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New Theories / Re: Can scientific beliefs be compared to religous dogma?

« on: 01/07/2016 07:11:13 »

From personal experience, yes. Science is comparable to religion as a belief system. When I was younger I believed science was God-like, but later opened up my mind to some religion. I noticed similar trends in behaviour between scientists and preachers. Both using sources or processes of knowledge to explain things, the former using more present day material and the latter using older material. Both can be extremely beneficial and destructive imo.

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Physiology & Medicine / Re: Do atypical antipsychotics really work?

« on: 19/06/2016 01:34:21 »

I rather have a fully detailed report of a biological test to prove i have a psychiatric disorder than a boat of pseudoscientific voodoo.

A biological test like a blood test?

Yes, a blood test would be a excellent diagnostic, assuming schizophrenia could be detected in the blood.

sznews/archives/001395.html

Thanks for the link.

I read about blood tests for bipolar and suicidal ideation but never came across this work for schizophrenia. This is a bit scary because more often than not, people are medicated straight away at any hints of psychiatric disorders. Therefore a blood test, and it's development, are skewed by the fact that there are almost no people with schizophrenia who are unmedicated to compare to with the 100% of people with schizophrenia who are/have been medicated.

I think you could detect "schizophrenia" in blood, but that is not really useful and is probably dangerous. Just my thoughts.

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Physiology & Medicine / Re: Does atypical antipsychotics really works?

« on: 16/06/2016 02:33:31 »

They do something that's for sure. Typically, they bind neuronal receptors, such as serotonergic or dopaminergic, in your brain quite strongly. So strongly that the receptor protein does not unbind from the drug and this leads to various biological effects on the neuron such as decreased or increased activity and potentially cell death, or cell growth in some cases.

If you need a life change, antipsychotics will probably do that for you because they'll change your brain. More likely for the worse from what I gather, but there could be some good too.

Thanks, Villi. I guess long-term antipsychotics use may induce dopamine hypersensitivity and mesolimbic neuronal damage. Thus, drug-induced schizophrenia is perhaps the result of antipsychotics binding to dopaminergic neurons.

Long-term use of antipsychotics has not been studied very well. The FDA clinical trials for approving these drugs are very short compared to how long some people have taken them. I wrote some papers for school about the long term side effects from a biological perspective, and these drugs do seem to shrink brains and change the chemistry. However, it's very important not to view this negatively because variations in brain size have many different effects from person to person, some beneficial. Another point, taking these drugs may change your chemistry (or you may be lucky and have powerful cyp genes, which metabolize these drugs and make them do nothing to you), but to stop taking them changes your chemistry too. The longer you take the Abilify, the more severe the withdrawal symptoms may be if you come off it. Injections are also a whole other ball game compared to pill form. So many more variables since there's more technology in them compared to pill form.

Again to stress this, there could be benefit. Just gotta try it out in little doses I think.

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Physiology & Medicine / Re: Does atypical antipsychotics really works?

« on: 15/06/2016 08:20:35 »

They do something that's for sure. Typically, they bind neuronal receptors, such as serotonergic or dopaminergic, in your brain quite strongly. So strongly that the receptor protein does not unbind from the drug and this leads to various biological effects on the neuron such as decreased or increased activity and potentially cell death, or cell growth in some cases.

If you need a life change, antipsychotics will probably do that for you because they'll change your brain. More likely for the worse from what I gather, but there could be some good too.