Maybe a bit of a strange take, but after having dealt with chronic illness personally and talked with a lot of others with chronic illness, I don't think classifying chronic illness by symptoms will help with curing, and in fact I don't think categorizing works at all for chronic illness. We've been trying to classify chronic illnesses for so long, and yet in most cases no pattern emerges.

This has led me to conclude that perhaps in most cases chronic illness is an emergent behavior from a complex system, namely our body. Now tbh this is kind of a cheap take, because it's not that hard to conclude. But gosh darn it, we're programmers and we deal with complex systems all the time! What I want to see is a complete quantitative mapping of human metabolism, so that we can see all the in-between steps, not just the surface levels. That way curing chronic illness is more about comparing metabolite levels against known pathways and seeing what's regulated incorrectly. There's just not enough introspective capability currently.

My vision is some day a person who's been chronically ill can walk into a clinic, take a blood test, and with mass spectrometry get the level of the around 1800 different intermediate metabolites. That gets mapped to a known good metabolic graph, and it's optimized to find what in-between step is off kilter. They're then prescribed a drug that resets the bad state, and it 6 weeks they're back to normal.

I also doubt that AI will substantially help either. It still doesn't bring any more introspection capability, and if we can't figure out why someone is sick, I have little faith that a predictive AI can figure it out either.

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rolisz 24 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Welcome to alternative health :))) there are many functional doctors, and others who perform this kind of stuff.

For example Organic Acids in Urine Test gives you some 70-80 metabolic markers, which some folks interpret. There's no large scale RCTs or studies on this, so it's a bit dubious. But I did one and the practitioner correctly read the leaves to suggest some things that were missing and which helped me (glutathione and B1).

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_3u10 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You used to be able to order a paper version but here it is.

https://web.expasy.org/pathways/

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smj-edison 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Thanks for the link! I looked over it, but I'm not seeing quantitative levels of reactions. That's been my biggest issue with current pathway databases. It's great to know what's connected to what, but very quickly it becomes everything connected to everything. And unfortunately everything doesn't reduce the problem space.

	▲	gilleain 36 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That would be difficult - a metabolic map is a diagram showing the known reactions. At any point in time, only a subset of these will be active. Like a road map - at midnight, only some roads will have traffic. I think what you are looking for is more like a model of the metabolome, showing the flow through the network under certain conditions (steady-state, growth, cell stress, etc). Not sure if there is a readily available database of such models, or how easy it would be just to run them and get meaningful results.

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_3u10 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Also, many people have cured chronic illnesses such as Crohn’s disease by moving to countries with low levels of those diseases.

	▲	smj-edison 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Source? Never heard of this before.