medgremlin @ medgremlin @midwest.social

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7

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477

Joined

2 yr. ago

I'm not even done with medical school and I get targeted advertisements about how well British Columbia treats their doctors.

I have the suspicion that you aren't really familiar with what rural poverty looks like. These are people that cannot qualify for credit cards, get taken advantage of by payday loans, and struggle to meet the basic necessities that don't actually even add up to a reasonable standard of living. These are people that can't afford to put enough gas in the tank of their car to drive to those other stores, and literally their only source of groceries is likely to be a Walmart if they're lucky enough to have one in their town.

There is a good amount of Schadenfreude to be had when it comes to Trump voters, but when you're in the position of trying to help them control their diabetes and high blood pressure on a diet of cheap, processed, high-sugar, high-sodium crap, you'll lose that spiteful glee real quick. These are people that are inextricably trapped by poverty, food deserts, healthcare deserts, and failing education systems that never really had a chance and it's hard for me to find any real satisfaction in seeing them suffer.

No there are not. In many smaller/rural communities, the nearest non-Walmart store can be up to hours away and be more expensive. If you're barely scraping by and you have to work long hours or multiple jobs to do so, you don't have the time or spare income to tack on an extra 2 hours to your grocery shopping and pay 10-20% more. Walmart has done an exceedingly good job at wiping out the competition in small communities that have no alternatives. That's why you don't see as many Walmart stores in larger, more populated areas....their entire business model relies on killing the competition.

And that's not even getting into how their new employee orientation has to include information on how to sign up for food stamps.

I will pretty frequently just eat straight peanut butter with a spoon, but peanut butter cookies are also great. Peanut Butter an Co. has a cinnamon sugar peanut butter that is obscenely good. I found out about it because Babish did a peanut butter tier list video and the cinnamon sugar peanut butter was the highest rank.

Peanut butter, nice bread, and hoarding shiny little trinkets.

I have my suspicions about how they calculated that and there was a bit in there about how freeze-dried coffee has the most fiber in it. I think it is much less than they are claiming for most of the preparations that people usually consume. Don't get me wrong, there are definite social and ritual aspects to coffee that aren't replaceable, but this trend of trying to insist that everything has some kind of physiological health benefit is seriously misguided. If you want a hot drink with actual proven health benefits, plain green tea without sugar or milk or anything is your best bet.

Did anyone else see this headline and immediately jump to Ghost in the Shell?

"0.47 to 0.75 grams". The daily recommendation for fiber is 25 to 30 grams. You're better off with a caffeine pill and some oatmeal.

I didn't say they paid no taxes at all, but I was explaining how the bottom 50% of earners in the country pay very little, if anything. The 19.3% is the bottom 19.3% of earners in the country, not a percentage of the bottom half.

I would argue that if you get everything (or most of your withheld taxes) back on your return....that means that you effectively didn't pay federal income taxes or paid very little. If you get most of your withholding back every year, you could look at how you filed your exemptions on your I-9 and increase the number to the maximum allowable. I know some people that put the maximum allowances so that no federal tax is withheld from their paycheck and they just pay the balance at the end of the year when they file their taxes instead of getting a return.

For Youtubers, I wish H. Bomberguy would post more often because I've seen him cited as some people's animus for de-radicalization. Abigail Thorn of Philosophy Tube was another good "male role model" prior to her transition and a lot of viewers commented about how she gave them a better model of masculinity to emulate (particularly ironic as she turned out to be trans). I think FD Signifier is a good example for young black men in particular, and Devin of Legal Eagle is a fine example of a successful professional for those that are more business-minded.

They just try to slide it under the radar by not showing the taxes on your payslip because you're more likely to look closer at that than your receipt from the grocery store.

And that's not even getting into state income taxes, Medicare taxes, and Social Security taxes. Those all have different brackets and some states are more regressive than others. There are states like Texas that don't have income taxes, but they make up for it by taxing everything else through things like sales and property taxes.

Of note: sales tax is always the most regressive taxation model, and tariffs are basically sales taxes on steroids.

For something very relevant to health: cooking, knowing how to measure food, and how to read a nutrition label. Obesity would be much less common if people were able to cook their own food more often, and knew how to actually measure out accurate portion sizes.

I totally get that time, upfront costs like cookware, and access to decent ingredients are MAJOR factors in whether or not someone can learn how to cook, but anyone can and should know how to read a nutrition label and know how to measure accurate portion sizes for the things they eat. If you are trying to lose weight or work on healthy habits, a food scale is infinitely more valuable than a body weight scale. Most people do not know what 28g of chips looks like.

The bottom 50% of Americans make less than $40k a year. They do pay some federal taxes, but with the standard deduction, the 19.3% of working Americans that make less than $15k a year don't pay any federal taxes. The standard deduction goes up to $22.5k for a head of household (i.e. a single working parent). Given that the federal minimum wage still works out to $15,080 a year, that means a full-time minimum wage worker doesn't make enough to get hit with income taxes.

Edit: Here's a wikipedia article with the numbers I pulled and the tax bracket info is on the IRS website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm in my 30's and my Dad still refers to me as "kiddo" sometimes.

And I'm pretty sure she's from the UK....