English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Mitch

01:25

@CowperKettle I've seen more than one (maybe that's two?) Article(s) about ... let's say... sobriety (no pun) about ensuring rigor in studies involving psychedelics

Because presumably it's very ... frothy all the talk about using psychedelics to cure everything mental

@CowperKettle Ein Teppichfresser isst es nicht

Wait.. no... that -is- the definition?

M.A.R.

02:08

@CowperKettle eh? This fanboy attitude is unhelpful. Valium is much better than barbiturates. Prozac, in the relevant indications, is much better than Valium.

@Mitch yeah it's horseshit. And sometimes bullshit.

Your typical psychedelic adds two mental diseases, if it ever cures one. Not to mention the horrible things they do to your body and your pocket.

It doesn't need some deep pharmacological insight. Just google what the proposed curative psychedelics do to people. Can you even tell they've been cured of something? I can't.

Oh, a historian. That makes sense.

Mitch

@M.A.R. I hear melatonin is awesome too

M.A.R.

02:23

@Mitch it's not very effective if the sleep disruption is more complicated than something like simple jet lag.

Mitch

@M.A.R. do you think it's total bollocks? I can imagine that in small non-hallucinatory doses it might help?

M.A.R.

When it comes to sleep, sleep hygiene I believe is far, far more important than any therapy. If a guy gets into a heated online debate at midnight, of course they're not gonna sleep.

@Mitch it is. It is discarding the entire field of medicinal chemistry, the entire development process of a drug.

You almost always have some natural or synthetc compound that needs to be optimized.

Mitch

Ok how about this... can you imagine any kind of therapeutic reason for a ...

Wow everything has their unintended consequences

M.A.R.

A useful MDMA will have to stop people from bashing their heads on objects and dying. You take that away, it will not be MDMA, it will be just another 'boring' Prozac v2

Mitch

I'm having trouble narrowing it down

M.A.R.

02:26

I read like half of the article

Mitch

Therapeutic ... hallucinogen?

M.A.R.

There's a valid point somewhere about educating people about psychedelics. My impression is many Americans do think marijuana is curative for this and that purpose, and that view needs to be corrected.

@Mitch exactly. An oxymoron.

But all the article does is ranting about this and that CEO saying this and that crazy thing, and that looking for the ideal antidepressant is actually a search for soma so we become slaves to said CEOs.

Mitch

@M.A.R. THC is good for chronic pain isn't it?

M.A.R.

Which is pretty cynical and unfair. It sounds like it would come from someone who's busy thinking up conspiracy theories in the comfort of their chair at home.

It's like saying we want to cure all types of cancer so we can push the retirement age and work people to death.

Mitch

(CBD has as much effect as phenylephrine haha)

THC is good for ... Inducing hunger?

Just for all the kids who are listening, smoking is bad for you.

M.A.R.

02:32

@Mitch it's complicated. This is roughly the same issue with, say, herbal extracts.

Mitch

THC in moderation, but please only edibles

@M.A.R. drugs had to come from somewhere. Why not herbs?

Tree bark is so bitter

M.A.R.

The gist of it is, you need rigorous studies so as to make a consistent, standardized drug dosage form (e.g. a pill) to ensure that it works the same for most people, does the same things, and has the same side effects.

These rigorous studies don't exist for plants, and they don't for THC either.

Mitch

I see 'borrage tea's in old people's houses... I do -not- want to know what it's for.

M.A.R.

So what happens instead is that a pharmacological study, at best on rats, finds out that THC purportedly works on some receptor, and that work is stopping pain signals from going to the brain.

Mitch

An hour ago when I was googling for references for @CowperKettle for 'psychedelics studies concerns' I got a lot of hits for 'wanna participate in our study for psychedelics?'

M.A.R.

02:37

This is actually even more evidence than many herbal supplements of course. For most of them, it's one enzyme in a test tube that reacts with the plant's extract. No rats, and no pharmacological mechanisms.

Mitch

Like it was aimed a little too well

M.A.R.

@Mitch big brother's been watching

Mitch

Oh, at me? Haha I hope not.

I don't think I've ever even had a THC gummy.

M.A.R.

So, as I was saying, this is enough evidence for people that want to believe something is effective. Those people includes the people that want to make it into a product and sell it, some all-natural-no-GMO hippies, and people that really like THC.

Mitch

I want the truth that -I- want man, not the one you're giving me!

M.A.R.

02:41

But for the scientists, it's definitely not enough. Most importantly, the drug hasn't been tested on people, and its effects haven't been documented, so you lack many crucial bits of info: Side effects, effective dose, lethal dose, environmental impact, impurities etc etc.

Mitch

Polish of the day: Pledge lemon-scented wood cleaner

M.A.R.

So, the biggest problem with some Californian purchasing "medical THC" is that the product is not standard: What if there's some hepatotoxic impurity in it? How much should you take it? How exactly do you ensure that the drug gets where it's supposed to go, as opposed to depositing somewhere useless where it's not absorbed by the body?

Mitch

@M.A.R. the difficulty with psychological effects is that the response is all self report (or not a classically objective measure like a blood test)

M.A.R.

After all, why don't they formulate those sprays in asthma as some bulk powder?

Mitch

And not that subjective is wrong or does not have a strong effect but that people aren't good at communicating

M.A.R.

02:45

@Mitch see, I'm saying the problem is much deeper than possible pitfalls in interpreting data: There is no reliable data!

Mitch

@M.A.R. so you need more and better studies

M.A.R.

So, I have to add that THC's medical effects are unproven. As I said, saying it blocks some pain-related receptor, while true, is not enough evidence for therapeutic efficacy.

> Chronic pain
— Chronic pain is the most well-researched indication for the use of medical cannabis [1,28,29] and the most common condition for which patients are certified for medical cannabis [30,31]. While many studies exist examining the utility of medical cannabis for the management of chronic pain, most of them are low or moderate quality due to small sample size, short follow-up periods, and nonblinded or unrandomized study design [28,29]. Further, no studies utilize a standardized dose or route of administration, and the chronic pain populations studied vary by etiology of pain. Th…

Fro UpToDate. May the gods of copyright forgive me.

> Chemotherapy-induced nausea
— Synthetic THC (dronabinol, nabilone) is US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved for the management of chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting and has been used for this purpose for decades. This is discussed in detail elsewhere. (See "Management of poorly controlled or breakthrough chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting in adults", section on 'Cannabinoids and medical marijuana'.)

Seizure disorders
— Cannabidiol (CBD) was approved by the FDA to treat rare forms of childhood epilepsy such as Dravet syndrome and Lennox-Gastaut syndrome. This is discu…

alphabet

I mean, THC "works" in that, if you're high, you care less about whatever pain you're in.

M.A.R.

@alphabet if you're in severe pain, I'm told it's not much of a high either.

alphabet

Pure THC is actually an FDA-approved drug. Cannabis is not.

Not for pain relief, though. It's "approved by the FDA as safe and effective for HIV/AIDS-induced anorexia and chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting only."

M.A.R.

02:53

Yes. Legalizing it is preposterous.

It's like legalizing dissolving T. brevifolia's bark and injecting it into a cancer patient.

alphabet

I do think that the people who advocate legalizing marijuana for medical purposes almost universally want it legalized for all uses; medical marijuana is seen as a stepping stone to complete legalization for recreational use, rather than an ultimate goal. So I find the advocacy around medical marijuana laws somewhat disingenuous, particularly because they circumvent the usual procedures for approving medical treatments.

And because there's already an FDA-approved version of THC, which doctors can prescribe like any other medication.

@M.A.R. But if, in the debate, you're right and knowledgeable but the other person is wrong and dumb, and it's very important that you demonstrate this, then pursuing the debate is still worth it, right? I mean, from a medical perspective.

CowperKettle

03:11

I don't understand why no large-scale replication studies have been launched into the findings reported by Lisa Pan et al., indicating that 10% of depressives who are resistant to every conventional drug/ECT can be helped by repurposing existing drugs. It's like 1 to several million people across the globe which could be helped, if this is true.

At the same time, so much publicity is given to psychedelics, but again, the trials are small-sized.

I mean this study by Lisa Pan et al.

alphabet

Looks like it wasn't placebo-controlled. I'm skeptical.

> Sixteen were provided treatment with folinic acid 1–2 mg/kg

Am I reading that right? That seems like an absurd amount of folate, probably at least 45 grams for a drug usually given in micrograms.

CowperKettle

@alphabet They should have divided those 16 into 2 groups?

@alphabet It's the exact amount given to children with genetic defects of FOLR1

alphabet

@CowperKettle Really, they should have recruited more than 16 people, so that they would have enough to do a proper randomized trial.

CowperKettle

03:26

@alphabet They did not recruit 16 people. They discovered them from a sample of 140 people. To find more, they would need to find.. maybe a 1000 people with severe treatment-resistant depression and with a history of suicide attempts. That would be a very expensive study.

They are trying to stratify the so-called "depression" into real diseases.

alphabet

@CowperKettle Yes, but it would be a study that actually produced reliable results. The fact that they didn't have funds to conduct a proper study doesn't make their results somehow more reliable.

CowperKettle

You make what you can with the funds that you have.

alphabet

But you still can't trust the results if you don't have funds to conduct a good study.

CowperKettle

If this was not a generically available folinic acid, but some fancy newly-licensed antidepressant, a pharma company would surely shell out millions on a large study. To gain profits later.

alphabet

Hah! Nope. Pharma would come out with a new Way Better Version Of Folate and sell it at $1000 a pill.

Regardless, even if the reason we don't have high-quality studies is that pharma won't fund them, we still don't have high-quality studies, so we still can't establish this treatment's efficacy.

CowperKettle

03:56

5-MTHF is the only thing that is somewhat helpful for my "depression" thus far (when added to an SSR(N)I), so I personally believe there is something in it.

M.A.R.

04:30

@alphabet health must never get in the way of being right

@CowperKettle how do you know they haven't? That study is only 2022. I dunno if it's valid or not, but if it's interesting, they could be trying it in a clinical trial right now whose results will publish at 2030 or something.

@alphabet no, a 70 kilo adult will get 140 mg of folinate, max.

alphabet

@M.A.R. Ack sorry I said grams when I meant milligrams. Still, 140mg is a lot, since usually supplements give you 800 micrograms.

M.A.R.

Note that folinate is the "active" form of folate. Folate in the body needs to be converted to folinate to exert its action in purine synthesis.

@alphabet a therapeutic dose for a disease might be much higher than the recommended daily allowance (RDA) of a compound, which for folate is 400 micrograms.

High doses are pretty harmless unless you're like Cowp and develop an allergy

Usually not several magnitudes, though, I grant

As I said I dunno how 'legit' the study is. I don't share Cowp's obsession with purine synthesis cofactors

alphabet

@M.A.R. Yeah, that's what makes me skeptical.

M.A.R.

There is an AFAIK unproven claim that high doses might be carcinogenic. You're giving cells ample resources for division after all

But it's much harder to accept the reverse, that folate deficiency is protective against cancer.

alphabet

With a lot of vitamins (as I recall) there are homeostatic systems regulating the level in your blood, so increasing the dose past a certain threshold shouldn't do anything, regardless of whether your body is using it normally (I think)

The research around the relationship between folate metabolism and depression is...complicated. I tried L-methylfolate with no success, but then again I probably didn't actually have normal MDD.

M.A.R.

04:41

@alphabet that's not entirely true. With higher doses, effects that were previously insignificant become important, hence why most vitamins show hormesis.

For example, very high levels of the safest vitamin of all, vitamin C, cause the excess vitamin to turn into oxalate, increasing the likelihood of kidney stones

alphabet

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7281966

> Milk can have a significant iodine concentration. Dairy products provide 49% of total estimated daily iodine intake from food in the U.S., making milk one of the most common food sources of iodine.

One of the many health benefits of a high-milk diets.

*diet.

I'm making typos. Clearly my cognition is impaired due to insufficient milk intake.

CowperKettle

05:02

@M.A.R. I hope so. But if indeed these measures (folinic, BH4) turn out to be helpful in a study published in 2030, I can imagine how many treatment-resistant depressives will have died by that moment.

I've been feeling half-dead for 2 days even with an added 400 mcg 5-MTHF. Maybe from polydypsia, but who can know.

I'll try to limit myself to 2 liters of liquid a day.

alphabet

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3921300

> These data support the hypothesis that dietary intake of dairy protein may be beneficial as an adjunct behavioral therapy to enhance the glycemic and food intake suppressive effects of GLP-1-based pharmacotherapies.

CowperKettle

I mean I've been sleeping almost non-stop from late Sunday to this morning.

alphabet

It appears the milk diet has a synergistic effect with Ozempic.

CowperKettle

Yay!

Maybe I'm overdozing on caffeine, and this exacerbates my bouts of weakness, when I cannot do anything for days.

I should go cold turkey on caffeine.

alphabet

You may just need a different antidepressant of some sort.

CowperKettle

08:50

Genetics of the day: hypomorph -- mutation that causes a partial loss of gene function.

@alphabet Or maybe it's some somatic illness..

CycloRotor | Start Outdoor Flying

►

A cyclogyro, I never heard of this principle.

Proposed in the early 1900s, realized only in the 2000s.

jlliagre

12:23

Lawn mowers

MetaEd

13:20

Wordle 843 2/6

🟩🟨🟩⬛⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

jlliagre

Wordle 843 4/6

⬜⬜🟨🟨⬜
⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜
🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Robusto

#Worldle #627 1/6 (100%)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🎉
⭐⭐⭐🏙️
https://worldle.teuteuf.fr

🌎 Oct 10, 2023 🌍
🔥 56 | Avg. Guesses: 4.28
⬜🟥🟩 = 3

globle-game.com
#globle

user 726941

13:42

(removed)

Robusto

Wordle 843 4/6

🟨⬛🟨⬛⬛
🟩⬛⬛⬛⬛
🟩🟨🟩🟩🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Daily Quordle 624
7️⃣9️⃣
8️⃣6️⃣
m-w.com/games/quordle/

Robusto

14:01

Daily Octordle #624
3️⃣6️⃣
5️⃣🕛
7️⃣🔟
🕐8️⃣
Score: 64

user 726941

after finding out that the last time we beat the packers was 1987 i'm seriously thinking about giving up on them

36 years ago

Robusto

Daily Sequence Octordle #624
4️⃣6️⃣
7️⃣9️⃣
🔟🕚
🕛🕐
Score: 72

@user726941 Not the same team, not even the same city.

user 726941

yeah, i looked up the stats

goodguy5

I need help forming a question before I post it - just kinda clunky getting my thoughts out

what is the name for false lyrics - lyrics bait and switch.

example: "In Summer" from Olaf in Frozen

Da da, da doo, a bubba bubba boo
The hot and the cold are both so intense
Put them together ? it just makes sense!

Rata ta ta dada dada da doo
Winter's a good time to stay in and cuddle
But put me in summer and I'll be a ? happy snowman!

Obviously, the "joke" is that the word is "puddle"

what is this effect called

user 726941

ear worm?

goodguy5

14:12

no, that's a song that gets stuck on you

specifically the quality of messing with lyrics expectations

though, I think typing this out has gotten me to where I need for the question

Laurel

14

Q: Is there a term for this word play where a song intentionally avoids completing a rhyme?

Take this for example: In this video, at 1:04 to 1:10, the person goes on rapping with a rhyming word at the end of each line, but he pauses before the end of the last word and, being humans, we predict the next word (due to the hint from the rhyme) that he is going to say but he avoids it inten...

It's called a duplicate :p

user 726941

LoL

goodguy5

That effect is heavily related, but I'm not certain it's the same

Robusto

@Laurel In music it's called a deceptive cadence.

user 726941

The hook on an ear worm is the grabbing of your attention

Robusto

14:15

Cadence

In Western musical theory, a cadence (Latin cadentia, "a falling") is the end of a phrase in which the melody or harmony creates a sense of full or partial resolution, especially in music of the 16th century onwards. A harmonic cadence is a progression of two or more chords that concludes a phrase, section, or piece of music. A rhythmic cadence is a characteristic rhythmic pattern that indicates the end of a phrase. A cadence can be labeled "weak" or "strong" depending on the impression of finality it gives. While cadences are usually classified by specific chord or melodic progressions, the use...

> "A cadence is called 'interrupted', 'deceptive' or 'false' where the penultimate, dominant chord is not followed by the expected tonic, but by another one, often the submediant."[21] This is the most important irregular resolution,[22] most commonly V7–vi (or V7–♭VI) in major or V7–VI in minor.[22][23] This is considered a weak cadence because of the "hanging" (suspended) feeling it invokes.

goodguy5

@Robusto :O

user 726941

in this case they are tricking the listener's attention

goodguy5

lemme check that link - just a minute

goodguy5

14:45

and a difference between stacks - why are answers in comments so accepted here?

Mitch

15:06

@goodguy5 Because for some questions it is so easy and people don't want to bother doing the research to confirm. "What is a word for a common pet with four legs and barks?" "A dog".

Lots of questions can be quickly answered by a sentence or less. And so people do it.

But also sometimes people legitimately answer in comments because they expect the question to be closed and don't want the OP to go away mad. And sometimes an answer is given in a comment really as a question for clarification "Are you looking for something like 'dog'? It's unclear."

Laurel

16:01

@goodguy5 I think it's more that RPG SE is the exception since its strict comment policy has a lot of community support (and also mod support). Plus, by the time those comments are flagged there are usually several answers already.

I think that ELU is more average wrt to this, though another moderator here is vehemently anti-answers-in-comments. I personally have a hard time deleting them myself, even when they're flagged

goodguy5

@Laurel oh hey This is your answer that answers my question. I would accept or am happy to mark mine as a duplicate

2

A: What are the names (/terms) for an anticipated-but-missing rhyme?

It's a mind rhyme. From Wikipedia: the suggestion of a rhyme which is left unsaid and must be inferred by the listener. Wikipedia gives this example: There was a young farmer who took a young miss to the back of the barn where he gave her a lecture

Laurel

16:34

@goodguy5 Uh, yeah I forgot about that lol

goodguy5

16:57

does this community prefer to have dupes be the older question, or the question with an answer?

like, an accepted answer

M.A.R.

17:57

@CowperKettle it's best to do it once but properly. Haphazard trials with unreliable outcomes are a dime a dozen

@goodguy5 that has always been decided on a case-by-case basis, no matter how many rules SE sites have proposed and tried to enforce. The difference between individual SE sites is how easily searchable the dupes are, and as far as I've seen ELL and ELU have some of the messiest, most unsearchable dupe targets

@alphabet I mean of course. You drink a bit of milk and you already feel full. I think it has something to do with the texture, but I haven't read anything on it

@goodguy5 I don't think comment-answers are a problem unique to ELU, and it's always been a matter of whether their scale is manageable and moderate-able.

@goodguy5 maybe just 'misdirection'?

@Laurel oh, I guessed right. Where's my repz

@jlliagre no that's Eddie Murphy

jlliagre

20:29

@M.A.R. I'm afraid the vocabulary of that jackass doesn't go beyond Hi-han.

MetaEd

20:57

Jan 9, 2018 at 15:29, by MetaEd

Aug 7 '13 at 23:09, by MετάEd

Nov 6 '12 at 22:50, by MετάEd

May 23 at 14:41, by MetaEd

... and: "There once was a man from Verdun."

user 726941

(Whose limericks would end on line one)

Mitch

@MetaEd ...dont les limériques finissent à ligne un?

@user726941 jinx?

MetaEd

@Mitch that's the homme

user 726941

@Mitch snooze you lose

Mitch

I mean he's from Verdun so

@user726941 I blame my phone's accent chooser UI

user 726941

21:09

There was a young man from Peru Whose limericks stopped at line two

MetaEd

Jan 9, 2018 at 15:30, by MetaEd

Aug 7 '13 at 23:09, by MετάEd

Nov 6 '12 at 22:50, by MετάEd

Jul 19 at 22:09, by MetaEd

And have you heard the one about Emperor Nero?

jlliagre

Il était un jeune homme de Montreux
qui des vers ne pouvait faire que deux.

user 726941

There was a Roman emperor who never aged after he turned 19. ... His name was Constant Teen.

3

Nov 6, 2012 at 22:56, by MετάEd

Nov 1 at 18:03, by MετάEd

Oct 5 at 16:14, by MετάEd

Dammit. I killed the room again.

MetaEd

21:36

@user726941 dammit, you killed the room

user 726941

:(

MetaEd

21:55

@tchrist I think you're referencing Nathaniel Borenstein

jlliagre

23:09

C'était l'homme d'un seul verre.

user 726941

23:21

@MetaEd why did you replace the Greek letters in your username

<_<

>_>

:^)

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English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…