I think the EA community has shown incredible initiative in tackling major global health issues, making a lot of progress on problems such as malaria (which causes 600,000 deaths/​year) and lead poisoning (which causes 1.5M deaths/​year), among so many others. These efforts really show our ability to mobilize resources and drive change when we identify pressing problems.
My hope is that we can direct a similar amount of attention to helping the ~3 million people worldwide who have this terrible condition. Even if my quantitative estimates of the burden of pain were off by an order of magnitude, the situation would still be tragic (and, as @algekalipso has pointed out, somewhat analogous to times when anesthesia had already been invented but not adopted, given the promise of low dose psychedelics1). I think it would be an incredible success story for our community if we managed to eliminate (or at least significantly reduce) this source of enormous suffering. If you’d like to contribute in any way—either with time or funding—please get in touch!
1 Coincidentally, when I asked Claude to estimate the lifetime prevalence of undergoing major surgery without general anesthesia before it was invented, its initial guess was surprisingly similar to the lifetime prevalence of cluster headaches—0.2%.
I think the EA community has shown incredible initiative in tackling major global health issues, making a lot of progress on problems such as malaria (which causes 600,000 deaths/​year) and lead poisoning (which causes 1.5M deaths/​year), among so many others. These efforts really show our ability to mobilize resources and drive change when we identify pressing problems.
My hope is that we can direct a similar amount of attention to helping the ~3 million people worldwide who have this terrible condition. Even if my quantitative estimates of the burden of pain were off by an order of magnitude, the situation would still be tragic (and, as @algekalipso has pointed out, somewhat analogous to times when anesthesia had already been invented but not adopted, given the promise of low dose psychedelics1). I think it would be an incredible success story for our community if we managed to eliminate (or at least significantly reduce) this source of enormous suffering. If you’d like to contribute in any way—either with time or funding—please get in touch!
1 Coincidentally, when I asked Claude to estimate the lifetime prevalence of undergoing major surgery without general anesthesia before it was invented, its initial guess was surprisingly similar to the lifetime prevalence of cluster headaches—0.2%.