saying that he now has brain scans to 'prove' his protocol works. I haven't looked at the paper yet. I'm not sure I will - because it doesn't matter.

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His experiments have no controls as far as I can tell. It's incredibly bad science. I find it difficult to believe that without a UCLA credential, Bredesen would have been able to publish this mess in anything other than a pay-to-play journal. But I'm a chemist and not all that familiar with the way medical publishing works - I could very well be wrong. To me, this protocol is no different than what naturopaths do - throw supplements and diets at a problem willy nilly and take credit when the patient gets 'better. The press release is yesterday, and I might have seen it.

But unfortunately I didn't. I would not call this a trial. Of the 10 subjects, each got a different set of putative therapies. The therapies sound like something you'd get at Whole Foods: At best, I'd call this a study, and not one that should be taken very seriously. It's based on a dubious notion -- that monotherapies have failed, so we should try a whole bunch of therapies at once.

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There's no control group, the researcher seems to have evaluated the subjects' responses to treatment qualitatively in 7 cases, and the conclusions go far beyond any reasonable interpretation of these meager results. Isn't this software considered a medical device? Medical devices are regulated by the FDA, so if this is a medical device there should be a filing for it. The idea isn't completely out of left field. There is a general consensus that most mathematicians do their best work before the age of Einstein, for example, was 26 when he published the paper for which he was later awarded the Nobel Prize, but went down a number of blind alleys e.

It's also well known that adults find it much harder than children to learn another language, though this is more of a a steady decline in that ability e. Of course, as is usual with woo that has a small element of truth to it, it is likely that this guy takes it much too far. I haven't yet read the whole paper in depth, but did look over patient 1. During his 10 months on the MEND protocol, he interrupted his otherwise good compliance once, and this was associated with an episode of memory loss, in which he failed to remember that he had left his car in the driveway while he was working in his house.

Bredesen explains that the episode of memory loss is because Pt 1 stopped the protocol. It is equally possible that Pt 1 stopped the protocol due to AD. IIRC, AD has alternating episodes of memory loss and lucidity, with poor cognitive function becoming an increasingly frequent event.

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With no controls, and no methods described, the paper is useless with regard to drawing any conclusions on efficacy. I think this, however, is a case of you throwing the baby out with bathwater. I don't see any connection of Dale Bredesen, or any of his co-authors, to Muses Labs at all…. Bredesen is very reputable researcher, who beyond doing these case studies finds time to publish many other pretty interesting papers, like this one about APOE: Also, Mark Thorson, in the comments you claim that "it's based on a dubious notion — that monotherapies have failed, so we should try a whole bunch of therapies at once.

I actually believe combination therapies are incredibly underexplored… There are obvious reasons why they are underfunded in industry, such as IP issues, and an inability to quickly obtain data necessary for approvals. They can also be challenging to execute, especially with protocols as ambitious as this one. But even very senior execs in industry believe they could hold a lot of promise.

Linus Pauling, Brian Josephson, and Sallie Baliunas[1] to name three examples off the top of my head were once well-respected researchers, too. That was before they involved themselves in various pseudoscientific pursuits: Vitamin C as cure-all, extreme racism, and climate science denialism, respectively. I have no idea whether Bredesen published good science in his younger days--I'm not qualified to evaluate it myself. But he's clearly gotten into some disreputable stuff lately. If he really had anything promising, he would be working toward setting up a full clinical trial with enough patients enrolled to have some statistical power for determining whether the protocol s is are more effective than placebos.

And he would make sure that he had IRB approval for this clinical trial. He wouldn't be mucking about with case studies that don't have IRB approval. He should know better, else he would not have obtained or kept a position at a reputable school like UCLA.

Plastic Alter Ego

Her research focus was on solar physics. This was before she started collaborating with Willie Soon to produce a series of easily refuted papers on the Sun's influence on the Earth's climate. I won't comment on the rest of your comment as I want to read the paper first, but I am wondering if you actually looked to see if there was a connection between Dale Bredesen and Muses Labs, because it took me less than a minute to find this page, which clearly indicates his extremely strong connection to Muses Labs: It seems he stepped down in , but that was after this paper was released http: One notes that in the original study solo-authored by Bredesen, which Orac linked to, he declares he has no competing interests.

However, the MEND Protocol was developed by him and Muses Labs, so he conceivably stood to make money if the research supported his claims. A quick scan of the paper found no mention of Muses Labs or Dr. Bredesen's connection to it. Todd W, After writing my comment I thought to check, which I should have done earlier, and noticed the same. Looking at the journal's CoI statement, it seems like his connection to Muses Labs should have been made clear. Financial relationships such as employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony as well as personal relationships and academic competition must be declared.

The authors declare conflicts of interests and sources of financial support as acknowledgment. Wouldn't getting the recommended amount of sleep generally help your cognition? Patient 1 went from hours of sleep to And I know my dentist is in love with electric toothbrushes and water picks , but even he wouldn't try to claim it will prevent dementia.

How would that even work? Travis 26 I did look, but only at their website, so many thanks for showing that he may have been involved at one point, but that he terminated his relationship with them.

Beyond that, the press release writes that he "severed all professional and scientific relations with Muses, including all professional and scientific relations with Muses, including consulting, trial participant review, and any interpretation of Muses information. The press release goes on to describe him setting up his own company, MPI Cognition. Bredesen is listed as the sole author on the paper. So even though he may have a title, it could still be somewhat debatable as to whether or not he really needs to list them.

More on it is here: Orac 10 - point taken. I don't want to derail this thread by mentioning it And it seems you're damned if you do and damned if you don't - I complaint that you're too reserved, someone else complains that you're throwing the baby out with the bath water. The word 'smug' was thrown around a bit, not by me, and I am pretty sure that I did not manage to influence a single opinion. Gah, it's now number 3, so I guess that was right at some point.

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BUT I think that the hoary old woo-meister is talking more about the hotness factor or suchlike for women. For the past two and a half months I've been suffering with a relatively minor but irksome injury- originally, I hurt myself whilst reading a menu in Portuguese when my sandal caught upon a broken paving stone during the financial crisis a few days after a flu vaccine. So armed with cash and a cavalier attitude, I embarked on a suburban journey to the offices of a Dr Hsu not her real name who has been doing this for 35 years in both a city and suburban locale- posh and semi-posh, respectively.

I filled out a long laundry list of possible complaints I actually have very few and met the practitioner who was abrupt but cautiously friendly. I was told my tongue betrayed my 'low energy' and that I might need supplements which weren't mentioned later at all surprisingly. She started to press upon various points around my jaw and ears as well as down my leg where the problem was: She carefully applied the disposable needles, unwrapping each one. A few of the spots seemed quite sensitive but one near my knee felt really differently as she pressed and poked at it doggedly for a while.

She placed more than a dozen mini glass fish bowl-like cups down my side and leg - some of which were rather discomforting and left marks fortunately, not the ones on my thigh which can be easily seen. I suppose it extracted the stagnant Qi or Evil as each one popped when she removed it. All in all, I do feel better but first of all 2 weeks have past, I continued taking meds, doing exercises and drinking wine. I must admit that she did something when she pressed and fixated upon that one particular point near my knee on the first visit.

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