As a former ER tech that had to hold up a belly that size for 30 minutes for a doctor to put in femoral central lines....I feel your pain. (literally)
I have a number of complex chronic health problems and I usually hit my out-of-pocket limit around April every year. I find spiteful glee in costing my health insurance tens of thousands of dollars every year. (And every penny of it is actually medically necessary.)
I'm assuming folks aren't paying a mortgage's worth of tuition each month though.
As a woman who has been trying for literal decades to exist in traditionally male nerdy spaces, there are a LOT of asshole gatekeeper guys that keep the women away. I've gotten everything from inquisitions into my "nerd cred" to outright rape threats from guys in nerdy and gaming communities.
I was fairly young, but I do remember using Windows 95 or 98 with Netscape and there were popups that had to be killed through the task manager (or equivalent, it was 30 years ago, so I don't remember precisely).
Back on Windows 95 through XP, each individual window was a process that could be killed in Task Manager, and popups opened in a new window.
As someone with experience with emergency medicine and related areas, the idea of bulletproof windows on a car is one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard of. If the windows are bulletproof, that means they're also window-breaker-proof, and in a car that has doors that don't work and likes to catch fire, that's a recipe for a death trap.
Brains are very finicky things and they get very upset if there's any disruption in their supply of glucose and oxygen, but anesthetics are carefully selected to not disrupt that as much as possible. Anesthesia might paralyze the muscles you use to breathe, but that's what the intubation and ventilator is for. The anesthetics we use don't affect the heart muscle because it uses different ions and chemicals than every other type of muscle in the body to generate contractions. However, open heart surgery will absolutely mess with the heart which will disrupt circulation.
I would wager that it's more to do with the surgery itself. Even transient hypoxia from blood not getting to your brain for a little bit can make a big difference. Anesthesia is used very frequently with rare complications, but complex heart surgeries have higher complication rates.
Occupational therapy is a thing, but it is a very different thing. Occupational therapy is part of rehab that helps patients regain or retain activities of daily living like dressing, bathing, and feeding themselves, etc.
Yeah, my old desktop computer is getting turned into my first dedicated Linux machine and my current desktop isn't getting updated to 11 until October 13th.
Time to prepare is very important because we have crap labor laws. It can be very hard for people to get time off work and missing a day can be very painful. For folks living paycheck to paycheck, missing a day of pay means missing a rent payment or not being able to afford food. In a lot of jobs, time off is very limited, even for illness, and is highly likely to be unpaid.
The robber barons have done an extremely good job at nailing our bootstraps in the pits of Tartarus through debt and indenture.
This looks like a great recommendation, thank you!
I have to know all of the medications for my board exams, but knowing what bullshit the pharma companies are advertising would be useful. There's a lot of people who will ask for Ozempic and then be horrified when they learn about the side effects (or the price of the medication). I worry a lot about the "compounding pharmacies" that will mail people knock-off Ozempic with minimal medical oversight. It's just a matter of time before someone gets killed by the pancreatitis or something.
One account in the milieu isn't going to make that much of a difference.
That will actually be helpful towards the weird stuff that men get into in addition to wholly unnecessary "hormone replacement therapy" (aka juicing on steroids)
That's actually super helpful. I'll need a few "content creators" to seed the dummy account with.
That will be a good downtime activity, but I also want to know what the algorithms are shoveling.
Signing up for emailing lists is probably a good place to start. I also accidentally subscribed to an RFK apologist Substack when it was recommending health-related writers to me.
Dr. Oz and Oprah are featured in Behind The Bastards for a reason. Oprah actually got a 7-episode mini-series.
I'm looking for medical misinformation on the internet. Where should I be looking for it?
I'm a 3rd year medical student and I've already been caught off-guard a few times by the WILD medical misinformation my patients talk about, and figured that I should probably get ahead of it so that I can have some kind of response prepared. (Or know what the hell they've OD'd on or taken that is interfering with their actual medications)
I'm setting up a dummy tablet with a new account that isn't tied to me in any reasonable way to collect medical misinformation from. I'm looking at adding tik tok, instagram, twitter, reddit, and facebook accounts to train the algorithms to show medical misinformation. Are there any other social media apps or websites I should add to scrape for medical misinformation?
Also, any pointers on which accounts to look for on those apps to get started? I have an instagram account for my artwork and one for sharing accurate medical information, but I've trained my personal algorithm to not show me all the complete bullshit for the sake of my blood pr
What Cutting Medicaid Actually Means - From a healthcare professional perspective
I wrote an essay (with sources! and data!) about what cutting Medicaid actually means because people don't have good perspective on it.
I wrote an essay (with sources! and data!) about what cutting Medicaid actually means because people don't have good perspective on it.
What Cutting Medicaid Actually Means - From a healthcare professional perspective
I've started writing some essays about my experiences in medicine and I'd appreciate any feedback folks have to offer.
Essays about medicine, medical issues, and my experiences in medicine. Click to read A Gremlin's Medical Journal, by Medgremlin, a Substack publication. Launched 3 months ago.
I'm working on creating a little social media presence for medical communication and education, and that includes a little substack where I've been posting some essays on my experiences in medicine. I would really appreciate any feedback folks have to offer or suggestions for topics that might be interesting to read about.
(I'm holding off on posting some of my spicier opinion pieces until I've graduated from medical school and gotten into residency, but I do try to be candid in my writing.)
A week of chaos in public health - Your Local Epidemiologist
A discussion post (and request for suggestions) regarding Vaccination
I'm currently on my pediatrics rotation and on my first day in clinic, I had about 40% of families decline vaccinations. For the last visit of the day, the patient was a 3 week old coming in for her newborn followup and her parents said that they were against all vaccinations.
I asked them to tell me what their concerns were and spent an hour debunking conspiracy theories and answering all the questions they had. By the end of the discussion, they agreed to look at the CDC fact sheets for the recommended childhood vaccinations for the first year of life and said they would look at doing a delayed vaccination schedule at least. They wanted specific numbers and data about complication rates, but I didn't have that on hand. They seemed okay with my explanation that the data is everyone walking around that got all their childhood vaccinations and are doing fine.
Now, as a medical student, my time is basically worthless and I can absolutely sit there for an hour and answer questions, but
(For the Americans) When it comes to insurance, what is your approach to dealing with the insurance monsters like UHC?
I have some previous experience fighting with the mass-murderers...I mean...insurance companies from the role of a clinic assistant, but I want to hear perspectives from physicians or other providers about your approaches to dealing with them.
I plan on being very familiar with the ICD-10's and CPT's and how to match those up as advantageously as possible, but I know that won't be enough on it's own. Do you think having someone in the office with medical training whose job it is to deal with insurance companies as their primary/only job is necessary?
"The Adjuster" has definitely captured the collective consciousness and kicked off some serious discussions, but I'm afraid that the mainstream media, corporations, and corporate-owned politicians are going to stamp this out or defy the will of the people so vehemently that it won't matter what we do short of full-on revolution.
A journey through his online footprint and influences
This is a great article written by Robert Evans of 'Behind the Bastards' fame that goes into Luigi's background, social media presence, and apparent ideologies.
We all have had patients with chronic pain, we all know someone with chronic pain, and some of us unfortunately have chronic pain. We know how horrible it can make someone's life, and how much worse life can be if your insurance just keeps denying anything that could help.
Edit: Here’s a link to what is most likely the real manifesto: https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/luigis-manifesto
Ken Klippenstein is a very reliable journalist and this version of the manifesto contains the snippets that have been released by law enforcement. Also, considering the thing was hand-written, that very long version involving his mom is dubious. (And there’s not any good evidence that his mom is in anything besides decent/good health)
A journey through his online footprint and influences
Edit: Here’s a link to what is most likely the real manifesto: https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/luigis-manifesto
Ken Klippenstein is a very reliable journalist and this version of the manifesto contains the snippets that have been released by law enforcement. Also, considering the thing was hand-written, that very long version involving his mom is dubious. (And there’s not any good evidence that his mom is in anything besides decent/good health)
I'm sure we all have opinions about the UHC CEO, so I wanted to make a thread for discussion and venting for us.
My contribution to the Void Flood (this little gremlin's name is Nova)
America is about to wind back the clock on all kinds of healthcare, not just reproductive healthcare. What are people's thoughts and plans to help our patients through these next 4+ years?
I'm still a medical student, but I'm about to start planning out my 4th year, and I'm hoping to structure my electives to get the best education I can to help as many people as possible. I'm also planning on moonlighting somewhere like Planned Parenthood while I'm in residency to do a bit more in the way of direct assistance. (I'm pretty sure my state is just blue enough that PP will continue to exist in some capacity.)
Dr. Glaucomflecken on the IV Fluid Shortage
Having just completed my surgery clerkship, this is surprisingly accurate.
There's always time for a little medical humor!
PSA: Hurricane Helene trashed the US's biggest manufacturer of IV fluids, so expect shortages to be ongoing for quite a while.
This is my absolute favorite source of spices and I need everyone to know about Penzeys.
They have really good sales almost all the time, their spices are extremely high quality, and they are politically active as anti-fascist leftists....what's not to love?
Dr. Glaucomflecken is, as always, on point.
Let's hope Cigna catches some real consequences this time. (Not likely, but we can hope.)
Implicit Biases are very important to be aware of in healthcare. This is a project that has a bunch of implicit bias testing, and I think it's worthwhile to recognize your own biases.
I like to go through and take a couple of these tests every now and then to kind of check up on myself to make sure I'm not developing biases that will negatively impact my ability to care for my patients. I think it's probably a good idea to at least get a baseline for yourself so you know when you're most likely going to need to self-monitor what you say and do more closely.
For folks still in training, how do you try to present yourself to new preceptors when first meeting them?
Personally, I try to present myself as excited for the training with some degree of competence without trying to pretend like I already know....anything? I feel like I have some trouble striking the perfect balance between competent and receptive, or maybe it's a balance between confidence and humility.
I think erring on the side of humility and receptiveness is a better bet if you're not sure where the balance is, but I'd like to hear from other folks' experiences and perspectives.
(I'd also be grateful for perspectives from folks who have been preceptors or instructors!)