You probably want to read the first half of my last post, “A treatment.” I wrote the post on Saturday, and on Sunday I read more scientific papers. Two of the papers were recently published and they greatly improved our knowledge of pharmacology, neurology, and the experiments with animals that teach us almost everything we know about pharmacology and neurology.
And they conclusively proved that the medicine I had planned to synthesize and use as a therapy would not fix my medical disorder (downregulated 5HT2A). The class of medicines includes many substances that absolutely will help me, but every medicine has some differences from every other medicine.
I must do more research
So, I need to research and select a different medicine. As far as I know, I don’t have the skills to synthesize any of the medicines in this class. The overwhelming majority of drugs in this class are only used in experiments on animals, so they are not readily available. It seems that one or two of them might be available as a dietary supplement. I need to research them more, and because none of the dietary supplements have scientific studies looking at upregulating 5HT2A, I will have to do a lot of calculations based on the properties of the medicines used in the studies and the properties of the dietary supplements, such as EC50, receptor selectivity, adenylyl cyclase inhibition, arrestin recruitment, half-life, and bioavailability by route of administration.
Did you know I am not a research neurologist but I am doing a pretty good job?
I don’t think I have mentioned that the last time I took a biology or chemistry class was my first year of university when I was 16-years-old: 27 years ago. True, I have a degree in psychology, but I have never taken a psychology class: I had read so much technical psychology that I took a test and scored better than 78% of psychology majors applying for graduate school.
I am learning the cutting edge of neurology despite formal schooling. It seems that I am the first person to identify this medical disorder, its biological root, its effects on the body, the symptoms a patient would present, two different existing medical tests that could conclusively diagnose the disease, a biological mechanism for curing the disorder, and an entire class of medicines to initiate that mechanism to cure the patient. If I am not the first person, I have still accomplished this independently—while suffering from the potentially deadly medical disorder—without a lab—and while homeless.
But I am not valuable
I am able to do this but the overwhelming majority of society has decided I have no value, and my family thinks I need to suffer more. My father, Dan Hogan, is the most generous. He gave me US$793 in 2018. He signed up for automatic payments of $50 per month, so that will be $600 for 2019. Ten years ago, $50 was less than he would regularly spend on dinner for two. Today, $50 per month is insignificant in his budget.
My mother sent me $15 in 2017. That is not a typo: fifteen US dollars in all of 2017. She included these consoling words, “I still love you. I wish your life was easier”. But she didn’t do anything to make my life easier. In 2018, she sent me US$0.00. Nothing—because I have no value to her. In 2011, my sister did one of the most heroic things I have ever heard of and prevented my mother from dying in her own house when my sister took my mother to the hospital hours before she would have died of dehydration. From Houston, my sister called me in Chicago and asked me for help. This was immediately before the most important interview about my law license. I dropped everything, including preparing for the interview, and drove from Chicago to Houston. (They are in the same country, but they are not close to each other. The distance from Houston to Chicago is the same as the distance from Houston to Mexico City.) If I had not gone to the hospital in Houston where my mother was being treated, she would have died in that hospital instead of being transferred to one of the best neurosurgical departments in the world. So, after my sister saved my mother’s life, I saved my mother’s life. But my skills are not valuable to her, and the value of my past actions, in any, expired in 2016.
My brother offered to buy me a sandwich if I drove to his side of Chicago, which would have cost me more in gas than I normally spent on lunch. He never bought me a sandwich.
All three of them claim they are helping me with “tough love”.
Stress changes my body and prevents my recovery
The rejection and abandonment by my family are painful. Rejection by society is painful. Poverty and homelessness are stressful. I have tried to find a reason why my 5HT2A receptors are downregulated to potentially deadly levels. I have only found one paper that could explain my medical condition, Stress Impairs 5-HT2A Receptor-Mediated Serotonergic Facilitation of GABA Release in Juvenile Rat Basolateral Amygdala, which includes the unusually unambiguous, direct, and clear statement, These data indicated that stress downregulated 5-HT2A receptors.
Whether or not stress caused the original downregulation, my stress level is so high right now that anything I do to upregulate 5HT2A will be mitigated by stress. Of the hundreds of papers I have read, scientists have only described one thing that hurts my recovery: stress. And overloading me with stress is the precise strategy my father, mother, and brother (and many other people) are using—allegedly to help me.
Click here to help reduce my stress.
