5 ms·

I'm not a doctor or neuroscientist, but this strikes me as a significant find if I'm understanding it correctly, right? "We were pretty sure the lymphatic syste

I'm not a doctor or neuroscientist, but this strikes me as a significant find if I'm understanding it correctly, right? "We were pretty sure the lymphatic system doesn't directly connect to the brain. Well we were wrong, (points) there it is."

summerdown2 11y ago
I'm not a doctor or neuroscientist either, but from what I gather it is indeed significant. It potentially makes the link between the brain and the body chemically study-able. Up to now there's always been the assumption of a brain/blood barrier stopping much of the chemical transfers. Now it appears there's a mechanism that might bypass that. Again, this is just what I gather from reading. I have no special expertise.
- timr 11y ago
  Blood is not the same as lymph. This is a lymphatic drainage vessel, not a blood vessel. Think of the lymphatic system as a kind of a superhighway for your immune system. It doesn't carry blood.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
timr 11y ago
We've known that there had to be a brain/immune connection of some sort. We didn't know that there was a tube. Remember that most of the interesting stuff in biology is invisible to the naked eye. Also, despite a few hundred years of poking around in corpses, we're still pretty crude in terms of what we can see and understand anatomically. The assumption that we have this stuff "mostly figured out" strikes me more as wishful thinking than fact. It's interesting to find a new tube lurking around, but then, it sounds like a pretty small tube. Animals are messy on the inside. Also, dark.
- skmurphy 11y ago
  We now know there is at least one tube, and perhaps much much more. In terms of mostly figured out I think we are still below 1% of what we may know in 2100 about the body. Michael Murphy wrote a very interesting book "The History of the Body" in 1993 http://www.amazon.com/The-Future-Body-Explorations-Evolution/dp/0874777305 http://www.amazon.com/The-Future-Body-Explorations-Evolution... curating a number of observations on the potential extent of our capabilities.
- shostack 11y ago
  Loved this comment as you did a great job of distilling the level of wonder that still remains to be discovered. While I'm not in any way qualified to assess this, it seems the fact that there's essentially a new piece of human anatomy that we've discovered is game changing. Potentially on the level of things that cause entire fields of medicine to re-evaluate what they thought they knew. I wonder what this means for other things we've taken for granted about neurochemistry. Any qualified individuals care to speculate on the possibilities?
  - spydum 11y ago
    Very likely I will get downvotes for this but: I suspect we will find there was far less quackery in some of the eastern medicine practices than we thought.
    - Rangi42 11y ago
      How does the discovery that one culture's beliefs about medicine were less accurate than expected, make you think that a different culture's beliefs are more accurate? It's not like eastern and western medicine are binary opposites, where if one is wrong the other must be right. Especially since this inaccuracy was only discovered through careful dissection and observation: what comparable practices did historical eastern medicine use, that should make it any more accurate than the equivalent old western superstitions? If "western" medicine has missed this detail up until now, I highly doubt that "eastern" medicine somehow accounted for it.

summerdown2 11y ago

I'm not a doctor or neuroscientist either, but from what I gather it is indeed significant. It potentially makes the link between the brain and the body chemically study-able. Up to now there's always been the assumption of a brain/blood barrier stopping much of the chemical transfers. Now it appears there's a mechanism that might bypass that. Again, this is just what I gather from reading. I have no special expertise.

timr 11y ago
Blood is not the same as lymph. This is a lymphatic drainage vessel, not a blood vessel. Think of the lymphatic system as a kind of a superhighway for your immune system. It doesn't carry blood.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

timr 11y ago

We've known that there had to be a brain/immune connection of some sort. We didn't know that there was a tube. Remember that most of the interesting stuff in biology is invisible to the naked eye. Also, despite a few hundred years of poking around in corpses, we're still pretty crude in terms of what we can see and understand anatomically. The assumption that we have this stuff "mostly figured out" strikes me more as wishful thinking than fact. It's interesting to find a new tube lurking around, but then, it sounds like a pretty small tube. Animals are messy on the inside. Also, dark.

skmurphy 11y ago
We now know there is at least one tube, and perhaps much much more. In terms of mostly figured out I think we are still below 1% of what we may know in 2100 about the body. Michael Murphy wrote a very interesting book "The History of the Body" in 1993 http://www.amazon.com/The-Future-Body-Explorations-Evolution/dp/0874777305 http://www.amazon.com/The-Future-Body-Explorations-Evolution... curating a number of observations on the potential extent of our capabilities.
shostack 11y ago
Loved this comment as you did a great job of distilling the level of wonder that still remains to be discovered. While I'm not in any way qualified to assess this, it seems the fact that there's essentially a new piece of human anatomy that we've discovered is game changing. Potentially on the level of things that cause entire fields of medicine to re-evaluate what they thought they knew. I wonder what this means for other things we've taken for granted about neurochemistry. Any qualified individuals care to speculate on the possibilities?
- spydum 11y ago
  Very likely I will get downvotes for this but: I suspect we will find there was far less quackery in some of the eastern medicine practices than we thought.
  - Rangi42 11y ago
    How does the discovery that one culture's beliefs about medicine were less accurate than expected, make you think that a different culture's beliefs are more accurate? It's not like eastern and western medicine are binary opposites, where if one is wrong the other must be right. Especially since this inaccuracy was only discovered through careful dissection and observation: what comparable practices did historical eastern medicine use, that should make it any more accurate than the equivalent old western superstitions? If "western" medicine has missed this detail up until now, I highly doubt that "eastern" medicine somehow accounted for it.