before i get to that...

this is from the lengthy paper i just posted on reversing corneal damage:

Anti-collagenases include tetracycline antibiotics, chelating agents and blood products (serum and plasma). 

chelating agents are a bad idea on teeth.

blood serum seems unrealistic or medieval.

what about tetracycline antiobiotics?

and, in fact there is some literature on this that i'm going to summarize as follows: it seems like this works, but is considered unnecessary in the face of traditional dental practices.

well....these antibiotics are covered and "traditional dental practices" are not.

search and you'll find, right? 

so, i think i've got something close to an answer here, maybe, finally. let me look this up carefully. i'll need an rx, and i'll need to run it by my doctor, but this neither seems unsafe nor experimental - this is an understood class of drugs that has been used for this purpose and has been demonstrated to be effective. it's just not used because normal dental procedures (root planing, gum grafting) work as well or better.

i'm going to stop to take a shower and get back to it after.

the answer appears to be 'no' - i can't buy serum, i can't buy plasma and i can't buy alpha 2-macroglobulin, either.

the paper seems to be strictly about topical use. even if i could generate this stuff in my liver, it's not clear what my body would do with it.

so, that's the next series of questions.

so, this is a hefty paper that suggests that topical application of blood serum and plasma can help reduce degradation of the cornea.

....which perhaps suggests that the problem was a lack of bloodflow and that merely increasing bloodflow might help, too? but, again: no sane person would purposefully increase their blood pressure.

i'm doing everything right in terms of maximizing blood flow, although i realize i may have a genetic condition (my father had the same problem). the only thing that might be somewhat of a problem is that it's cold in here sometimes. are there studies tying air conditioning to gum recession? it would make some sense.

gargling with my own blood seems a little medieval for me.

can i isolate the mechanism here? it seems to be "alpha 2-macroglobulin". can i get that in a supplement? are there side effects?

https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2296&context=open_access_theses

it's not just that the marketization of education has reduced access to it.

it's also that it's reduced the quality of it.

it's just a product for sale. really. we say that; let's actually believe it and understand it and adjust to it.

it's a status symbol - a marker of wealth.

it's not much more. and, it's not of much further value.

analyze my writings for what they're worth, don't get bourgeois on me and start waving around letters and papers. they mean nothing at all...

listen.

a degree, nowadays, is a product that you purchase on a market. i don't like that, but i came to terms with it a very long time ago.

that doesn't mean you shouldn't go to school, if you can afford it, or if buying that degree is a step on the path to the life that you want to live.

but, the premise of "consulting experts" has been broken by the marketization of education; the sanctity of the process has been utterly decimated, and it is now as easy to find an expert in a topic without a degree in it as it is to find somebody with a degree that doesn't have a clue what they're talking about. the affirmation process has become meaningless for any substantive or meaningful purpose.

it really doesn't mean anything at all.

so, yeah - i'm adamant about my anarchism, and we're not keen on divisions of labour or hierarchies of knowledge. but, i claim my rejection of formal education is empirical.

the best and worst schools are all diploma mills at this point, because all you're really doing is purchasing the product, for sale.

i'm going to start a kickstarter to raise funds to pay for surgery to remove my tongue from my cheek.

i wonder if surgery to separate my tongue from my cheek is covered...

something else i can't rule out entirely is that this recession may be caused by my tongue being lodged firmly in my cheek tissue, creating a force of pressure on my jaw that is separating the gingiva from the bone.

i'd need xrays to know for sure.

calcium is generally presented in media reports as a white powder, which is probably just another example of structural racism.

this is actually elemental calcium, believe it or not:

to be clear: if you were to inject a calcium blocker in your arm, it would remove calcium from your blood, which would lower your blood pressure - and seems to often have the side-effect of gingival overgrowth.

injecting edta seems likely to actually kill you, although it seems to be used in small doses to clear the body of metal like lead. it might act as a calcium blocker in that context, by clearing the blood of calcium, if it doesn't give you a stroke first by calcifying it out.

but, if you put a collagenase inhibitor like edta on your teeth, it should pull the calcium out and leave your tooth a mushy mess of phosphate and whatever else has been uptaken into them.

so, if i'm going to use a collagenase inhibitor topically, i need to make sure it's not a chelating agent, as most of them seem to be, because it will just dissolve the metals in your mouth (calcium is technically a metal, kids) like a powerful acid.

this is making more sense as i'm reading more, but it's not helping me develop usable answers.

one of the complications is that these molecules seem to dissolve calcium on contact, so i don't want to put them on my teeth.

collagenase inhibitors are actually well studied in terms of:

- how or where they exist in plaque buildups, which might be of some use topically but largely isn't what i'm dealing with

- cornea and vision loss

the collagen/collagenase equilibrium seems to be the same mechanism underlying certain types of age-related vision loss. so, i wonder if boosting production in the liver might help with more than gum recession. i said that already, but it was less clear then than it is now.

i've got some lengthy, paper-length reports to read before i comment further, if i can stay awake long enough. and, we'll see in the end if i think that trying to get my liver to produce something and distribute it is an effective strategy or not - or if i think i have to do this purely topically.

it's an embarrassing show of ignorance by our parliament.

but, i don't expect much better.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/uighur-genocide-motion-vote-1.5922711

am i awake yet?

let's try again.

she used to tease me for wearing mascara and denying it because i had perfect eyelashes.

but, i never wore mascara...

i was just born with it. i guess.

whatever air tight logic she had in the fourth grade had evaporated by the 8th, as i had to deal with her giving me lap dances on the bus - and fully realized she expected me to ignore her, but wanted me to grab her. and, i did ignore her. so, it turned into a twisted game - how far could she push me?

i was happy when the routes changed.

and, i strictly avoided that one until graduation.

so, i have a distinct memory of getting fag hagged in the girl's washroom at the school dance in the fourth grade after she dragged me to it and i didn't react to her at all, and realizing the logic and absurdity of it at the same time.

hey, give the kid credit - she tried five or six times and after getting no response at all reacted empirically to what she observed in front of her - i was, in fact, obviously a girl. and, she was right, too.

after a few fails, that little girl that i tattletaled on for, amongst other things, trying to kiss me in the library was the first person to actually figure it out and decide i was actually a girl.

she figured it out before i did.

all i knew is that i didn't like the attention and wanted her to stop.

consequently, all that drugging me is going to do is make me more depressed and less social.

it's the worst thing you could possibly do to me.

i know that people might guffaw at this, but the annoying truth is that i've never been able to build substantive friendships with women because they all want to fuck me, and the feeling just simply isn't mutual. every time i've tried, i've just ended up frustrated by the reality that they're not able to interpret me in the gender i identify as. i don't bother.

further, i can't build friendships with men because i end up repressing an attraction to them, and it's not fair for me to be dishonest about that. i've avoided this in recent years, as well.

i cannot expect any kind of meaningful social existence until i can fully transition, first, and people can drop their delusions and misperceptions - until women are no longer attracted to me and can interpret me as one of them, and until men stop broing me, without realizing i want them to fuck me. there's just no reasonable way forward, there; there's no set of outcomes besides frustration and wastes of time.

until then, i will continue to live a solitary existence because the social pressures are too difficult for me to deal with. 

i'd rather just sit alone by myself than have to deal with expectations i don't want.

....but i'm not interested in a sex life at this point in my life.

what i want is to suppress and eliminate all sexuality; i want to be post-sexuality and post-sex.

my only experiment was a short relationship with a woman in my early 20s, almost 20 years ago.

that experiment failed.

while i haven't acted anything out because i don't have the body parts to do it with, i have, generally, been more interested in sex with men.

i'm still unable to stay awake, and i'm not confused about the reasons for that - i understand i'm being drugged against my will, and i don't know the source. if i did, i would reverse it. but, again, i can't starve myself.

i'm convinced that this drugging is rooted in a misperception of my sexuality, which i've written about the long way here on multiple occasions. so, let me try the short version.

- while i always felt more like a girl, serious gender dysphoria didn't start to sink in until around high school

- i have memories of young girls being attracted to me as a pre-teen and being confused when i didn't react to them. there was one little girl that explicitly hit on me, and i went to the teacher to ask him to ask her to stop, and he didn't understand, either. so, while i didn't have a formed identity at the time, i was certainly a queer kid, and the only reaction i got from anybody around me was that i was too stupid to understand the benefits of girls chasing me around. 

- i have distinct memories of being attracted to boys in my class in grades 7-12, and also the first two years of university, but no memories of being attracted to girls in my class. i didn't act on these impulses, and didn't even really understand them at the time. i know that people that knew me at the time have remarked to me that my disinterest in girls was an idiosyncrasy, and something they noticed about me; i had no interest, and they knew i had no interest because i broadcast it pretty clearly, and i'm pretty sure they had to tell a few that asked about me that i had no interest. 

- in fact, i was not as oblivious as i came off as - i did in fact realize that there were girls that were attracted to me in high school, and i reacted by going out of my way to avoid them because i didn't want to deal with the stigma of coming out as explicitly queer. when i knew that a girl was interested in me, i would avoid being in the same space as them for as long as it took for them to move on. some didn't move on at all, and the avoidance occurred over 4 or 5 years. my prerogative, at the time, was strict avoidance in an attempt to prevent a conflict. the unintended consequence of this was that i didn't build any substantive friendships with the gender i identified as, because i was too busy avoiding their sexual interest, which i did not want.

- during this period, i identified as a homosexual male online and simply didn't explore the issue in real life. i had dysphoric feelings from the start of puberty or before it, around the age of 13-14, but i suppressed them as unrealistic fantasies. these feelings became unmanageable around the age of 20. 

- so, i did not date in high school. at all. my tactic was total avoidance of the issue, and i assumed at the time that i would maintain a tactic of avoidance for as long as i was alive. 

- the dysphoria became unmanageable during the second year of university, and i went to see a psychiatrist about it, eventually starting hormone therapy at the end of second year.

- i was a complete and total virgin when i went on hormones - i had never had sex, i had never kissed anybody, i had never been on a date, i had never asked anybody on a date and i had turned down a few people that indicated interest in me. i had the sexual (im)maturity and experience of a 10-11 year-old.

- i got a job as a coffee barista in the fall of that year.

- there was a girl that worked there that aggressively pursued me, and i finally relented. smartly appealing to my empirically-driven nature, she insisted i couldn't know if i liked sex until i tried it and convinced me to conduct an experiment.

- my absolute lack of sexual and emotional maturity was unable to deal with what followed, at first. but, in the end, i made a clear decision: the experiment failed.

- that was in the mid 00s, and i have not had sex since.

so, i tried the experiment, and the experiment produce a clear result - i didn't like it.

the rdi for vitamin c for me would be 90 mg. again - i don't know why the health authorities would suggest differing rdis for men and women for vitamin c, except basing it on sexist (and very bad.) assumptions about body weight and height. but, i want to pick the higher number to err on the side of caution. (menstruating) women have higher iron requirements, and that at least makes sense, and i've chosen the higher numbers, as well. and, then i've lowballed everything...

so, why take 100 mg per meal, then?

because vitamin c is cleared by your body within hours - it's the reason these megadoses don't work. pauling didn't understand that because the science wasn't there yet. his argument was not bad, but he assumed that we'd store vitamin c for a while if we took huge amounts of it and we just don't - we process it as we come into contact with it and eliminate it as soon as we're done with it.

so, all that taking a 2000 mg pill of vitamin c is going to actually do is put unnecessary strain on your kidneys. unfortunately.

if we could hack ourselves to actually store and release - or potentially even synthesize - vitamin c, the kinds of things that people like pauling talked about could reassert themselves. we all know that we need vitamin c because we can't produce it, but we might not realize that most animals can make their own c and don't need to consume much at all. your dog can make it's own vitamin c, but your cat can't make it's own taurine. we're similar, but these are differences - and they're genetic.

we could flip the switch:

https://academic.oup.com/emph/article/2019/1/221/5556105

and, then these megadoses would transport c to the liver, where it would be released.

as it is, we just get rid of it very fast - so replenishment is necessary at regular intervals. so, if you're going to do this, you should take 100 mg 2-3 times daily, rather than a large dose all at once.

the truth is that what i'm doing right now is how real advances in the field of health science have always actually occurred.

so, what i've got here is something like this:

- collagen needs vitamin c & various amino acids

- collagenase seems to require folate

- so, whatever the rdis and intakes are, i may be experiencing the effects of more folate than c; i may be getting more than enough of both, but the b9:c equilibrium appears to be out of whack

- as a consequence, i'm producing more collagense than collagen

don't publish that or anything, but i think it's what is actually correct.

what do i do about it?

- i could take more vitamin c, but i may be maxxed out. i could try topical c on my mouth.

- topical collagen in my mouth

- i want to find a study of some sort before i jump to reducing folate, but i need to find some kind of collagenase inhibitor, regardless.

i don't want to say that this is cutting edge science; it seems like it's more along the lines of butter-knife science, in that nobody seems to want to approach gum loss with medication. it's just not how anybody does this. but, i have more brains than dollars, and little choice but to try and make some guesses and carry out the experiment. you can publish the result somewhere if you'd like, in the end.

there's a study here about vitamin c and oral health:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6678404/