First of all, congratulations on your initiative and for pushing through despite the challenges you've faced! It's frustrating that you have so little systemic support, but it honestly makes me happy to see people still putting in the effort to do meaningful work, even when it really shouldn’t be this hard.

As for your questions, I wish I had a clear answer, but I’ve seen the same issues in Eastern Europe too, and no one seems to have figured it out yet. There is nothing more discouraging than wanting to do something, only to hit wall after wall just trying to get started. This causes people to quickly give up on their ambitions, which is a shame.

Very interesting article. I knew about cluster headaches from my research about migraines (of which I suffer - luckily a lot less nowadays than in the past). 

I would have never thought about this condition as a possible EA target, but now I am eager to read more about it and see how can I support the efforts made to improve the treatment of this condition.

Thank you for the great read!

I do see where you're trying to come from in terms of focusing on effectiveness — especially the idea that acting without understanding consciousness might lead to wasted effort. That makes sense from a resource-allocation standpoint.

One thing that stands out in how this is framed is the separation between humans and animals. Usually, we, humans, take an approach of talking about animals from an outside perspective, which works in most cases:  us, the humans, and them, the animals. But if we want to bring biology into this, specifically the biology of consciousness, it would be scientifically incorrect to apply that separation because biologically we are animals too.

Framing the question as “do animals have consciousness?” as if they’re a completely different category overlooks the fact that consciousness likely exists on a continuum. Humans didn’t just suddenly become conscious — it likely developed gradually across species. So instead of treating animal consciousness as an all-or-nothing question, it may make more sense to think in terms of degrees and types of experience, with humans being part of that same spectrum.