The Dangers of Self-Diagnosis and AUD (Alcohol Use Disorder)

Using naltrexone to cut back on drinking isn’t new, says Sarah Wakeman, a senior medical director for substance use disorder at Mass General Brigham. The approach dates back to the 1980s with the Sinclair method, which pairs drinking with naltrexone to blunt alcohol’s pleasurable effects. In parts of Europe, Wakeman adds, people have long used a “pill-in-the-pocket” strategy, taking the medication only when they anticipate drinking. A decades-old drug is helping people drink less alcohol—without giving it up completelyhttps://www.nationalgeographic.com/health/article/naltrexone-drink-less-alcohol? (Paywall article)

The Provider Individual who is not a doctor will see you after you answer the questionnaire (this is the self-diagnosis part).

Oar Health is an online service offering naltrexone subscriptions to those with alcohol use disorder (AUD). Users can fill out a brief assessment which is reviewed by a medical professional, then be given a naltrexone prescription if appropriate. After a one-time $50 fee, subscriptions cost $297 for three months of medication, which comes out to $99 monthly. It’s currently available in 42 US states. Beyond the naltrexone prescription, Oar Health offers ongoing access to the support of a medication prescriber, a health coach, a Facebook group for community support, and extras like educational articles and guided reflections.Oar Health Review: Pros & Cons, Cost, & My Experiencehttps://www.choosingtherapy.com/oar-health-review/

Health coaches who are “naltrexone experts”! And The Sinclair Method might not work for everyone. https://drugfree.org/article/sinclair-method/

Depending upon the online service you choose you may get naltrexone prescribed when trying to get your doctor prescribed GLP-1 filled out even when you don’t have alcohol use disorder.

Telehealth companies such as Vida Health and its rivals offer lifestyle support so people taking drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound can have the most success on the drugs. But the companies often have another job: limiting obesity drug costs for employers.

The Vida Health nurse said he was a good candidate for Zepbound but insisted he try two generic drugs first: naltrexone, a drug used to curb alcohol and opioid use, and bupropion, an antidepressant. Neither drug is approved for obstructive sleep apnea. Primary care doctors raise alarm as telehealth companies get involved in obesity drugshttps://www.npr.org/2026/06/14/nx-s1-5805984/glp1-telehealth-weight-loss-drugs

Yikes.

Study Failure to Learn Success

Michael Girdley on private equity:

The lesson is pretty straightforward. You’re going to go buy a business, and you’re going to look and say, “Where can I cut costs? How can I start to optimize and streamline this?” You can cut fat, but you definitely don’t want to cut muscle, and you don’t want to cut bone. That’s exactly what these guys did. Why did they do that? They’re private equity guys. They get paid on management fees and the deals when they turn around and put them out in the public. They don’t care about the long term. They care about the next three to five years, and that’s exactly what they optimized for.

You Will Own Nothing and Be Happy

In her original post, Auken predicted a time, viz. 2030, wherein she would not ‘own anything’, not a car, a house, nor even any clothes. This was because, she explained, all things previously regarded as a ‘product’ would be supplied and available in the future as a ‘service’. As a result, everything that one might need could be rented, thereby eliminating the need, although not necessarily the right, to ‘own anything’. This was “a good life”, Auken concluded. A future with no individual ownership is not a happy one: Property theory shows why – Futures, Volume 152, 2023 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328723001131

Text message received, deleted.

I will never sell my house to a modern day slum landlord.

Scary Charts 05.17.26

Source – The Class of 2026 is cooked https://www.semafor.com/article/05/15/2026/ai-has-contorted-the-job-market-for-twentysomethings-leaving-college-this-may

Sourcehttps://layoffs.fyi/

“I think the junior level is definitely finding it harder now to enter the workforce,” said John Romeo, who leads the consulting firm’s research arm, the Oliver Wyman Forum. “It’s those mid- and senior-level employees that CEOs are now looking at to drive productivity.” That’s because of the types of tasks that AI agents are able to perform, from writing code at the level of a junior developer to evaluating sales leads. What the agents can’t do in many fields is make judgment calls using the insight that comes from on-the-job experience, according to labor experts. AI Poised to Tilt Job Market Leverage Toward Older Workershttps://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/ai-poised-tilt-job-market-150000094.html

Yikes!

If you managed to scroll down this far here’s a bonus video.

Optimize This!

But the productivity gurus were child’s play compared to the rise of the biohacking movement that followed. Guys like Andrew Huberman and Bryan Johnson rose to fame in recent years with their strict diets, excessive supplementation, and elaborate morning routines. Science-backed exercise and nutrition advice became the name of the game. And there was no shortage of influencers to supply it. Optimizing Ourselves to Deathhttps://ofdollarsanddata.com/optimizing-ourselves-to-death/

You can’t optimize everything. Mistakes will be made and are part of life. Sub-optimal for whatever you are chasing will be the end result because perfection is impossible.

Tell yourself this is OK.

Peptides Explained

Your Local Epidemiologist (YLE) is founded and operated by Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, MPH PhD—an epidemiologist, wife, and mom of two little girls.

The people currently using these compounds are, in effect, running an uncontrolled experiment on themselves. Peptides, explained: Answers to your top questionshttps://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/peptides-explained-answers-to-your?

An uncontrolled experiment on themselves.

Yikes.

“Medical” Advice for the Masses

The AIs’ failure rates exceeded 80 percent when provided with given ambiguous symptoms that could match more than one condition, and for more straightforward cases that included including physical exam findings and lab results, they still failed 40 percent of the time. The researchers also found that unlike human clinicians, the “LLMs collapse prematurely onto single answers,” resulting in “weak performance” across all models. Millions of Americans Are Talking to AI Instead of Going to the Doctor, and It’s Giving Them Horrendously Flawed Medical Advicehttps://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/millions-americans-ai-instead-doctor-bad-advice

Wow.

From the study discussion section:

Our evaluation suggests that despite rapid advances in pattern recognition and knowledge retrieval, current LLMs still lack the reasoning processes needed for safe clinical use. The consistent gap between differential diagnosis and final diagnosis highlights how differently these systems process information compared with physicians. Clinicians preserve uncertainty and iteratively refine differential diagnoses, whereas LLMs collapse prematurely onto single answers, a limitation that persists across model generations. Their weak performance on differential diagnosis, consistent with a prior study from authors of the current work,8 suggests these limitations persist across early and state-of-the-art models. The risk is not just that LLMs are sometimes wrong but that their reasoning is brittle precisely where uncertainty and nuance matter most. Benchmarks that reward only correct final answers risk reinforcing this shortcutting, widening the gap between marketing claims and the skills actually required at the bedside. Large Language Model Performance and Clinical Reasoning Tasks – Rao AS, Esmail KP, Lee RS, et al. Large Language Model Performance and Clinical Reasoning Tasks. JAMA Netw Open. 2026;9(4):e264003. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2026.4003 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2847679

Wow.

Should you really trust health advice from an AI chatbot? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyepyy82kxo. Dr Nicholas Tiller explains: “They are designed to give very confident, very authoritative responses, and that conveys a sense of credibility, so the user assumes that it must know what it’s talking about.” He thinks chatbots should be avoided for health advice unless you have the expertise to know when the AI is getting the answers wrong.

The study’s Conclusions The audited chatbots performed poorly when answering questions in misinformation-prone health and medical fields. Continued deployment without public education and oversight risks amplifying misinformation. Tiller NB, Marcon AR, Zenone M, et al

Generative artificial intelligence-driven chatbots and medical misinformation: an accuracy, referencing and readability audit BMJ Open 2026;16:e112695. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2025-112695 https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/16/4/e112695

Wow.

Now go read this thread posted on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/posts/gratuz_ai-llm-activity-7358862577512165376-Q7AA

Yikes.

America’s Largest Hospital System Ready to Start Replacing Radiologists With AI

“We could replace a great deal of radiologists with AI at this moment, if we are ready to do the regulatory challenge,”
Mitchell Katz, president and CEO of New York’s 11-hospital public benefit corporation

Mohammed Suhail, a radiologist at North Coast Imaging in San Diego, told Radiology that Katz’s comments are “undeniable proof that confidently uninformed hospital administrators are a danger to patients (and are) ..“easily duped by AI companies that are nowhere near capable of providing patient care.”

America’s Largest Hospital System Ready to Start Replacing Radiologists With AI, Its CEO Says – https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/hospital-ceo-ai-radiology

Confidently. Uninformed.

Yikes.

America’s Next Epidemic is Happening in Canada

Sports betting is being marketed to young Americans as an investment. Social media has perpetuated the idea that betting on sports is a profitable venture, leading to the normalization of unsafe and risky behavior. The legalization of prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket have only reinforced that messaging. America’s next epidemichttps://www.bettoroff.org/about-6-1

Nearly one in four (23.5%) young adults, aged 18 to 29, who reported gambling online in the past year experienced high levels of gambling-related harms, including financial, emotional, psychological and relationship harms. Online Gambling Among Young Canadian Adults: A Call to Actionhttps://www.ccsa.ca/en

Yikes.

GLP-1s (it’s kind of a mess)

“But the real question is what is the quality of the weight regain and what is the shift in people’s metabolism, and it seems to be very bad,” she said. “Ongoing studies that haven’t been published yet suggest that hypertension comes back. All the inflammatory markers come back, and lipids go up. And if you have diabetes, it gets worse. Overall, it’s kind of a mess…As these studies and others showed, most people regain the weight. Whether or not they regain all the weight depends in part on diabetes and insulin and many other factors, but people will likely regain most of their weight.”

“But the message isn’t that you regain the weight. The message is that you may be less healthy when you regain the weight. That’s why we need to couple the drugs with lifestyle interventions. And it’s why people who just want to lose 5 or 10 pounds really need to consider that lifestyle change, hard as it is, is the better way to do it.”

Anne Peters, MD, professor Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California

Less Weight Regain, More Health Loss after Stopping GLP-1s? – Medscape – March 05, 2026 – https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/less-weight-regain-more-health-loss-after-stopping-glp-1s-2026a10006rv?

I never envisioned developing an obsession with pharmaceuticals. And after many years of endless blogging into the void I learned I could link to previous posts like this: https://lifeunderwriter.net/tag/glp-1-receptor-agonist/

The learning never stops.