Throwaway05
23d ago
Welllllll no.
I know Scott's article makes a case but it's way more complicated than that.
Sleep medicine, Psychiatry, and PCPs all have wildly different views about Melatonin all of which can be simplified as "sure, fine, it's safe" but a lot is happening under the hood there.
Some evidence it does absolutely nothing.
Research is complicated because anxious college students, the elderly, someone in a Psychiatric inpatient unit recovering from an episode of something, and a 40 year old man with a bowel perf in the hospital all have wildly different sleep needs and problems. Makes research very hard.
Then you add in the stuff like spaced dosing being more effective...
Throwaway05
23d ago
Once you get used to pepper enough you can still taste the flavor and so on even at high heats.
Think of it like metal music - once you get used to the genre you can hear the melodies and vocal talent on display, but if you aren't used to it can sometimes sound like random noises and screaming.
Throwaway05
24d ago
On this note, I have a large number of friends who live in a Blue state, and have a tenuous connection to a swing state (for instance their parents live there) and they are just registering and voting in the swing state via absentee ballot.
Anyone who can swing it.
Throwaway05
24d ago
Like I said pain is complicated, likewise pharm is complicated - some people are fast metabolizers of certain medication and get no effect at all.
Personally I find NSAIDs to be even better for low dose opiates for pain associated with significant inflammation (for me).
Throwaway05
24d ago
The physiology of pain is very complicated. Briefly - Ibuprofen is an NSAID, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug it basically works by turning off a part of the inflammatory response which is a large part of most types of pain. Bowel pain? Inflammation. Healing wound? Inflammation. Stub your toe? Inflammation.
If you have the right type of pain it can be immensely effective, even more effective than opioids in the sense that it can actually "heal" the pain instead of just doing other stuff (if swelling is pushing on a nerve for instance).
However it can be bad for you because you need inflammation......
For the wrong type of pain it's not going to do a lot.
A good rule of thumb is that if swelling is involved you'll want to use ibuprofen, if it's not Tylenol.
However how functional your liver kidneys, and gastric system etc. are matters a lot.
Throwaway05
25d ago
Inspired by another poster who wrote about misadventures with Tylenol, I just want to provide a brief commentary on medications.
More medication is not necessarily more better.
Many medications essentially work by targeting a receptor of interest or receptors of interest.
If you double the dose you might go from 95% of the effect you want to 98% of the effect you want, while also saturating other receptors that cause side effects.
For ones that are more receptor specific (like Ibuprofen (Advil)) we find that things like doubling the dose from 400 to 800 has little impact on pain, more of an impact on anti-inflammatory properties, and a massively increased risk of side effects.
Don't just take a handful of pills expecting more to do more of what you want!
Throwaway05
25d ago
4000mg acetaminophen 1h before, so it has time to properly kick in;
Unless you have a relevant advanced degree and significant domain specific knowledge DO NOT DO THIS.
Tylenol overdose is one of the worst ways to do imaginable.
Throwaway05
25d ago
One of the things that I found interesting was Joe talking afterwards about how he couldn't pin Trump down. It makes sense! He's a good interviewer, politicians in general and Trump in particular manage to dodge and weave - but Joe makes it explicit.
And I think we spend a lot of time Monday morning quarterbacking communication and would do no better without additional training or something.
Throwaway05
26d ago
Interesting. Again I don't think it's invalid to not be about Trump, but I did find it very entertaining - Joe is a great interviewer but it felt like he was on the Trump ride and at times sitting there going "wow." The anecdote about the Lincoln bedroom isn't particularly interesting, but the fact that it was Trump saying it and the way he said it was.
If I want to hear about the technical details of Space X I want an engineer, if I want to hear Elon do his thing I want to hear Elon. Talking over Joe, being hard to pin down. That's part of the Trump experience.
And again, no problem if you don't like that or aren't about it in this situation because you want to see Joe nail him down on the JFK stuff.
From a campaign perspective you have Trump sitting down and seeming more or less normal, with it (despite media push about that) and reasonable (despite reputation about that) for multiple hours.
Someone else called it relatively boring but if I'm Trump that's what I want to be here given that so many people have heard me called senile Hitler.
Also for what it's worth I know some people who have met him, and this interview matches what casual interactions with him are supposedly like. Don't know if there is anything else under the hood however.
Throwaway05
26d ago
I think it helps if you try not to parse it like high density scientific style communication (much of the diet of most people here) or usual focused politician/PR boilerplate.
It's more like two guys smoking weed and shooting the shit, but one of them has to periodically say some campaign related bullcrap.
It's all over the place, Trump goes on these asides, but I was enthralled with the first ten minutes or so - it's easy to listen to, shockingly focused for his reputation, and charismatic as hell (this is coming in as someone who hasn't really heard him do anything long form before).
My suspicion is that most of the people here who didn't like it were already pretty anti-Trump or very logic brained. Both of those are totally fine, but it's worth considering a more "typical" person might be more directly buying what he's selling here. This is very much one of the ways high end charisma can manifest itself, and in one of Joe's post-game type things he even talks about how hard it is wrangle Trump, which is interesting given how proficient of an interviewer JR clearly is.
Throwaway05
26d ago
The media blitz on this front has been very strong, it's tough to consistently completely disregard "experts."
Throwaway05
26d ago
He knows exactly what he's doing.
As a point of fascination with Trump I'm not really sure if he knows exactly what he's doing or he's just an entity who has gone through enough selection pressure to emerge as a thing that naturally does this kinda stuff.
Throwaway05
26d ago
He called it "the weave" and says it's the mark of a good speaker if they can weave multiple different things together but still come back home at the end.
Again has someone who has never heard him talk at length I was really impressed by the answer about a thing, shove in a random campaign talking point in a reasonableish way, go back to the thing.
He's clearly still very with it.
Throwaway05
26d ago
Yeah to some extent it just seemed like two dudes talking about a bunch of random stuff with a moderate degree of intelligence. For Trump that's a big win.
Throwaway05
26d ago
Sorry that was in subjective hours as experienced by Hillary Clinton being forced to listen to Trump. I apologize for my lack of clarity.
Throwaway05
26d ago
Trump's interview with Joe Rogan is out. I think it should be mandatory viewing, as someone who has read a lot about both of them but never heard either speak at length I had some interesting surprises.
I spotted a few major pieces of culture war fodder.
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Joe apparently didn't want to do this because he was worried it would end up being fluff or making Trump look good.
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I do think it makes Trump look good. It's the beer test, implemented, and for all to see. Many people have the instant opposite visceral opinion. As with everything about this, that's interesting.
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Most here have concerns about legacy media, I think this adroitly makes the case against legacy media - as does Joe himself explicitly multiple times during the interview.
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I've polled some Kamala supporters and they all think she'd have done just as well, but I highly doubt that.
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Trump gets asked about election stealing...and some of his answer kinda matches some of the "best" answers we see here (complaining about procedural changes and so on).
At time of this posting it's at 18 million views in the same number of hours.
Throwaway05
28d ago
You're putting a lot of words in my mouth, which I'll attribute to your repeatedly mentioned intellectual exhaustion.
It's possible, because I've had this conversation many, many times and nobody seems to learn or listen, but calling me "exhausted" is straight up ad hominem.
You won't catch me saying the affirmative action policies are good, but there still aren't a large number of minorities present in medicine, it's mostly the Whites and Asians involved in the rat race. People drop out/abandon because it doesn't seem worth the money and they can't hack it, which they will often not admit.
With the tensions present in medicine today we can't get doctors to work where we need them with salaries we have, but all of the suggested solutions to the problem reduce salaries...
You'll get worsening shortages, or more realistically the two tiered system we've started to develop.
Throwaway05
28d ago
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The average patient's average interaction with a doctor is not complicated. What patient's don't generally realize is that is a small fraction of the overall work done by doctors. This is true both because more complicated patient's and problems take up more time but also because they have more interactions, and more kinds of interactions. Family Medicine is bread and butter outpatient appointments, but nobody else is. Every single interaction Emergency Medicine starts complicated or can go from simple to complicated at the drop of a hat, and needs to be treated as complicated for that reason and for others like defensive medicine. Entire specialties like Radiology and Pathology never see a single patient or outpatient appointment, and complex surgical specialties will see someone for five minutes in the clinic but only after all the work is done. Even when the thinking part is simple other parts of the workflow or not. An anxious 20 year old comes in with chest pain. It's MSK or anxiety, not a heart attack. But if you have to rule out the heart attack just in case. Remembering to do that is not hard. Triaging when to do it when you are balancing everything else, knowing what level of intervention (EKG? Sure. Echo? Absolutely no. Trop? Maybe, but if we do serial trop the patient might leave) is hard, and communicating this to a stressed patient again while balancing all the other tensions in your job is hard. Non medical people, and even medical people underestimate the level of intellectual challenge in medicine, and yes it doesn't require as much horsepower as being NYC PE person, but it's not a small amount....but it's only one slice of the job.
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NPs/PAs are important because society decided that you are right, and they came up with this plan. And it sucked. It was decided to be the best plan, and it made everything worse. Other solutions will have similar problems, otherwise we'd have done them.
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All the billionaires get together and decide to donate a 100 billion dollars to improving U.S. medical education to increase supply of doctors. Some things can be fixed. Some things can't, even with infinite financial support. One of the biggest problems is that doctors want to go where the people and society are because they have to give up years of their lives in training and don't want to live in upstate NY or Arkansas. Fine. 100 billion. Offer them 3 million a year and they'll go to the places that need doctors. You can fix that problem with infinite money but we don't have infinite money and its extremely unpopular to raise doctor salaries so even if you increase the supply all you'll be doing is improving supply in a few geographic areas and depressing salaries in them. Not helpful.
Some things just can't be trained. Surgeons require a certain number of procedures to be proficient. If we don't do them often enough because we don't need to then you can't train them. Plenty of programs cannot handle more residents because not enough stuff is happening to adequately train more than we have. You can increase the numbers mildly in most specialties but somethings it just won't work. With 100 billion you could bribe people to get extra, unnecessary surgeries or to use outdated modalities that you only do in emergencies, but that would be grossly unethical.
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Year after year going into medicine becomes less popular. People quite and burn out and it's not because of the hours its because of other stuff like lawsuits, lack of respect, administrative burden. None of what you are talking about addresses any of those. Cut salaries by further increasing supply and you'll get less Americans in it.
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Foreign doctors aren't free and without issues. Patients complain about accented doctors all the time. Training is inferior in most countries. This is a real problem. Stealing them from other countries is an honest to god additional ethical issue you can't ignore. Often (like with other forms of importing) they become trapped and subjected to poor working conditions.
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What's your job? If you are posting here, probably tech? How do you feel about outsourcing? Americans are losing job, the product is terrible quality, most workers hate it and most employers hate it because it sucks, but go with it because cheaper is king. I don't want your job to go away, and you don't either. That applies here also.
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The typical model of rent seeking is something like NYC taxi cab medallions. You can more or less costly increase the supply with maybe some mild increase in traffic and a significant decrease in salaries. Again that is not the case here. Importing foreign doctors is vaguely possible if you are okay with decreasing the value of American healthcare (which is a massive segment of the economy) and reducing quality of care (which you don't believe is important) and reducing salaries (which you don't care about at all) but you can't do a lot to increase the total number of American medical grads because their isn't enough work to properly educate them.
Throwaway05
28d ago
As is usual for us there's a whole bunch of different ways this happens. I'm going to simplify some of this for ease of reading.
Surgical rounding team (ex: post-op patients). A team of 4 residents manages 80 post-op patients they know nothing about. Some of them are very complicated, but they are complicated in a relatively small number of ways that can be picked up and put down as needed. Someone prints out a hand out from the computer that tells the residents everything they should need to know, which is generated automatically. Some particularly weird situations get handed off verbally. Nobody remembers what was said. Every X amount of hours the team changes over or new people come on and off. Shift times are generally vague, they exist on paper but emergencies are constantly happening and surgeries run long. One intern (first year resident) who doesn't really know anything about anything is hypothetically in charge of making sure floor patients don't die, while everyone else hides in the OR as much as possible. Handoff risk: low-to medium.
Radiology. You finish your worklist and everything is done. No handover. Ish. Handoff risk: low.
Medical floors. During the day 12 residents manage 120 patients. 2 them stay overnight or two fresh people going on to work 16 hour nights for a week straight. If something happens overnight you hope it's someone you know, otherwise you look at the chart, the notes are good because it's medicine, ideally if something complicated is expected to happen the day team told you about it. Sometimes they don't or it's a new problem. Fuck. Also the nurse will call you at 10pm asking for an update on the discharge plan because the family asked. You don't know because you've never met this patient before and never will. Handoff risk: normally low-to medium, but sometimes high.
Surgery. You don't hand off, you can't. Handoff risk: incredibly high, but because the docs stay until they are done, low. If the surgery has NPs/PAs involved (most typically Anesthesia). Can be hugely problematic since they don't have responsibility and try to stick with shift times.
Surgical/Medical ICU. Patients have failures of multiple organ systems. Documentation is good and on paper tells you what is up. In real life you lose track of how often fluid or blood products went in. Complicated stuff happens constantly. You takeover a patient and have to tell their kids and their mom is going to die. You've never meet the mom. Actually that was the other patient. This person is a dad and is fine. Fuck. Okay now someone else is dying. How many units did the first person get again? You've worked 90 hours a week for the last two weeks. Handoff risk: fuck my life.
Obviously I'm making this sound more ridiculous than it is for the most part, but in real life we do endeavor to write good documentation that supposedly allows an oncoming doctor to pick up the patient, we have handoff reports with automatically summarized information, and a verbal signout (or written via computer for like a weekend daytime doc on a psych unit) happens. But the reality and complexity of the situation often gets in the way.
Lots of research has been done to get this as safe as possible, and it works to some extent, but you can't substitute for actually knowing the patient and being the one who did the surgery or admitted them last week.
Throwaway05
29d ago
No no, it's not simple like that. For one, patient handoffs are so dangerous that one of the reasons we work stupidly long shifts is because someone so sleep deprived they are drunk is safer than having someone else come in for a complicated patient.
For another, we've been part of a multi-decade long project to remove the "guild" and reduce training requirements to bring in replacements. When I first started complaining about this the jury was still out, it's back - and it doesn't work. NPs and PAs have much less exhaustive training requirements and have been in place and growing for years. They suck. They don't save any money because increased testing costs money (it's just a transfer from the doctor to the hospital) and the increased testing and consults create burdens any everyone else. NPs and PAs just consult everything, overloading the sub-specialists even more. Radiology is near breaking from unnecessary testing.
Train more doctors you say. Sure, fine. Except that that takes a long time, requires professors and other resources (we don't have enough cadavers for anatomy lab already) and things like surgery specialties don't have enough procedures to adequately train in a timely fashion. You need to see a variety of cases and patients and advancements in medical care have made this harder (which is mostly good but not for this specific issue).
Import foreign doctors you say. Okay better. Yes most foreign doctors are very much not as good. They are also mostly good enough, especially after retraining. But then you are stealing doctors from other countries, which you know, need them. You are also stealing jobs and wealth from Americans, which is sometimes justified but most of the people making this complaint don't like it when it happens to them or people they like.
In the longer term you'd kill Americans going into medicine, and Americans going into medicine and our absurd wealth is responsible for a huge amount of medical advancement.
Even if you fix the hours worked issue (which for most specialties is a problem during training more than anything), you won't remove the other major causes of burnout which include administrative burden, malpractice, American patients, fucking dealing with dying people, and so on.
Throwaway05
29d ago
Here's one ~ someone else wrote when we were still on Reddit a few years ago.
The following is loosely based on true events:
Imagine you are a trauma surgeon.
You work in a small trauma center; you show up to your shift. There’s more shouting than normal in the ED, so you head to the trauma bay first.
24 hours to go.
The first thing you see is a headless body in one of the bays. “What the fuck is that Jim” you say to your colleague, who is currently administering chest compressions to a clearly very temporarily alive patient, and only such because someone is basically rhythmically punching her in the heart.
“Oh yeah, EMS didn’t want to call it so they left that there. Paperwork, you know? No idea where the head is.” He pauses. “Car accident, we think, didn’t get a great report before they ran off.” He then grunts and someone else takes over chest compressions, he walks over to lab print outs and stares at some numbers, willing them to change. They don’t. The patient gurgles for a second, everyone’s breath pauses as they hope, but then nothing else happens. You look back at the patient being coded, her chest looks like it has the consistency of spaghetti and meatballs.
You take in the scene and then ask the dreaded question “how long?” “we don’t know, she was down in the field and we’ve been doing compressions for…30 minutes?” One of the nurses’ interrupts “43.” You stare. He stares back. He then points to the pediatric trauma bay. The curtain is closed. “I didn’t want all three, you know?” You nod, then walk over to the headless body. “Time of death, whenever the fuck now is. I’ll chart later.” Someone reads off the time, someone else writes it on a post it note and puts the name of the patient on it, and then slaps it to the computer you usually use.
You briefly consider how aggravated this would make the hospital legal team when a nurse walks in from the main ED, exposing the headless body to a bunch of civilians waiting for treatment of their mild respiratory infections. She says “umm doctor, the one patient wanted to talk to you about their pain medicine. Thanks!” She then runs away before you can ask follow up questions, and you hear her saying to another nurse “OMG it’s just sitting their headless.” A patient looks ill hearing this.
“Fucking nurses” you say. “Fucking nurses” the nurses in the trauma bay reply back.
Anesthesia sighs.
The phone rings, you pick it up. It’s the OR. “Dr. Fuckmylife, how can I help you?” “We’ve got a hot gallbladder down here, and then you have emergency cases for the next 12 hours. Jim’s got the bay, can you come scrub?
You sigh.
23 hours and 45 minutes to go.
Early training is not going to help with the above shitshow.
Throwaway05
29d ago
As is usual when this kinda thing comes up, time for me to jump in and defend the field.
Doing medicine isn't what people expect.
For most specialties the hard part isn't knowing what to do for any specific patient (outside of fields with technical skills like surgery, or fuzzier guidelines with broader knowledge bases like Psychiatry), it's balancing all of the tensions of medicine. Some things are complicated. Radiology needs to know everyone else's shit. Neurology involves tough, at times technically challenging physical exams that are actually meaningful for diagnosis.
However most patients really only interact with primary care or basic bitch outpatient medicine, and then they go "I can toss this shit into google and get myself the diagnosis and the management." Yeah you can, we get paid for knowing the situations where the first hit on google is wrong, but that doesn't seem to excite people so let's talk about the other shit.
The hard parts of medicine include the long training period, brutal hours even as an attending physician, working nights, weekends, holidays, and 24+ hours in a row. Managing multiple types of intensely dysfunctional bureaucracy (the government, insurance, the hospital system, medical records), dealing with constant death and bad outcomes, writing notes that need to be clear for whoever is coming on to replace you and will protect you from getting sued if you fuck up, or if you don't, and doing all of this an environment where people are screaming, constantly trying to get your attention, and with a chair and keyboard that a homeless shelter would reject for being too gross.
It's the summation of requirements, including empathy and related fatigue and burnout, and also the necessary customer service/patient interaction skills, and the need to be doing stuff other than your work constantly like basic research and the need to continue to study continuously every year for the rest of your career...
Most doctors are teachers, researchers, and all kinds of other shit in addition to the doctor.
Balancing all this stuff without becoming an alcoholic or killing is absolutely a challenge and well, we see high rates of both of those things in the MD population.
I can't really think of many jobs that combine reasonably high intelligence, massively high work ethic, significant administrative burden, massive hours, catastrophically poor resources and equally disruptive customer service needs.
Takes a lot to balance.
To put some context in, most jobs involve things like lunch breaks and misc. downtime during the day where you can shoot the shit, unwind, and refocus. It's extremely common for a physician to work 16+ hours with barely enough downtime to piss and shove a flaccid banana down your throat like a two dollar hooker.
That's absolutely foreign to most sectors of the economy (including nursing).
Throwaway05
30d ago
While players tear their ligaments all the time, and Watson was getting beat up by every pass rush he faced, the timing lines up a liiiiitle too conveniently.
It was non contact though right?
The mysterious extra law suit though...
Yeah I think the medical side of things are most worried about the flu side of things. Monkeypox doesn't excite me, Myco isn't a big deal.
A Kessler cascade is one of my biggest fears though, yikes.
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