Macular degeneration and inflammation

Inflammation seems to be getting more attention these days, mostly, I think, because scientists keep making new discoveries. As The New York Times reported, “Inflammation is the product of an incredibly complex network that we’re just beginning to understand.” While inflammation is a very complicated regulatory network, new discoveries are beginning to yield some treatment results.

Inflammatory responses, such as fever, swelling, and redness, are signs that your immune system is engaged in battle, destroying invaders or repairing injuries. If that process doesn’t work quite right, some inflammation lingers, resulting in low-level chronic inflammation, a condition that has been shown to correlate with aging and serious health problems.

The challenge for scientists is figuring out how to reduce inflammation without weakening the body’s ability to fight disease. As one scientist notes, “Turning off the inflammation without knowing exactly why it’s present risks doing more harm than good.”

(The new GLP-1 weight loss drugs seem to reduce inflammation by influencing pathways throughout the body that cause inflammation, but scientists don’t fully understand how it works.)

Researchers are making some progress in developing some helpful drugs. One new drug has been shown to reduce the risk of macular degeneration (and Alzheimer’s) by blocking a specific group of inflammatory proteins. Trials conducted by the Center for Advanced Vision Science at the University of Virginia School of Medicine has shown “very promising results.”  The drug may be available in the next 18 to 24 months. I don’t have macular degeneration, but I know several people who do. I hope the new drug works.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

AI wrote this post

I’ve never used AI to write anything. Out of curiosity, I asked Google’s chatbot, Gemini, to write a 250 word summary about the pros and cons of older people using weight loss drugs. In a few seconds, here’s what I got, exactly as written:

“The rise of GLP-1 weight loss medications (such as semaglutide and tirzepatide) offers new possibilities for senior health, but using these drugs in older adults requires balancing significant health benefits against unique risks.

The Pros

• Cardiometabolic Improvements: Substantial weight loss helps control type 2 diabetes, lowers blood pressure, and reduces the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
• Joint & Mobility Relief: Shedding extra weight alleviates mechanical strain on aging joints, easing knee and hip pain from osteoarthritis.
• Broader Systemic Protection: Clinical studies show additional benefits, including reduced systemic inflammation, improved kidney function, and reduced sleep apnea severity.

The Cons

• Muscle & Bone Loss: Rapid weight loss causes loss of lean muscle alongside fat. In seniors, this accelerates sarcopenia (age-related muscle loss) and reduces bone density, increasing frailty and fall risks.
• Gastrointestinal & Dehydration Risks: Common side effects like nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea can quickly lead to severe dehydration, orthostatic hypotension (sudden blood pressure drops upon standing), and dizziness in older adults.
• Polypharmacy & Pharmacokinetics: Age-related declines in kidney and liver function affect how drugs are metabolized. Adding GLP-1s to an existing multi-medication regimen increases the likelihood of adverse drug interactions.

The Bottom Line

For older adults, weight loss drugs are most effective when paired with resistance training and high protein intake to preserve crucial muscle mass. Careful physician supervision is essential to adjust existing medications and monitor hydration levels.” [230 words]

(FYI: A recent article in Scientific American states that “the evidence supporting their use in the age-60-and-older population is limited. …we simply don’t have enough evidence yet to make informed conclusions….")

The reason I chose technical writing as a profession is that I like researching a topic, organizing the information, and writing about it. Sometimes it takes a long time. Now, a chatbot can do the same thing in seconds. It’s disheartening.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

The end of reading?

This post is not medical/health/doctor-related. It comes from a recent article by Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic, which I found rather alarming and worth sharing. It appears that young people increasingly view reading as an unnecessarily burdensome way of acquiring knowledge.  

Here are some of the salient points, gleaned from a variety of studies:

• A 2025 survey found that most middle- and high-school English teachers assigned zero to four books a year.
•  Average IQ scores are declining by about three points a decade.
• Scores on ACT’s reading and English sections are at their lowest level in more than 3 years.
• Nearly 30 percent of adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text.
• In 1984, 8 percent of 13-year-olds said they rarely or never read for fun. In 2025 that number rose to 29 percent.  High schoolers in focus groups think of reading for pleasure as an “alien practice.”
• By eighth grade, the average kid spends four and a half hours a day on social media, often watching at 2x speed.
• In 2004 the average attention span on a screen was two and a half minutes. By 2025 it had dropped to about 47 seconds.

People do read in “textual fragments,” but even those textual fragments are losing ground:  Social media, once mainly text-based, has been overrun with short-form videos, such as TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels. Experts tell us that filling time with short-form videos instead of books degrades the complex cognitive skills that reading fosters, including concentration, extended focus, logical deduction, and analytical thought. Video does contain more information than text (language, sounds, moving images) but does not stimulate deeper thinking. 

In The New York Times, David Foster Wallace offers a rebuttal to Horowitch's arguments, noting that you can slice data in different ways. He cites some studies showing that young Americans are reading more than they did a couple of decades ago, and that the decline in reading is driven by older Americans--those 65 and up. At the same time, he notes, book sales are near record highs, with more books sold these days than a decade ago.

He does admit, however, that “reading comprehension is indeed falling.”

Over past decades, screen time of one form or another has been five to ten times as common as reading. In the 1980s, for example, the TV in the average American household was on for more than nine hours a day, a figure that’s been dropping—probably because of the smart phone.

Who knows what the future might bring? As Horowitch suggests, "maybe the generations growing up with their brains hooked to endless video feeds are developing some kind of novel, as-yet-undefinable cognitive brilliance." Perhaps we are entering a phase of "secondary orality" in which a once-literate society reverts back to some of the conventions of preliterate cultures. Perhaps our literate era will prove to be a brief interlude between the oral and digital ages.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

AI medical scribes

Thanks to AI, doctors no longer need to write summaries—clinical notes—of patient exams. Now, scribe applications, installed on their phones, will do the job. The apps eavesdrop on their conversations with patients, synthesize the information, and produce a polished document with the details, structure, and tone of a proper clinical note—notes with no typos, proper grammar, and written in complete sentences.  After the apps produce the notes, the doctors read, correct—if necessary—and sign them.

AI scribes not only relieve doctors of a tedious chore, they also make it possible for doctors to focus their attention on the patient instead of a computer screen. (Doctors also find that the AI scribes increase productivity and revenue.) What’s not to like?

Companies, many of them start-ups, create and sell the apps to medical facilities. They’ve raised nearly $5 billion since 2019. So far, the rate of adoption has reached as high as 80 percent in some clinics and departments. It’s been the fastest-adopted medical technology of all time.

One doctor, while initially thrilled, found that, by letting the AI scribe write the note, she was “no longer thinking through the interaction with a patient and the meaning of the information” she had gathered—that the writing process itself helped her formulate her medical decision-making. Her cognitive labor was being “offloaded to a machine.”

Three years ago, I wrote a blog post about the rise in medical scribes: humans who accompany the physician during an exam and enter the relevant information into the computer. At that time, it was the fastest growing healthcare profession in the nation. I suppose most of those people are now looking for work.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.