Sunday, June 21, 2026

DMSO and spine injuries

 


Jackson's spinal recovery stunned news stations & millions online. Doctors said he'd never walk, breathe, or move again. His mom's secret? DMSO—a simple compound vets use on spine injuries the FDA won't approve But that's not the only "incurable" neurological disorder it helps. Approximately 2000 studies support DMSO's use for conditions ranging from Alzheimer's and Parkinson's to strokes, MS, ALS, chronic pain, neuropathy, depression, epilepsy, and Down syndrome, and a physician who began treating his patients with it estimates roughly 80% of what people see neurologists for goes away with DMSO.





https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/how-dmso-heals-the-spine-and-reverses


Friday, June 19, 2026

Midjourney body scanner

 

ZERO VC funding. OVER $500M in revenue. 200 employees. They reinventing medical imaging. They forever changed adorable non-radiation, non-ultra magnetic preventive medical scanning and made it affordable. Using just sound. Basically in a garage. This .


I'm a cardiologist. Something just happened today that I genuinely did not see coming — and it could change the future of preventive medicine more than anything I've written about on this platform. Midjourney — the AI company that became famous for generating images from text prompts — just announced a medical hardware division and unveiled a working prototype of a full-body scanner unlike anything that's ever existed. It's called the Midjourney Scanner. And it works like this. You step into a shallow pool of water. You stand on a platform that slowly descends — about two inches per second — through a ring containing roughly half a million tiny ultrasonic transducers, each the size of a grain of sand. Every one of them acts as both a speaker and a microphone, sending ultrasonic waves through your body from every angle and recording what comes back. 60 seconds later, you step out. The scan is done. No radiation. No magnets. No claustrophobia. No IV contrast. Just sound, water, and an almost incomprehensible amount of computing power — roughly 2 petaflops processing 17 gigabytes per second of raw acoustic data — reconstructing a 3D map of your entire internal anatomy down to half a millimeter resolution. Organs. Tissues. Blood vessels. Bones. Muscle. Fat distribution. All segmented by AI in real time. As a cardiologist who has spent months writing about how the standard screening playbook misses the majority of future heart attacks — this is the technology I've been waiting for without knowing it existed. Here's why this matters for the future of your heart. Right now, getting a detailed look inside your cardiovascular system requires either a CT scan (radiation), an MRI (magnets, claustrophobia, 45-60 minutes, $1,000+), or a coronary CT angiogram (radiation, IV contrast, limited availability). These are powerful tools. I order them regularly and they save lives. But they're reactive. You get them when something is already suspected. They're expensive. They're uncomfortable. And for most people, they happen once — maybe twice — in a lifetime. Imagine instead: a 60-second scan with no radiation that you could repeat monthly or quarterly. Tracking cardiac structure over time. Watching body composition shift. Detecting changes in organ size, fluid distribution, or vascular architecture before symptoms ever develop. Building a longitudinal dataset of YOUR body that AI can analyze for patterns no single snapshot would reveal. That's what Midjourney is building toward. The company plans 50,000 scanners worldwide over six years, with capacity for a billion scans per month. The first location — the "Midjourney Spa" in San Francisco — opens at the end of 2027 with 10 scanners alongside saunas, cold plunges, and a gym. The scan costs a few dollars. The experience is designed to feel like wellness, not medicine. The technology is built on Butterfly Network's ultrasound-on-chip platform — 40 modules per scanner — combined with Midjourney's own AI segmentation and reconstruction stack. David Holz, the founder, claims the system aims for image quality comparable to MRI in many aspects but at nearly 100x the speed with zero radiation. Now the caveats — because I'm a physician and the caveats matter enormously. This is a Gen 1 prototype. About a dozen people have been scanned so far. Current scan time is actually closer to 20 minutes, not 60 seconds — the system is bottlenecked by bandwidth and reconstruction algorithms. The 60-second target is aspirational for future hardware generations. It is not FDA-cleared for diagnostic use. Midjourney is starting with body composition maps — a category below diagnostic imaging in the regulatory hierarchy. The path from "beautiful 3D body scans" to "clinically validated diagnostic tool that your cardiologist can act on" runs through years of clinical trials, comparative studies against MRI and CT gold standards, and FDA review. No independent clinical validation has been published. The imaging claims come from Midjourney's own demonstrations. Comparative data against established modalities does not yet exist. And the privacy implications of full-body internal scans at planetary scale — a billion scans per month — is a conversation that hasn't even started yet. So I want to be precise. This is not ready for clinical medicine today. It may not be ready for years. Many ambitious medical hardware projects have failed in the gap between prototype and product. But. The fact that a working prototype exists — producing real segmented 3D anatomy from sound waves and compute alone — means the physics works. The engineering works. The question is no longer "is this possible" but "how fast can it be validated and scaled." And if it is validated — if the resolution holds up against MRI, if the AI segmentation proves reliable, if the regulatory path clears — then what we're looking at is the most significant new imaging modality in 50 years. For my entire career, preventive cardiology has been limited by the fact that seeing inside the body is expensive, slow, uncomfortable, and infrequent. We catch disease late because we image rarely. We image rarely because imaging is hard. A 60-second, no-radiation, spa-based full-body scan that costs a few dollars would demolish every one of those barriers. I've written about AI detecting inflamed arteries. About gene editing curing cholesterol. About GLP-1 drugs rewriting metabolic medicine. About cellular reprogramming reversing aging. This is the missing piece: the ability to see inside every human body, routinely, safely, and affordably — so all of those interventions can be deployed before the disease arrives instead of after. The company that taught AI to generate images from imagination just built a machine that generates images from the human body. The future of medicine showed up today from the last place anyone expected.



https://x.com/midjourney/status/2067421950314688759?s=20



The company that taught machines to imagine just built a machine to see inside your body. A full body medical scanner. You step into a pool of warm water. Half a million sensors pulse ultrasonic waves through your body from every angle. Sixty seconds. No radiation. No magnets. No claustrophobia. A 3D map of your organs down to a fraction of a millimeter. A hundred times the speed of an MRI. A few dollars instead of thousands. They mastered text-to-image. Now they’re doing sound-to-biology. Midjourney isn’t putting this in a hospital. They’re building a spa. Saunas. Cold plunges. Rooms of golden light that quietly scan your biology while you relax. The scan is a side effect of showing up. First location opens in San Francisco, late 2027. By 2031 they’re targeting 50,000 scanners worldwide. A billion scans per month. Fewer than twelve of these machines at full speed could outperform every MRI on Earth combined. Zero investors. Zero venture capital. Just subscription revenue from everyday people paying to generate AI art. A community funded research lab just walked into the most protected industry on the planet. We mapped the ocean floor. Photographed black holes. Sequenced the entire human genome. And the only way to see inside your own body was to be sick enough or rich enough to justify the scan. This inverts that. Monthly scans. AI tracking your organs over time. Anomalies flagged years before a single symptom appears. You stop reacting to disease and start watching for it. At this scale, preventive imaging could avert 30% of all deaths and cut healthcare spending in half. Debate the numbers. The logic underneath is airtight. What breaks your brain is who built it. Not a pharmaceutical giant. Not a government lab. Nine people at an AI art company. The team that spent years teaching machines to generate things that don’t exist just built one that reveals the thing that always did. You have lived your entire life inside a body you have never truly seen. You’re about to.

Thursday, June 18, 2026

Asking basic questions

 


The biggest improvement ever made to the most complex machine in human history came from a guy holding a camera. Not a propulsion engineer. Not a systems architect. Not anyone on the SpaceX payroll. A YouTuber named Tim Dodd. Dodd was touring Starbase when Musk explained how they eliminated the entire cold gas thruster system on the Super Heavy booster. Instead of a separate mechanism with its own weight and its own failure points, they just vented hot gas straight from the propellant tanks. Zero added weight. Zero extra parts. Dodd asked one question. “But this is only for the booster, right?” Musk stopped. Musk: “Although, arguably, now you mentioned it, it might be wise to do this for the ship too. We’re gonna fix that.” Seven months later, Musk confirmed it was one of the biggest improvements ever made to the vehicle. That moment should have been impossible. Thousands of the most brilliant aerospace minds alive work at SpaceX. They designed this system. Reviewed it. Tested it. Shipped it. Defended it in rooms where challenging the architecture has a cost. None of them asked the question. Not because they were stupid. Because they were expert. We worship expertise. We hire for it. We pay for it. We promote for it. We have built entire civilizations on the assumption that the person who understands a problem most deeply is the one most qualified to solve it. But depth is not the same thing as sight. Expertise is not a straight line toward truth. It is a circle. You learn enough to solve the problem. Then you learn enough to justify the solution. Then you learn enough to defend the justification. And eventually you know so much about why things are the way they are that you lose the ability to ask whether they should be. The SpaceX engineers understood exactly why the cold gas thrusters existed on the ship. Thermal constraints. Attitude control requirements. Heritage design logic. They had context and history and institutional memory and ten perfectly valid reasons the ship was different from the booster. Every single one of those reasons was a wall between them and the obvious. Dodd had none of it. No history telling him the question was already answered. No career incentive to leave the architecture alone. No knowledge of why things were the way they were. He just had the question. And the question was right. The cold gas system on the ship was not a mistake anyone was hiding. It was a mistake nobody could see. Because the only way to see it was to know less. Not more. Now think about your own expertise. The thing you have built or maintained or defended longer than anyone around you. The system you understand so deeply that nobody questions your judgment on it anymore. What is the question nobody around you is asking? Not because it is hard. Because it is so simple it feels beneath the room. That question is probably worth more than everything your smartest people have produced this quarter. And right now it is sitting in the mouth of someone you would never think to invite to the meeting. The rocket got lighter because someone didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to ask. Most expertise will spend its entire life making sure no one does.