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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   2683 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 29, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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My scumbag achilles...

Tendons are weird. Stupid and weird. And nobody knows shit about how to fix them.

Early in the summer, I strained my achilles playing soccer. I am old and this has happened before many times. This time I decided to GO HAM on my achilles. I adopted a strict stretching and eccentric exercise protocol. The sort that physical therapists have recommended in the past. I was 100% consistent and spent about 20 minutes each day. I did this for MONTHS. Did my achilles get better? Kinda, sorta, not really.

So I stopped doing the program. And I kept playing soccer. And the achilles pain sort of just... went away. It's completely gone now.

The only thing that changed was I switched to a low carb diet. GPT-4 tells me there is no evidence that this related.

One day, science will figure tendons out. We're a long way from that now. In the mean time, for those with nagging sports injuries, I advise not wasting your money on doctors and PT unless someone else is paying for it.

Tendons.. nobody knows shit about how to fix them

Well the thing is simply that doctors are scientifically illiterate, unlike me. The most potent drug at repairing tendons is BPC-157 which is a peptide endogenously produced in the body. It is available OTC for a short term injections cycle, the most reputable website but a bit pricey is peptidesciences .com https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14554208/ BPC is quite popular on /r/peptides and has "saved" many, however it is a serious medication that shouldn't be taken without studying its tradeoffs (short term anhedonia risk, amphetamine blunting and increased angiogenesis (therefore increased lifespan if young, increased risk of metastasis if old)

Thanks. A podcaster I listened to also mentioned this peptide as a sort of miracle cure for his long term tendon problems.

Apparently, peptides like this can't be patented so there is no financial incentive to research them. It seems like a good opportunity for countries outside of the US/Europe to push the science forward.

Nobody will push the science forward the world will keep being nearly maximally inept, both this century and for the others to come. As you correctly say, the economic incentives are beyond malevolent but most importantly, the pharma enterprises are simply extremely mediocre and their complacency, like worlwide suffering will perpetuate. The insane mediocrity is simply a product of the extreme absence of education during the human's brain-formative years (so called critical periods). Only a few artifact outliers like me can contemplate the contemporary horror in its fullest depth.

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