I’m one of the minority who will put forward some GHD orgs this week ;). I think that marginal individual dollars often do the most value funding growing orgs that do one important thing well, so picked Fortify Health, FEM and Lafiya. Full disclosure I know and admire some their founders/workers a bit personally which makes a difference to me too.
I’m not yet convinced about cluster headaches as a cause area, mainly because I’m not convinced that the number of sufferers isas high as claimed. In 13 years as a doctor in Uganda and treating a few thousand patients, I’ve never seen a convincing case of cluster headache here. However their fundraising post was well written and compelling, and I like new cause areas getting attention so I added them to my vote list.
I’ve also voted for the Humane League due to their excellent track record and experience doing what I still consider to be the most important/effective animal welfare work—getting hens out of cages. I realise given the ranked choice voting system this will mean that my vote will not go to one of my top ranked GHD orgs, but if it counts at all might actually count towards an animal welfare org lol, which I’m all good with :).
I’m not convinced that the number of sufferers isas high as claimed. In 13 years as a doctor in Uganda and treating a few thousand patients, I’ve never seen a convincing case of cluster headache here.
This is indeed quite surprising! The relatively low prevalence and the lack of recognition of the disease / misdiagnosis may explain it to some extent, but zero patients in 13 years is still very surprising.
(Consider that even an average neurologist only ever sees a few dozen CH patients during their entire career. I asked Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3.0 to estimate how many CH patients an average neurologist in the US sees per year, assuming an annual prevalence of 1/2000 adults, and their responses were 1–2/year and 1/year, respectively. They also think that the average neurologist sees 3–5x (5–10x resp.) more CH patients than the average primary care doctor, but the odds of not encountering a single patient in 13 years should still be very, very low. Will look into this!)
Also, there’s almost no epidemiological data on the prevalence of CH in African countries, so the prevalence error bars are large. (In our paper, we included a sensitivity analysis of the most uncertain variables to add some nuance.)
Nice response—i wouldn’t take my experience too seriously. i only work part time as a doctor (i run an org) and i could well just have encountered missed the one or two patients with cluster headache. if prevalence is one in 2000 and I’ve only seen a few thousand patients i probably just missed the guy lol.
I probably shouldn’t index off my own experience so much either.
interestingly though there are a lot of conditions with wildly different preference around the world and we don’t understand why.
I’m one of the minority who will put forward some GHD orgs this week ;). I think that marginal individual dollars often do the most value funding growing orgs that do one important thing well, so picked Fortify Health, FEM and Lafiya. Full disclosure I know and admire some their founders/workers a bit personally which makes a difference to me too.
I’m not yet convinced about cluster headaches as a cause area, mainly because I’m not convinced that the number of sufferers isas high as claimed. In 13 years as a doctor in Uganda and treating a few thousand patients, I’ve never seen a convincing case of cluster headache here. However their fundraising post was well written and compelling, and I like new cause areas getting attention so I added them to my vote list.
I’ve also voted for the Humane League due to their excellent track record and experience doing what I still consider to be the most important/effective animal welfare work—getting hens out of cages. I realise given the ranked choice voting system this will mean that my vote will not go to one of my top ranked GHD orgs, but if it counts at all might actually count towards an animal welfare org lol, which I’m all good with :).
Thanks for the shoutout and for the vote! :)
This is indeed quite surprising! The relatively low prevalence and the lack of recognition of the disease / misdiagnosis may explain it to some extent, but zero patients in 13 years is still very surprising.
(Consider that even an average neurologist only ever sees a few dozen CH patients during their entire career. I asked Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3.0 to estimate how many CH patients an average neurologist in the US sees per year, assuming an annual prevalence of 1/2000 adults, and their responses were 1–2/year and 1/year, respectively. They also think that the average neurologist sees 3–5x (5–10x resp.) more CH patients than the average primary care doctor, but the odds of not encountering a single patient in 13 years should still be very, very low. Will look into this!)
Also, there’s almost no epidemiological data on the prevalence of CH in African countries, so the prevalence error bars are large. (In our paper, we included a sensitivity analysis of the most uncertain variables to add some nuance.)
Nice response—i wouldn’t take my experience too seriously. i only work part time as a doctor (i run an org) and i could well just have encountered missed the one or two patients with cluster headache. if prevalence is one in 2000 and I’ve only seen a few thousand patients i probably just missed the guy lol.
I probably shouldn’t index off my own experience so much either.
interestingly though there are a lot of conditions with wildly different preference around the world and we don’t understand why.