Friends with Parkinson's with neural implants anecdotally report great results, but of course with rather coarse tech. There seems to be lots of future potential.
My brother has had YOPD since his late 20s. He got DBS done about 3 years ago, and it was life changing. Not only in the symptom reduction (tremors and rigidity significantly reduced -- he walked straight for the first time in years, could button his shirts again, etc), but also in lifestyle improvements around the amount and frequency of medication, the ability to sleep properly (several side effects of both PD and the meds affect sleep), the ability for his body to actually relax.
DBS, like you said, is rather course tech and actually quite old technology. Doctors still don't entirely know why it works, so the adjustment is often experimental. In fact prior to specialized MRI machines that they use during surgery now, the patients would remain awake during the placement (brain surgery) of the electrodes so that the surgeons would know when the placement was "correct" based on real-time assessment of their symptoms. Now they do it under MRI, but the point being it's far from an exact science.
Can't wait to see what the future holds as they improve on it. Hard to imagine a world where his symptoms are fully managed (PD is progressive degeneration, so his symptoms, even with DBS are gradually worsening with time), but it was also hard to imagine how DBS could overnight change his life in the ways it did.
My daughter has DBS for severe Tourette's. Her quality of life before the implant was horrible -- frequent 110 dB+ screams and self-injury. The implant has reduced her tic frequency and intensity by easily 95%. It's not only given her her life back but also the lives of her family members.
The potential of brain interface technology is truly incredible -- both for good and ill.
Thanks for the feedback! I sort of agree with you on acupuncture being a bit pseudoscience, and that's the reason I built this tool to have evidence-based answers. Seems like that Chinese study got published in PubMed, and that's why it got picked up by the tool: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40557042/
I am working on more features to get deeper insights and more refined search results.
That article says that the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project didn’t agree with the identification. This new article is about a published article on the discovery. The articles are totally different.
Yes. LLMs are good at producing plausible statements and responses that radiate awareness, consideration, balance, and at least superficial knowledge of the technology in question. Even if they are non-committal, indecisive, or even inaccurate.
In other words, they are very economical replacements for many non-developers.
Note that the proposal for this came from the EU Commission over the last few years - the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T). Initially Finland pushed back on it as being too expensive.
There is little benefit for the cost for Finland. Currently I believe that there are no railway between Finland and the rest of the EU, with the first one to Sweden under construction (and obviously a huge detour since the only land connection is through the North of the country).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system