busyThe dye is decades old. It took this long to notice the beneficial effect because food science and neuroscience are treated as totally unrelated fields. This demonstrates why too much cutting of subjects into little pieces is bad thinking: you can miss extremely useful connections.
Also, nobody wants to fund studies for humans. Right now there is no treatment for spinal injuries. This might be one. Why aren't people leaping into action to see if this would actually work on humans? Because the dye is extremely cheap. It would be too hard to make a profit. THIS is a key reason why our health care system is broken and unaffordable: the prime motive is profit, and cheap treatments can't attract research funding. Folks, we should be ALL OVER this line of research. We should be all over anything that promises a strong health benefit at very little cost.
Would someone in a sane country please call this to the attention of your scientists, in case it works out?
I'll also add that checking oral delivery would be helpful, in case that might be effective, because after all it's food dye. Imagine being able to stash a couple of blue pills in a first aid kit in case of suspected spinal injury. It'd be a lot faster than a trip to the emergency room -- similar to the current advice of taking aspirin for a suspected heart attack.
Well...
July 29 2009, 22:34:17 UTC 11 years ago
Also, it occurred to me later that the "15 minutes isn't clinically significant" is not necessarily fair because it assumes getting the victim to an emergency room. Most places can get an ambulance to someone in 5-10 minutes. (In some cities people will throw a public tantrum if the time is 5+ minutes: they expect 2-3 minute emergency service. I don't know how, I've just seen it repeatedly.) Anything that can be deployed in an ambulance should be useful down to a window of about 5 minutes.
Re: Well...
July 30 2009, 01:15:02 UTC 11 years ago