medgremlin @ medgremlin @midwest.social

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2 yr. ago

Stories like this make me very glad that I got my pediatric experience in a good children's hospital before starting medical school. The attending physicians made sure to drill it into everyone's heads that if the parent is expressing concern about a change in condition or "something just not being right", you report that to the patient's physician and nurse ASAP. Everyone from the physicians down to the admin folks were empowered to challenge decisions they thought weren't in the patient's best interest.

Hell, I even had a case where, as the ER tech, I challenged a physician on her diagnosis of a child and refused to let her discharge the kiddo without looking at him again. The mom told me something was wrong, and even with just an EMT license, I was able to see something was subtly wrong as well. It turns out the mom and I were right and the physician changed her diagnosis and admitted him to the hospital for treatment instead of discharging him home to follow up in clinic in a couple days.

Generative 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.)

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.

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.

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.

Edit: Here's an article describing the way the IDF treats doctors and paramedics. (Who are not members of Hamas) https://www.democracynow.org/2024/8/27/hrw_report

Except that the sentencing keeps getting postponed.

That's the thing though...I think it is part of their due diligence to know what's going on in their own business. If they can't guarantee that it's safe, they shouldn't release it.

The c-suites have the ultimate power and therefore ultimate responsibility for whatever happens in their organization. Similar to how parents can be held criminally liable for their children's actions. It's just that much more incentive for them to make sure things are in order in their organization.

Also, Citizen's United ruled that corporations are people, so they can be held to the same standards of responsibility as other people.

I think the threshold for proving the "reasonable person" standard for companies should be extremely low. They are a complex organization that is supposed to have internal checks and reviews, so it should be very difficult for them to squirm out of liability. The C-suite should be first on the list for criminal liability so that they have a vested interest in ensuring that their products are actually safe.

I'd accept that if the makers of the self-driving cars can be tried for vehicular manslaughter the same way a human would be. Humans carry civil and criminal liability, and at the moment, the companies that produce these things only have nominal civil liability. If Musk can go to prison for his self-driving cars killing people the same way a regular driver would, I'd be willing to lower the standard.

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.

The nuclear industry is heavily regulated by the government via the NRC, but they impose even stricter regulations upon themselves. Solar and wind are cheaper, but they are less reliable. A grid comprised of a mix of solar and wind, bolstered by nuclear is the most effective and least environmentally harmful option that we currently have.

The emissions are negligible on the grand scheme of things, especially compared to fossil fuels. The manufacturing of solar panels isn't the cleanest either.

While that gene therapy does exist, it is not the same as what is being done here. The offspring of these mosquitos will have this same modified gene. The offspring of the recipients of the Sickle Cell gene therapy will not have the modified gene. We have the ability to alter a single human for their lifespan, but we do not have the ability to alter a human in such a way that their offspring will carry the same modification.

Gene therapy is not the same thing as CRISPR. CRISPR is modifying the genome before the organism makes it past 1 cell.

Not necessarily, but the advancement of the technology and refinement of the technique are not progressing very quickly and since it's so far away from human application, there's not a lot of money/investment in it.

As a widely available, cost-effective treatment? Almost certainly not. We have yet to successfully genetically modify a human being and there's a metric ton of legal and ethical red tape to deal with before we can even try.

CRISPR is profoundly difficult and expensive, and gets more difficult and expensive the more chromosomes are at play. Modifying mosquitos is much easier, and with the short generations (days or weeks instead of decades for humans) it's much easier to get the genetic changes to stick and observe their efficacy. We might get around to modifying humans someday, but it will likely be centuries before it is available for anything besides fixing lethal anomalies (and even then, it'll be a long time until that becomes consistently successful).

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.

Thank you!