medgremlin

@medgremlin@midwest.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Heliobiology a pseudoscience?⁩ ⁨⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  It is absolutely nonsense. People are subjected to stronger, more direct magnetic fields all the time in MRI’s, and MRI’s are substantially safer than most other imaging modalities in medicine (besides ultrasound). The amount of radiation from non-atmospheric sources vastly outweighs the cosmic (non-UV) radiation humans are subjected to, to the point that it’s not really even worth considering outside of maybe astronauts or people who take long-haul high altitude flights extremely frequently.

  The amount of ferrous material in blood is negligible at best, and there’s an estimated 3 to 4 grams of iron in the entire human body. The pressure from your heart pumping and the relatively high percentage of blood’s mass that is not iron (about 5kg) means that the effect of the iron if it was responsive to magnetic fields is slim to none.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨doctors⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  For a lot of doctors, the incentive to not do risky procedures is the fact that you have to live with the guilt of your patient’s death, even if you did everything perfectly. Or, you do everything perfectly, but they still have a poor outcome because they weren’t healthy enough to go through the procedure and the recovery, and you get sued for millions of dollars because you didn’t spend 4 hours going through the informed consent with the patient to ensure that every single possible complication was adequately discussed.

  I’ve worked in emergency medicine and I’ve had patients die in my care that we had absolutely no way of saving. The screams of their families still haunt me and I will carry those cries of anguish and loss to my grave. I would not perform a procedure that was not 1000000% necessary if the risks are too high because I have enough blood on my hands already, and I haven’t even finished medical school.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨doctors⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Sometimes. It depends why the first surgeon would be unable to do the procedure. If the problem is that the patient might not wake up from anesthesia because of problems with heart disease, lung problems, or other metabolic issues, then it doesn’t really matter what the surgeon has to say about actually doing the procedure because the anesthesiologist is the one saying “no”. If it’s an issue of too much adipose, sometimes it would mean that the surgery would take longer than it’s safe for the patient to be under anesthesia.

  Another possibility is that the first surgeon operates at a facility that doesn’t have access to more advanced technologies or other medical specialists in the event that something goes wrong. And there are some surgeons that are just more willing to accept the risk of a bad outcome, and I would argue that that’s rarely in the patient’s best interest. There are alternative options that the surgeon should discuss with the patient as part of the informed consent process, and sometimes, the alternatives to surgery are just safer than the risk of the surgery itself, even if they aren’t as effective or are a long term treatment (ongoing) as opposed to a definitive treatment (cure). If the patient has a high risk of serious complications, up to and including death, then attempting the curative procedure might be more risk than it’s worth compared to a long term medication that mitigates the disease.

  You’ll see this with pregnant patients too. For elective procedures that have safer alternatives or temporizing measures (a holdover treatment until surgery is safe), those are generally preferred to putting a pregnant patient under anesthesia because of all the cardiovascular, immunologic, and other physiologic changes that happen during pregnancy alongside potential risks to the fetus.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨doctors⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a reason you have to get a pre-op physical exam for any non-emergent surgery. Figuring out if you’ll wake up from the anesthesia at all is part of the calculus that determines whether the benefits of the procedure outweigh the risks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do children address a non-binary parent?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m in my 30’s and my Dad still refers to me as “kiddo” sometimes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨doctors⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Another option for diabetes are the SGLT-2 inhibitors like Jardiance. They work by making you pee out all the excess sugar. You won’t have the diarrhea issues, but you will be peeing a lot. (It’s basically a special diuretic, so it’s also really good for blood pressure.) Bonus: they’ve also gained approval for slowing the progression of diabetic nephropathy (kidney disease), so if that’s something you have any trouble with, it can help get it covered.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨doctors⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  One of the biggest problems with the GLP-1’s (Ozempic, etc) is the fact that people lose weight by just not eating as much, and the things they do eat aren’t likely to be very nutritious. Protein malnutrition and muscle wasting are very common sources of weight loss on Ozempic. That’s why it’s standard of care to get your patient to a licensed dietician before starting them on one of those drugs if at all possible.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨doctors⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The BMI number that is calculated just from weight and height is really just a number that tells us we need to go look at some other numbers. The other numbers are things like body fat percentage, cholesterol levels, blood pressure, blood sugar, etc. It is entirely possible for someone to have a “normal” BMI and still be very fat and unhealthy, and those people are pretty easy to identify visually, just as someone with a “high” BMI who is a powerlifter or something is very easy to visually identify.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨doctors⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m a medical student and I have some direct experience with this. Sometimes, the difference between the surgeon who will do the procedure versus the surgeon that won’t do the procedure is the availability of specialized facilities and equipment that they have access to. An elective surgery (i.e. not an emergency surgery) can go from routine to very high risk depending on the amount of adipose tissue the patient has.

  And it’s not just a matter of the fat tissue overlying the surgical site. Morbidly obese patients are much more likely to have things like sleep apnea which can make anesthesia more risky and might require more specialized equipment than a particular surgeon/hospital/anesthesiologist might have access to. The “morbid” part of “morbid obesity” also refers to the fact that people above a certain threshold of weight are much more likely to have other health conditions like heart disease that make anesthesia more risky.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨“No Apple tax means we will lower prices” - Proton announces lower prices for users by up to 30% after US ruling against Apple fees⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s what I’ve been seeing. I don’t use Netflix anyways and I mostly just have a VPN for when I’m on a university or hospital campus and I’d like to keep my internet usage private. (Or when sailing the high seas for books.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨“No Apple tax means we will lower prices” - Proton announces lower prices for users by up to 30% after US ruling against Apple fees⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, my 2 year plan is up in June. I haven’t decided what I’m switching to. I’ve heard good things about Mullvad’s privacy policies and politics, but I’ve also seen reviews that a bunch of sites and services have them blocked.

  I’m open to suggestions at this point.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pictures of Animals Getting CT Scans Against their Will: A Thread⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  They’re probably having a better time than the ones that aren’t intubated. The intubation is to make sure they’re still breathing while they’re anesthetized. The ones without tubes are just awake and angry/scared.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pictures of Animals Getting CT Scans Against their Will: A Thread⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The crossovers between veterinary medicine and pediatric medicine are a lot more significant than most people like to think about. The Venn diagram isn’t a perfect circle…but it’s close.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TRUCKIN'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  As an ED tech, I had to clean up C diff and chemo diarrhea off patients, beds, floors, and commodes multiple times. ED boarding meant that patients that should have been admitted to hospital rooms that had a bathroom attached were stuck in the ED for hours or even days.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TRUCKIN'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I worked as an assistant in a plastic surgery office for a while as well, and I had to clean lipoaspirate out of the suction tube/syringe and the erlenmyer flask it was emptied into. That was still preferable to the time it got splattered on my scrubs because the surgeon emptied it into a kidney basin the first time. (The flask was my idea to prevent getting splattered again.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TRUCKIN'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  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)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AdNauseam is a uBlock fork that goes further: it actively attacks marketers by auto-clicking every ad before blocking⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Back on Windows 98 through XP, each individual window was a process that could be killed in Task Manager, and popups opened in a new window.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Startup will brick $800 emotional support robot for kids without refunds⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  FIP Warriors is who we went through, but it progressed too quickly because the fluid accumulation was in his lungs, not his abdomen.

  That medication is quite new to the market and wasn’t available when this happened about 4 years ago, but I will mention this to our current vet so that she knows about it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Startup will brick $800 emotional support robot for kids without refunds⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Careful with that one. Big pharma killed my cat once.

  My cat came down with Feline Infectious Peritonitis which is a coronavirus that is lethal to cats when the virus mutates and becomes FIP. FIP is 100% fatal without treatment, and there is now a treatment (originally developed at UC Davis) that is now owned by a big pharma company. They shut down the feline clinical trials in 2020 because they also make Remdesivir, and there was a concern that any problems with the feline drug trial, the FDA might not approve Remdesivir for COVID. You can buy the drug on the internet from China, but it’s a 12 week course of twice daily injections, and you’re gambling on whether you got a good batch every time you get a shipment.

  By the time we found this out, it was too late to save our kitty, so he crossed the rainbow bridge.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Clever, clever⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Generational AI like ChatGPT is absolutely useless for anything besides maybe making summaries. Humans use language as a default method of communication, and if you are trying to produce academic work, the onus is on you to learn how to use language effectively. These heaps of algorithms and marketing exclusively hallucinate and plagiarize, both of which are absolutely unacceptable in academia (and should be unacceptable in society at large, in my opinion.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Clever, clever⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Tell me you haven’t reviewed classmates’ papers without telling me you haven’t reviewed classmates’ papers.

  Some of the papers I’ve read from my classmates make me wonder how they got out of high school, let alone into university or (!!) medical school. There are a lot of people who cannot write decently to save their lives that are still somehow in academia.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I thought the point was to be better than Hamas? Of course they mistreat detainees, but that doesn’t mean Israel gets a blank check to do the same. Also, many of the Palestinians currently being held by Israel without charges in indefinite detention are innocent civilians, including many from the West Bank. Israel has been illegally detaining and mistreating thousands upon thousands of Palestinians without any kind of due process or concern for human rights for decades. Pointing a finger at Hamas and saying “Look! They’re doing it too!! October 7th!!1!!” is not a valid argument for how Israel has been treating captive Palestinians for years.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The way that Hamas treats Palestinians is partially the responsibility of Netanyahu and the Likud given that they provided Hamas with material support to take power in the first place. Also, the fact that Israelis stormed an IDF base in protest of the punishment of IDF thugs that anally raped innocent Palestinians to death with rifles tells me a lot about what Israel thinks of all Palestinians, not just the ones that are actually part of Hamas.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tough Shit⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I just finished my surgery rotation for medical school and I saw so many colonoscopies. I have seen the inside of dozens of people’s colons and this is a pretty good explanation for what’s going on. I could also tell which patients ate a lot of fruit or seeds because there would still be some residual seeds in there after the clean-out prep.

  Pro tip: if you are going in for a colonoscopy, ask for the pill form of the prep. Most insurances cover it, it works better, and you don’t have to drink the gallon of disgusting fluid.

  Also! Colonoscopies are very important! They are the single best tool for detecting and preventing colon cancer. During the scope, if they find any polyps, they get removed and sent for evaluation to see if they are cancerous, pre-cancerous, or benign, and the polyps are basically the seeds of colon cancer. It is recommended to get your first colonoscopy at age 45, unless you have a family history of colon cancer, in which case you would get your first one 10 years younger than the age the family member was diagnosed, or age 45, whichever is younger.

  There are the home tests like the cologuard, but that has a 45% false positive rate, and they’re only good for 3 years while a colonoscopy is good for 10 years(*) if it comes back normal, so the cologuard ends up being more expensive in the long run. It also only detects the later, more advanced polyps that are more likely to be closer to being cancer, and if it comes back positive, you have to get a colonoscopy anyways. A lot of the false positives come from the fact that it tests for DNA associated with cancer mutations and for microscopic blood in the stool, and they don’t tell you if it’s positive because of the DNA or the blood, and you can have microscopic amounts of blood in your stool for tons of reasons.

  TL;DR: Colonoscopies are very important, and MUCH better than the home test. Talk to your primary care provider about when you should start screening, and if you’re over 45, go get scheduled for one now. Colon cancer is a horrible disease, and it’s actually quite preventable and easy to catch in the early stages, if you get your colonoscopies on the recommended schedule.

  *Addendum: If your colonoscopy detects certain kinds of polyps, or more than a certain number of polyps, you might be on a shorter interval for surveillance scopes to make sure they catch anything before it becomes cancer, and that interval can be anywhere from 3 to 7 years depending on what they found. Also, if you have a family history of colon or rectal cancer, you’ll be on a 5 year schedule because you’re higher risk.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Horrors We've Unleashed⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Many species of mosquitos are reliant on blood for reproduction. The females utilize a “blood meal” for the nutrients for laying eggs to be fertilized. Additionally, it is the female mosquito bite that transmits diseases like malaria.