18.Rare diseases

300 to 500 million cases are reported.

Now when we talk about suicide, there is also a medical contribution here.

No heart disease, nocturnal asthma or sleep apnea.

It's made a mistake.

I want to tell you about another disorder.

She graduated NYU, she has a heart condition.

Some of you may remember that.

I went to see Dr. Marder, a schizophrenia expert who was following me for medication side effects.

These are years that we could get.

Three years later, he's ripping through boot camp. Attending physician calls the improvement in his bloodcell count miraculous.

I have Friedreich's ataxia, a neuromuscular disease.

This is a place where the oldest living female population is found.

We then take the cells, the vascular cells, blood vessel cells, we perfuse the vascular tree with the patient's own cells.

Because we understand very little about most human diseases.

like Parkinson's or essential tremor.

When I travel around, I ask my colleagues in biomedical research

Elyn, you don't really understand

Okay, we can start with that. I say no.

Bellini's lymphocemia. It's an autoimmune disease.

It's similar to the pellagra epidemic in Mississippi in the '30s.

We think there's a future to this.

The death of Little Nell and Cordelia and all that sort of stuff just doesn't happen anymore.

It's a national tragedy and scandal that the L.A. County Jail is the biggest psychiatric facility in the United States.

Let's flip the table yet again

Really?

But, as a cancer doc, this is what I see.

Most of this is in developing countries, and the majority is in Africa.

I'll show you an example of that real quickly.

I feel like i'm going clinically insane.

Some diseases are caused by a defective gene.

OK. Now let's move from sleep to diseases.

These little chippies, these things are the size of a credit card.

It's the most amazing thing I've ever seen.

She suffers from a chronic illness.

But when it doesn't, we have to do something about that, therapeutically.

90 of people who die by suicide have a diagnosable and treatable mental illness at the time of their death.

And I was rather taken aback.

So here are some amazing goals that I think we can deal with now.

We do this by color coding our patients. We call this prioritization process triage.

And as you can see virtually 30 of all disabilities from all medical causes can be attributed to mental disorders or neuro psychiatric syndromes.

We are more likely to die from the diseases of old age such as cancer, stroke and the number one killer

Let's move now to a more painful subject.

How does that play out in terms of application to a disease?

So dystonia is a disorder affecting children.