I don't think it's been tested in studies, but I can offer that I had hand warts for 7 years until I got the HPV vaccine, and the hand warts suddenly disappeared after dose 2.
HPV functions by cloaking itself from your immune system. The reason why treatments like freezing work is not by removing the HPV -- it's by stimulating your immune system to look at the area around the wart. Then your immune system can get past the cloaking, and recognize the HPV, and then it destroys it.
So functionally, it makes total sense that the HPV vaccine would clear existing infections, and anecdotally, lots of patients (such as myself) have seen HPV clear after getting the vaccine. It's a shame that our bureaucracy doesn't have the incentives to run the studies to acknowledge it institutionally.
From my understanding most vaccines have never been compared against placebo trials, but would be happy to be proven wrong, e.g. if you can find a study on HPV vaccine.
I remember reading about this about a year ago, so I'm not sure what the source was and how reliable it was, but I found this meta-analysis of studies researching the effect of the vaccine on people who had previously already received treatment for HPV:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8879645/
This seems to indicate that the vaccine reduces the risk of finding abnormal cells and precancerous lesions for people who already have HPV.
I really wish we had therapeutic vaccines against HPV. As a man, I always got told "it's not for men", followed by "it is also for men, but only if you never had sex", followed by "it's also for men who had sex, but only to a limited age".
As a male who meets all the criteria to be in a high risk group for HPV throat cancer, and who is dealing with a persistent HPV infection (as proved by warts that won't go away), I'm really sad that I may one day at a young age get cancer in my throat, and there is nothing I can do about it to prevent it. I wish we would put the same amount of energy into inventing vaccines that suppress the virus, or help the body to get rid of them.
I was in a similar situation to you. The doctor said it wasn't indicated for me, but I said I wanted it anyway, and the doctor said ok, and it cleared up my existing HPV infections after dose #2.
I live in a part of the world that feels almost too liberal for drugs, but that also means that when I wanted to get the HPV vaccine, I walked into a clinic and got the shot. Then I went to a different country and got the second and third shots.
What's the hold up?
Please keep trying to get your Gardasil-9 shots even against their advice.
I feel like this only works in small groups. Have you (repeatedly) done this in bigger groups? I feel like that's a great way to make everyone hate you. Although I must say that sometimes I have asked this question, and people seemed thankful because they also didn't understand a thing, but simply didn't dare to ask. This is a bit tricky, because if nobody asks questions, I feel like they all understand and I'm the only dumb one who doesn't get it.
> I feel like that's a great way to make everyone hate you
Maybe. But at least you'd know what the discussion is about. Or ask for notes. I can't say I've been in a meeting where someone asking questions was frowned upon.
This is how I feel about a lot of books, such as The Lean Startup. Technically, there's a new topic with every chapter, but after the first 100 pages or so I feel like I get the gist, and I'm not really learning much new.
A lot of modern book publishing has turned into a bit of a bait and switch grift. You take 2 post-it notes worth of ideas and pad them out to 300 pages with tangentially related anecdotes, because on average people buy books online based on the title and the page count alone, and put them on a shelf for several years before they read them, meaning they can't return them by the time they find out.
Which is why my first read is just skimming the book, marking important passages. Then I read just these passages, write notes down, and put the book away. But I often buy heavily discounted books.
My current data engineering job is already less than 10% coding anyway. It's mostly talking and drawing diagrams.
I suppose if an AI will do all the work, I will probably be the one who uses the AI. Sure as hell the business people are not going to be the ones leveraging AI to build stuff.
With the milky way it's the same thing as the auroras. I went camping in the middle of nowhere USA, and on a clear night you can absolutely not see the milkyway the way it's portrayed in photos. It looks waaaaaaaaay less clear. You need a very long exposure camera to see it the same way as on the internet. The only difference with Europe is that I saw more stars, but none of those nebulas.
Not entirely true, I was out hiking in the mountains of Colorado, and that was the best Milky Way view I’ve ever seen. It looked just like the crazy photos with millions of stars. Just laid on a rock staring at it for an hour
