Science

I work in drug development, and have done a lot of work in topical drug development, specifically for skin diseases. Psoriasis gets most of the attention, but there's a lot of work being done on other skin diseases, as well

"Eczema" is kind of a catch-all term for a group of diseases, which is one of the reasons treatment is so difficult. One kind is often mistaken for (or even indistinguishable from) another. The most common, though, is atopic dermatitis (which is hilarious when you look up the etymology).

So that said.... Have you tried JAK inhibitors? Ruxolitinib is one of the best ones, formulated as a cream called Opzelura. It's at least good for flare ups.

Unfortunately, there aren't really any good drugs for preventing it. If you want company on that one, talk to the asthma community.

But.... There is work being done. I've worked on it. I've had companies spend millions on the work. I haven't seen anything very promising, but maybe you can take some comfort that there are frustrated scientists working on it, and pharma companies poised to take all of your money once something is found.

I had mysterious rash outbreaks for half a year... I shudder to imagine a lifetime of something worse.

That's specifically for a LLM which would probably not be the best AI base for medical uses.

In a use case like this, AI would be less about a final diagnose and more about getting the doctor or patient pointed in the right direction, especially with rare cases that few doctors are aware of. You no longer need to visit a hundred specialists in the hope of finding the one person who's seen something similar to your case before.

Yeah, I'm not talking about a language model AI. But rather something like the stuff the insurance companies are using to assess risk -- they take a lot of data in and cluster them together. Humans are sometimes really bad at recognizing patterns if you don't have enough data. A pattern that goes: "oh, all these people in this region with this specific digestive problem spatially maps to this insect" is the sort of thing ML should be good at. But where it will be really good is in turning proteins into diagnosis: "if this protein is detected in the blood in an general scan, combined with symptoms, then diagnose X" -- right now you only get tested for the things the doctor orders. Even more promising yet: with enough data, the AI should figure out which proteins actually do specific functions in the body, which will advance the research side (see, for example, Alphafold).

Pattern recognition is something modern techniques are very good at.

ChatGPT isn't that. It also isn't intelligent and doesn't know anything. It's basically a jacked up parrot blindly throwing words together.

In this application, AI would really just be a fancy search engine the doctor can use to look for things he doesn't already know about.

Isn't picaridin also shown to be effective? Or is that only against mosquitos and not ticks?

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