My career of treating patients has ended
old.reddit.com
old.reddit.com
> the body can only absorb a maximum of 100 mg a day, with the rest creating the world's most expensive urine
An adult can absorb up to 500 mg of vitamin C: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12134712/
And vitamin C is one of the cheapest supplements, at least in that part of globe I currently in. The entire line about "expensive urine" is taken from a handbook of party conversations.
https://redditmetis.com/user/thanosrain
Account created October 14, 2019
135 total comments
102 of which are in /r/QAnonCasualties
Other top subreddits include HermanCainAwards, CovIdiots, and Quit_Headquarters.
Some comments in AskReddit and others, almost exclusively about covid.
This doesn't say much about the persons identity, but they're clearly not coming to the site to have fun.
Submission by weekday is also interesting, high on weekdays, low on weekends, highest on Monday.
I hate to be skeptical because I have doctor friends that have similar covid stories, but this post is quite sensational, newsworthy even. I wonder if the user would be receptive to verifying themselves with the mods.
edit: their first comment is March 3rd, 2021 and first submission is March 2nd, 2021. Nearly a year and a half after the account was created.
The whole things reads like an airport novel, adjusted for a specific subject. It's what people who believe about a certain world view expect to see in that world. A tear-jerker for sure, but in practice, for example, I have a lot of anti-vaxxer friends, and even though I don't agree with their choice (but I agree with their choice to have a choice), none of them behave like the people in the story. They are not insane, they just strongly adhere to a certain set of believes.
People would point out to the writer's history, but in fact, their account is only 9 month old, with an average of a few posts per months. It's completely not unreasonable to believe that someone spends this effort to create an illusion of credibility. Heck, I know people with two dozen "active" hacker news accounts, doing the same thing, but in their case so they could promote key tech articles, instead of vaccines.
Internet is a lovely place, isn't it.
As your own source explains, “High intakes of the vitamin are generally well tolerated; a tolerable upper level was recently set at 2g based on gastrointestinal upset that sometimes accompanies excessive intakes.”
The OP’s reference to 100mg daily was evidently a typo; he probably meant 1000mg rather than 100.
FYI: I’m currently taking 1000mg daily on the advice of my primary care physician.
Run as fast as you can away from doctors and other healthcare providers who think like this. Healthcare providers who have this particular arrogance can create very severe health issues for you and your family with their hubris. There are incredible doctors out there who also have humility when it comes to their own knowledge and will answer your questions and listen to you and take you seriously when you come to them with your own research.
The human body is orders and orders and orders of magnitude more complex than the most elite and advanced human endeavors of engineering. It's almost not even comparable. You have to have extreme humility in the face of such complexity and in the age of Google and open access to medical journals there is just so much to know and so much that is available that any doctor or healthcare provider who would dismiss the value of patients and caretakers doing their own research is really someone who is very dangerous to you and your loved ones.
It's not about "be the better way".
It's about being able to to entertain & consider multiple theories, versus just being an asshole who won't even regard any convictions except your own.
Google Medical School doesn't have to be right every time. It doesn't have to be the more consistent option to be not "the better way", but simply worth entertaining. It doesn't have to be right 10% of the time. Some suffering patients will find & learn & discover things that do seem to fit their own problems. Being an asshole doctor who disregards, who writes off alternate theories: that's the wrong fucking way, and fuck those doctors, run the fuck away, get them fired, get them blacklisted, & warn other people. That's the wrong way.
There's no one more invested in a patients health than the patient. The resources of time & analysis they'll put in to trying to figure out what could be an issue is far far higher than what the medical system can provide for all but the very very richest of people. The resources out there to figure stuff out are real. Is it a better way? No. The patient doesn't have years and years of medical school. But that doesn't make their way wrong. That doesn't make them caring about themselves wrong, doesn't make their quest for truth & healing wrong. Any doctor that would turn their nose up at a patient, would refuse to hear a patient out, that refuses to acknowledge how wonderful & accessible medical information is in the world, and how helpful that can be: they are strictly worse. Worse diagnosticians, and worse people.
- The doctor is going off a very short explanation you gave in a 30-minute appointment. If you have a serious medical problem, you can dump days, weeks, or months into finding information that matches your experience down to the fine details, which can very much matter - especially if you have an unusual case of something.
- There may be new information since your doctor was trained. Medicine has advanced a lot, and while doctors do their best to keep up, there’s more new research than any one person can digest.
- You will always believe yourself, never dismiss your experiences as “exaggerated” or “drug seeking”, and never blame your conditions on obviously unrelated causes.
That last one is especially relevant to people who aren’t cis white dudes. I’ve witnessed, with my own eyes, a woman talk to a doctor about chronic nasal congestion, and his response was to tell her to lose weight. Doctors habitually not believing the experiences of their patients has done incredible harm over the years.
I've seen a similar situation but felt the doctor was stating what was important. He did accept her experiences but... Her congestion was not remotely as important as her weight, her weight was going to speed her death, and she'd best lose weight soon.
IOW he was saying "regardless of how you solve your congestion, you simply must lose weight now or you will die soon from a heart attack or stroke."
It's also important to distinguish between technique and knowledge. The difference between a layperson and their surgeon is enormous, a layperson and their doctor, not so much in the grand scheme of things.
1. The type that's too incompetent to diagnose anything more complicated than a cold or a broken bone. Usually they are general practitioners, sometimes they are specialists.
2. The type that might have been a productive person but they are too arrogant and/or lazy to diagnose anything but the most common things that pop up in their specialization. If its starting to look like its going to take any amount of effort at all to diagnose they'll throw their hands up and literally claim they don't know and its probably just something you'll have to live with.
It would be foolish for a layperson to think they can train themselves to be a doctor using google and diagnose a wide range of medical conditions in a large group of random patients better than a doctor. Its not foolish at all to think that given you have all the time in the world since its your life, that you might be able to do some productive things and try to figure out what could theoretically be wrong with you so you can make a more educated guess about which specific specialist might be able to diagnose your condition or rule out one that you suspected you might have. 99% of doctors are going to make a basic effort and then pretend its just some unknown chronic thing you probably shouldn't worry about, even if you feel like you are dying on a daily basis. Or diagnose you for one of the common things that doesn't fit your symptoms, give you medicine that will either not help at all or actually exacerbate your condition, and then double down on the diagnosis. And its not just about finding the right type of specialist, you can go to two specialists within the same field and one can be completely worthless to you because they have no experience with your set of symptoms.
I've gotten too many blank stares from doctors when asking them basic things that they should know to buy into the notion we seem to promote in the US that all of them are geniuses.
FYI Not an anti-medicine, anti-vax conspiracy nut. I just went through a nightmarish ordeal for several years trying to get help for my wife. Her condition is a physical condition that's misdiagnosed 80% of the time as anxiety. Once you have anxiety listed on your medical record, good fucking luck getting any of these arrogant assholes to do their job. Once you do get a diagnosis, the results of treatment are pretty mixed, but mostly not amazing. Fortunately it doesn't significantly shorten a person's life, but it does make it difficult to live it.
I've seen mildly famous and wealthy youtubers (famous for being sick youtubers, in some cases having the same condition as my wife) get teams of doctors working together hand in hand to figure out some rare set of conditions and make a person's life better. Most doctors I've encountered will figuratively tell you to go fuck yourself if you even want them to talk to another specialist. The closest I came to that was spending several thousand dollars sending her to the Mayo clinic. They rush you through a series of tests and then send you home without doing much of anything at all, hoping that you have a good team of doctors that can pick up where they left off. If you don't (and you won't) its a massive waste of time and money.
Dermatologists! Dermatologists!
My wife and I have gone to our healthcare providers' dermatologists about 6 time in total: each time they've sent us home with a diagnosis of "allergic reaction" and a prescription for a tub of cortisone (which we have, at this point, ceased to fill):
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0996/0350/products/triamci...
The cortisone never works, but I have two tubs of cortisone cream in the refrigerator in case of nuclear war.
This is a shame. We once had a private dermatologist who was simply outstanding - he nailed every problem with his diagnoses. But he retired. It seems the colleagues he left behind are all candidates for the Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B.
My wife recently was given another "allergic reaction" diagnosis for a skin irritation and got another cortisone tub prescription. I looked at her skin and then, on a hunch, sat at her computer terminal awhile. Sure enough in a few minutes I felt stings on my neck and right arm. An examination with a magnifying glass revealed very tiny fire ants on my arm. I searched above her chair and found the source - a Chinese lantern was the ants' launch platform - they were falling onto her and then stinging her.
How a trained dermatologist cannot distinguish ant bites from an "allergic reaction" is beyond me. The ant bites have a red center and form blisters, which is nothing like a generalized allergic reaction.
A little bug spray and some ant baits took care of the ants. I don't know how to fix the dermatologists.
I think what they are talking about are people using terrible sources (garlic curing HIV example). Then demanding that they are right.
So really, what we see here on both sides as the root cause are people who are not interested in a discussion and simply assert they are right. Dangerous if a patient does it, also dangerous if a doctor does it.
For every 1 person who actually has discovered something useful or accurately self-diagnosed with some very well-done research, there are surely 10,000 complete idiots who have swallowed hook, line and sinker the first nutball result they read, which they now believe 100% and if you don't agree you're an ignorant, indeed murderous enemy.
It's completely understandable to me why doctors take this stance.
Often it just requires a bit of pushing if it's a simple diagnostic test. "Can we just do this blood test to completely rule out [x]?". I remember about a decade ago my father was getting this extremely bad dermatitis on his elbows for years, and mum had researched and found coeliac (celiac) disease could cause that as a symptom. The GP was prescribing steroid creams, and they really had to push him to do a blood test to check for those antibodies. He thought it was dumb but gave in just to shut them up! Came back positive, next step was an endoscopy, which showed massive inflammation in the small intestine. Dad cut gluten out of his diet and over the next year the dermatitis and intestinal inflammation disappeared.
What if an engineer responded by harboring a grudge against all blockchain?
I mean, it would be unfortunate if that engineer decided not to donate to Scihub. But that exhausts my list of bad things that could happen due to such a grudge.
It does have to suck to have a lot of badly informed people parroting silly ideas they casually picked up online. But to so callously write off everyone, to so easily disregard any opinion & information other than your own, with what limited time you've got to examine a patient? Detestable, just absolutely revileable: this person has deeply failed their oath.
I also don't think your scenario is fair. The customer isn't just showing up & ordering you around. As a doctor, the patient is the product. The product is speaking for itself, asking for help. It's also paying you fairly well for your time & services. And as I said above, there's a good chance the product is well informed about itself. To write this off as a case of idiots making pointless requests- I can not disagree hard enough about what a callous, disregardful view this is. There are plenty of times when yes, the patient has fed themselves garbage, the patient is way off base, but let them not be so easily out of hand dismissed, let not the workplace maintain such a sense of absolute smug over the idiot rubes of the world.
That's exactly what patients are doing. Entire industries are built around this. People don't want to be told the hard answers to their problems, they want to do whatever they want and then take one tiny pill that causes weight loss, resistance to heart and respiratory disease, and increased libido.
>I also don't think your scenario is fair. The customer isn't just showing up & ordering you around
Read the stories. Watch the news. This is exactly what is going on. There is not a good chance that the patient knows what they're talking about - the overwhelming majority saw a quack on Facebook or Oprah saying something clearly wrong and stopped looking further because they want that one easy answer.
if indeed a patient is requesting modern quackery, then yes, reject that. but simply turning up your nose at "Google Medical School" & dismissing all patient concerns blanketly is not ok.
If the solution to your particular disease involves a year of changing your lifestyle then no doctor on earth is going to help you. (it's not their job)
And guess what? They say “that medicine is poison, I use tumeric”. Then in a few years they are dead, or blind or have both legs amputated.
Humans make horrible health choices all the time. Maybe the difference is just the scale at this point.
It's great that this doctor can share his experience but why is he posting this on Reddit? Why isn't this information available from trusted media sources? And for that matter, why aren't there any such trusted sources that everyone can agree is acting in their best interests and providing them with worthwhile and pertinent news?
Democracies can not survive without functional news and media sources.
Because doctors are people, and they just wanted to get the experience off their chest without any personally identifying information being disclosed?
They didn't frame the post as something that should be bringing about any change. It's literally just a person sharing their story to get a sympathetic ear. Because sometimes humans need that to keep going.
Exacerbating, btw.
A conversation centered around the identity of the person is much less interesting than a conversation about the contents of their post.
Q is fake, but there’s a whole subset of seemingly rational people who are being sucked into the void of this cult.
I mean, look at the subreddit this was posted in.
So if you find what I have to say ignorant and unhelpful, so be it. My words are not here for you. If you truly have a life experience with Q then I am sorry to hear that but please understand I cannot blindly accept what you say (As I don't expect you to accept on faith what I say).
So maybe I am in the magic land where the Q never travels, or maybe this whole Q thing is blown out of proportion. I do not know but my ignorant anecdote may make someone else like me ask the same question of why they don't know any Q either.
The follow-up is: what is your sociocultural environment? I'm also in the world Q never travel on my mother's side (all conservative, some could be considered liberal by US standards, but right-leaning at least). The far-right conspiracy don't touch them. They are doctors, CEOs (and retired CEOs), insurance VPs. Amongst the younger generation some are also nurses and physiotherapists, or work in marketing. Not one single conspiracy freak. Some weird claims at the beginning of the pandemic, but since one of them worked in the first national Covid "hotspot" and asked us to limit our travel 5 days before any EU government instaured a lockdown, i think any weird reactance was quashed before it could ever change how we acted.
But amongst my friends who never left my rural hometown? We don't have Q out here but this is the same type of far-right/authoritarian ethos. "We are better than the others, but the others have more money/power/education than us. This can only be because of a conspiracy led by [LGBT lobbies/jews/islamists/atlantists (aka pro-Otan/pro-US)] that we need to fight against, else our kind will die".
Conspiracy theories are not reserved to to working class, it is the whole environment that make them emerge. And i'm not saying they are reserved to the right either (hence the "atlantist" talking point), but that their talking points ethos are usually associated to the far-right. Even if far-left figures used the same (Stalin, Mao).
I started a digression on spinoza but that was only muddying the water, so i'm cutting it here.
I don't find the post itself to be political at all though. It's the recount of a doctor's recent experience being physically assaulted after refusing to treat an unvaccinated covid patient with ivermectin and vitamin-c, believing that the former may be actively harmful to their health, and the latter simply ineffective.
The post isn't political. It only seems political because the rejection of modern science is along a political line.
If this doctor believes that ivermectin is "harmful", the doctor was so poorly informed that medical fact was mixing up with something he saw on CNN. The assertion about effective dosage being lethal, in particular, was completely fictional -- I don't believe that it works, but the people advocating for it aren't talking about crazy doses.
Ivermectin is a very safe drug. It is given to millions of people a year to prevent parasitic infections. There is a large RCT underway to see if is an effective therapeutic for Covid-19. We should all hope that it works. This incessant political polarization of science has to stop.
Everything in this reads like a low-quality re-hash of click-bait headlines from the last year, several of which were completely debunked.
>This incessant political polarization of science has to stop.
Lol. In comments to a post about a doctor venting about being assaulted for not giving into conspiracy theorists demands re: treatment, and people say he's making it "political". Anyone can doubt the veracity all they want, there's 1000 more stories just like this.
Didn't I write that I don't believe it's effective? I'm not sure who you think you're arguing with, here.
The point is, this person made a specific claim -- that the "effective dose" would be so high as to be fatal. That claim is so laughable and baseless in fact that it calls into question the credibility of the entire story. No informed doctor would say such a thing. We simply don't know what the "effective dose" is (if any), but we know what other people are recommending as effective doses, and these are not toxic.
When "doctors" go on QAnon forums on reddit, and post things that sound like re-mixes of CNN headlines while making egregious mistakes of medicine, at the very least it should make you question their objectivity, if not the credibility of the claim.
People learn faster when they get to choose their own options.
> 'Society's advancement is measured by that which it may take for granted' I forgot! Help! (until it cant/that fails)
> "Every gain made by individuals or societies is almost instantly taken for granted. The luminous ceiling toward which we raise our longing eyes becomes, when we have climbed to the next floor, a stretch of disregarded linoleum beneath our feet." -Aldous Huxley
> "The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats it's most vulnerable members." -Mahatma Ghandi
But this sometimes requires not just aiding them, treating them well, but re-socializing them, re-educating them, informing them, breaking them out of their ignorance & failings.
To simply say that we must
> [re-]"engineer our environments so unhealthy choices are [not] so easy to make"
feels a folly to me. We must socialize. We must foster an aware, awake, able society. Striving to simply prevent all faults is not how we achieve success; it results in a vision of domineering & the absolute & fixedness: it bespeaks a belief that there is one true path for society & that we need only set it out & all will walk this course. It's singular utopian, a singular destiny, not a polytopia, not letting us many people discover & hunt for our own ends. Imo society must remain a dialectic, a conversation, a hunt. We must encourage growth & awareness & hunts for meaning, without insisting on a systematic & singular top choice.
I don't think social media is a part of this question:
> "Everyone believes whatever they want to,"
is a false Boogeyman, a false god, a Fear Uncertainty & Doubt (FUD), meant to scare us. We have to allow plurality, we have to allow polytopianism, we have to allow many systems, many beliefs. But we can still in aggregate steer towards informed, towards good beliefs, towards healthy ends. Trying to demonize the availability of voices & options- "safetly cocooned in their own social media echo chambers"- just misses the real point: that society doesn't have a progressive vision at large, that basically no one has a real bead on a healthy, progressive, gainful society. Everything is beset by conflict, and we are trying to make choices with very biased, limited, local regards. And there are very few clear paths, very few regardable winners.
For sure, much of what presented in the world is faulty & awful. But this too feels like a part of evolution. Simply wishing for authoritarianism, for everyone to make the right choices, for everyone to accept good dogma in the place of bad dogma: it's a disaster. And I don't think "Everyone believes whatever they want to", I think they have complex experiences which shape what they are most susceptible to, and I think most of us lack good positive role models & experiences to shape us properly forward. The world does not reward the just & righteous, it doesn't promote the healthy: it showcases greed & taking & exploitation, it showcases narcisim & delusion. It shows us an all too recent history of medical abuse & experimentation of our minorities. These aren't social media problems, these are the actual world: the actual evidence of the actual world is unclear, is deeply shadowy, is ghastly.
"The longer this state of affairs persists the worse things will get". Such appeal to authority & Fear. Such terror!!! "Inability to deal with a pandemic is just the tip of the iceberg" it itself a promise of horror & terror, it insists on & demands we obey or conform, & demands that anything else we do, any other permissiveness we permit only Immenatizes the Eschaton. To me, this high capitol fear uncertainty & doubt is the chief Immenatizing of the Eschaton there is. I don't like what people pick. I think people are incredibly stupid & full of shit. But I don't see that conformity & authority are the reagents here, I don't see that a more structured society that informs what decisions we must make will help. I believe society from the top needs to demonstrate better health, needs to make better choices easier to pick, needs to make better icons & references we can respect, that will inform what choices we freely make. Right now society simply lacks meaning. That social media is out there making it complicated is merely incidental, a scape goat, a convenient anti-authority to blame this all upon, but authority itself is shit, useless, cowards, good for nothing, and no one respects it, rightfully. Make a social contract worth believing in, society.
Arden authoritarianism is far worse than the too many choices of the very very young ur-connected world we have recently arrived at. We do need to surface & democratize better choice-making, create better supporting info-networks & options of choice. But recognize first that the 4th age information society is very young, and that simply wishing to stuff it back in the bottle/box, blaming it, & being upset we don't do better is not going to help. And recognize that there are so many 1st 2nd & 3rd age society problems still dogging us, still making things enormously difficult, and recognize that those need remedy & addressal to before society can ever really right itself & find progress. Fearing pop-culture society, it's superficial glam, is a misdeed: what is really weak is society itself, is the unhelpful, unprogressive, un-gainful world that has failed to create better circumstances. I don't blame the people. I don't think we must outmanuever people, to make unhealthy choices impossible/harder. To me, it's less about trying to fight against the baleful/evil, and more about creating the construtive/positive. Social media will spread the good too, will snuff out the darkness, if we have it, if there's the sunlight to spread.
The combination of freedom, capitalism, and greed. This is why I can't be entirely sure that China's approach isn't potentially longer term sustainable, as much as I disagree with it - it might actually be a better way to deal with the stubborn-ness of stupidity that's so inherent to humanity (to be fair, all these traits must have served us well when Pringles and Pop Tarts weren't cheap and easily available).
Cigarettes. How did they become a thing? What, ever, was their redeeming feature? At least Pringles and Pop Tarts taste nice.
Social media is just a more-efficient distillation of what traditional media has profited from since it began. It's not new human-hacking, it's just an efficiency bump that's actually more facilitated by the internet and pocket-portable devices with access to it.
Really? Last I heard, life expectancy in the USSR was quite a bit worse.
> Cigarettes. How did they become a thing?
Nicotine. Not hard at all to understand. Personally, I've always liked the smell of cigarettes. I never smoked, because I knew I'd really like it. Cigars, though, make me want to puke.
> deal with the stubborn-ness of stupidity that's so inherent to humanity
Most evil in the world is not perpetrated by evil people, but by good people believing they know what's best for everyone else, and forcing it on them.
Also monoamine oxidase inhibitors, a class of compounds that are effective against depression, panic disorder, and social phobia.
Some think that the absence of the MAO inhibitors are why nicotine replacement therapies (gum, patches) aren't really all that great at getting people to stop smoking.
I don't know. But I do know that people were much worse off economically in the USSR than in the US. This impacts longevity.
> They had pretty good doctors as far as I know.
I recall reading in a thread on Chernobyl where people who lived there at the time of the disaster were commenting. One comment stood out - root canals were free, but there was no anesthetic available. Having had a root canal myself, I can't imagine sitting in that chair for several hours getting drilled without anesthetic.
> believing they know what's best for everyone else, and forcing it on them.
Agree, to an extent. Forcing things on people is required of a functioning society. Government and laws and whatnot.
I genuinely don't know where the lines should be drawn on the entire spectrum. Law of unintended consequences and all that.
The government's proper role is to prevent people from using force on each other. It is not forcing things that the government imagines are good for people on them.
For example, I believed for decades the advice from the government that margarine was better for me than eggs. That turned out to be backwards.
I don't think you can necessarily separate those two things from one another so simply, except in the most extreme of examples.
> For example, I believed for decades the advice from the government that margarine was better for me than eggs. That turned out to be backwards.
I'm just going to assume you chose a bad example here. There's no force at play, you're free to choose your thing, you can even have both at the same time. Freedom!
2. not a bad example - what if the government forced me to use margarine instead, secure it its rectitude? That's the point.
Ethics and morality used to be a cornerstone of medicine.
Every legitimate long term study of non surgical weight loss shows that it doesn't happen for the vast, vast majority of people.
1) ["In controlled settings, participants who remain in weight loss programs usually lose approximately 10% of their weight. However, one third to two thirds of the weight is regained within 1 year, and almost all is regained within 5 years. "](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1580453)
2) Giant meta study of long term weight loss: ["Five years after completing structured weight-loss programs, the average individual maintained a weight loss of >3% of initial body weight."](http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/74/5/579.full)
3) Less Scientific: [Weight Watcher's Failure - "about two out of a thousand Weight Watchers participants who reached goal weight stayed there for more than five years."](https://fatfu.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/weight-watchers/)
4) [The reason why it's impossible seems to be that although calories in < calories out works, the body of a fat person makes it extremely difficult psychologically to eat less.](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/magazine/tara-parker-pope-...) This is borne out by the above data.
5) [The only thing that does seem to work in the long term is gastric surgery.](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1421028/)
Moreover, you won't find any reputable study on the web where the average person lost 10%+ of their body weight and kept it off for five years. Not even one.
https://www.europeanpharmaceuticalreview.com/news/165203/weg...
Losing it is easy.
I’ve lost 100lbs five times in my life.
It’s fucked.
It's not impossible; some people do it. But it's not easy to change how you think about food and your body, especially when you're surrounded by your old habits every day.
Sci hub up this paper and check out the citations too.
He returned in 3 months, and shocked the nutritionist is he was exactly on the target weight and had followed the plan. She remarked that nobody had ever followed her plans before.
He never regained the weight.
I've seen statistics that only 5% of dieters keep the weight off more than 5 years. It's not impossible, but it is unusual. I've known a couple others who've done it, too.
I suspect for some people they just gained a little weight cumulatively over time due to a slightly fattening eating habit, and for those it's probably not that big an ask to change/fix.
But for many of the overweight/obese people I know, their eating is a straight up dysfunctional drug abuse-style addiction. Predictably it's as difficult to change these behaviors as it is to get a drug addict to quit their drug of choice.
The whole dogmatic war-on-drugs attitude creates this imaginary boundary around "food" which for many I suspect green-lights abuse of "food" because it's not "drugs".
It makes me wonder how much our societal obesity problems would change if the prevailing attitude towards drugs became more factual and nuanced. If people understood better that cocaine isn't as problematic as psilocybin in terms of addiction, maybe they'll also start thinking more critically about candy bars vs. oranges. Perhaps my optimism is showing.
If combined with a confined window of eating, like 11am to 5pm, you'll lose weight faster.
The following comes from a study on T2D reversal where bariatric surgery was one aspect of the study:
“Furthermore, microbial changes in the human gut have been linked to obesity, and surgical alterations to gastrointestinal anatomy have been associated with dramatic changes in gut microbiota populations with reversion from an “obesogenic” to a lean bacterial population [13,14,16,19,23,24].”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6520897/
It’s a relatively new science and area of study but some of it is fascinating if not hopeful. One in particular looked at identical twins where only 1 suffered from malnutrition finding in all such cases the microbiomes were different between the twins and the malnutrition was successfully treated via the microbiome.
Unfortunately, in modern times the days of short rations never come, at least in First World countries.
That drive functions at a neural level way below the level of the rational mind.
People often make poor choices vis-a-vis sexual activity, too, and for much the same reason.
They passed it on to us before there was a chance to introspect the nutritional and psychological realities of food.
My partner and I are both overweight and we are trying to do a better job with our child - giving them healthy but delicious options, while also not turning any junky food into a reward or a mystery that must be guarded or doled out in careful portions.
So far, we're okay. Not sure how this is going to last once the kid gets into school age...
If I saw people permanently ban junk/fat/sugary food from their homes, do at least 3 hours/week of complete training (weights and cardio), and not being able to stay fit, I would believe that weight loss/being fit is a serious physiological and psychological challenge.
What I observe though, starting from mid-30s, is that the vast majority of people keeps junk food at home (which is, no wonder, "extremely difficult psychologically" not to eat) and/or doesn't do traning (let alone complete training). And invariably blames it on genetics and aging.
(I don't doubt that there is a minority of the people that has serious metabolic disorders, but that's not the general case)
In other words, if you're a doctor, go ahead and tell all your patients the above. You will see negligible impact on their weight, so your advice was useless (worse than useless, since you come across as an asshole).
As an aside, conscientiousness/willpower is highly heritable (as much as height and IQ), so if you're especially good at sticking to a diet, that's also genetics.
Also, who is saying we are calling patients weak willed losers? Should we not tell patients to stop smoking, or to quit heroin, because they might think that we think of them as "weak willed losers"?
*edit for ambiguous wording: By this I mean it seems to work for at least 50% of people, with the average being 3% weight loss.
For the weak willed comment, that was a reference to Pizza234's comment I was responding to earlier, not yours.
It more points to the limitations of studies like these than it does an incontrovertible fact. Some people who are highly internally motivated can lose weight and keep it off.
https://www.nature.com/articles/ijo201094
>More than one out of every six US adults who has ever been overweight or obese has accomplished LTWLM [1y] of at least 10%.
review: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4777230/
As far as the doctor's advice is concerned, focusing on weight loss as the sole outcome is misguided. The typical trajectory of an obese individual is to keep gaining weight; if doctors could even make their patients stop gaining weight, that would already be a major development in standards of care.
It's also important to consider the limitations of the metric. Studies don't evaluate sustained cultural shifts like "do doctors regularly talk to the patients about nutrition", because it's hard enough to track a patient for five years, let alone get a doctor to do blinded controlled interventions for five years. So what the study tests is a controlled diet for a short period followed by a period of unsupervised maintenance (with a recipe book), not the consistent availability of nutrition guidance over a period of years.
It's perhaps more important to note that while the results in adults are quite bad, it has been shown possible for adolescents to drop by more than a standard deviation in BMI after an intervention and maintain this for two years:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002234760...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1054139X1...
Professional interventions for weight loss and/or maintenance aren't infeasible, they're just hard, and it pays to start early. It's not too surprising that older people are more reluctant to change their habits.
[fuller2014]: Finds that Weight Watchers underperforms standard national guidelines: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4282338/
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/images/databriefs/351-400/db360-fig...
Those studies on adolescents is heartening though.
Source 1 seems to be from a conference, and they don't list specific numbers or cite sources, so I have no idea what "almost all" means.
"5) [The only thing that does seem to work in the long term is gastric surgery." That study says that gastric surgery works, it says nothing about the other methods for weight loss.
Right, except they'll still be homeless, poor, mentally unstable, or all of the above. Drug use is often the symptom, not the root cause.
It's similar with food. For many people, food becomes the primary source of joy in life. And just like with drugs, the joy shrinks, the high gets shorter, and the health side effects soon start outweighing the benefits. But it's still quite hard to go cold turkey, and just like a recovering addict, even years after establishing a healthy diet it becomes really easy to fall off the wagon.
We can moralize about how starving children in africa have things much worse, but human happiness is contextual to the reality we know. And life in modern western society has a lot of pitfalls, anxiety, and depression. Obesity is in many ways a side effect of people's lived experience.
Giving a diet plan for weight loss is basically an equivalent of giving an exercise plan for depression.
This mostly reflects on what doctors recommend rather than blanket discipline failure across a broad population. I can tell you what my local Kaiser recommended for T2D and obesity:
1) they send you to a Registered Dietician who shows you a modernized food pyramid based heavily on grains. Minimize animal fats, replacing with seed oils. 70% calories as carbohydrate.
2) MD flat tells you "you MUST eat 6 small meals a day so you never get hungry."
What was done instead: Time Restricted Feeding, 4-6 hour window, low carb, limiting to mostly keto first half of window. A1C dropped over 3 points (10.3 to 7) by next labs.
Crazy, that's what I would recommend if you want to become obese.
>2) MD flat tells you "you MUST eat 6 small meals a day so you never get hungry."
I guess that MD really wants his patients to become insulin resistant and eventually develop diabetes.
Everything (hyperbole) you can buy in a supermarket is meant to make you feel full for an hour and then hungry again.
An alternative to surgery would be to just to continuously monitor blood glucose. The patient would immediately know when the food they are eating is messing up their body and the doctor can control the diet of the patient.
The GLP1s have proven to have excellent efficacy for weight loss (and cardiovascular mortality in diabetics). Their numbers approach bariatric surgery (>10% body weight in the obese).
People keep the weight off too. Here's one study showing 5kg on average weight loss at 5 years according to this study: https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/1/207/pdf
So why do i care about the cause again? I dont. it was a non reversible event
Not just lets them get away with it, actively encourages them to use practically toxic amounts of high fructose corn syrup by subsidizing the grain.
When he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he decided to forgo the aggressive medical treatment advised by doctors, opting instead of acupuncture & fruit juices.
Acupuncture and fruit juices are just as effective, with a much lower incidence of side effects. I’d choose that treatment option as well. There’s nothing unethical about palliative care.
He had a much rarer form of pancreatic cancer that is treatable and has much better survival rates.
Pallatiative care is making the choice to travel to end of the line. I am currently going through making that decision. If i do, bring on the tasty juices and accupuncture to make me feel relieved at the time. But i am not delusional, it's not treatment. It is not going to fix anything or even stall it
> A recognition that doing so would be putting a target on me, my family, my colleagues and my hospital for all of the violent Q-Anon people. The arrest would be local and possibly national news. It would subject these children to deep pain. Worse, though, it would hit Facebook, and within no time, my name, my kids' names, and my wife's name would be all over their sites. All of us would be threatened. These people are unpredictable, but seem to crave violence. I don't want to be responsible for one of my colleagues being shot in the parking lot because I became a national symbol of Q-Anon hospital violence.
He makes a couple of blatantly dubious medical claims. For example he claims that Ivermectin doesn't work (probably true) with a followup claim that it does work but you have to give so much you'd OD from it.
In other posts he claims "every ICU patient is covid" which is a repeated hoax we've seen. At the very least it doesn't differentiate people in ICU who have covid vs people in ICU because of covid, and how many of the people caught their covid while in the hospital/ICU, etc.
ICUs aren't full. If this is actually a doctor and they are actually in an ICU that's temporarily full, it definitely is not always full. Statistically ICU beds in hospitals are at pre-pandemic vacancy levels.
Lastly, and this isn't really fact based, but it's too "on the nose". The whole narrative they've created is like it was written by a third rate script writer to sell the narrative. It's "too perfect" for his side. The truth is bad enough, people really are dying and suffering. There really are a lot of conspiracy people. But it's just to clean for his side.
Ivermectin does work in vitro, but the equivalent effective dosage would kill a person.
"The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Here's a pretty interesting video essay about online fakery, with a heavy focus on Reddit fakery.
Doesn't mean the story itself isn't true, but I would expect the author writing about someone else and not himself.
Some examples from the top of my head:
A woman named MsScribe spent years fabricating harassment against herself so that she could gain influence in her community and join the moderation team of a fan fiction website. She would create sock puppets to attack herself, so that the community would rally around her, over and over again.
A reddit user spent years creating "fake fake stories". They made obviously fake stories, which they put a lot of effort into, such as writing poetry and drawing comics. They would post these stories to places like r/thathappened, as if someone had genuinely tried to pass these off as real stories. Their goal seemed to be to present the communities these fictional authors belonged to as ridiculous, they were building straw men. I don't remember the name of this user, but this is presented in the video I linked in a sibling comment.
(Both of these people eventually admitted to this behavior when confronted.)
https://www.businessinsider.com/covid-19-patients-family-mem...
https://www.sfreporter.com/news/2021/11/23/christus-st-vince...
https://www.wkyc.com/amp/article/news/health/violence-agains...
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/hospitals-refused...
And here’s a doctor describing the conflict, frustration and regret of unvaccinated late term patients:
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-08-12/doctor-ange...
Their experience basically mirrors this up until the assault. According to them, they've never had so many patients and family members fight them for every single decision they make -- they're bringing in all these ridiculous printouts about "give me these vitamins and steroids on this schedule" and of course they want HCQ and IVM still. None of them will accept responsibility for not being vaccinated, they blame the medical staff when they don't get better like they think they should, they all see intubation as the step that kills their loved ones instead of a last chance to save them.. it's enough that my family member is retiring rather than deal with it any more.
My family member works at a small hospital in the Midwest and more than one patient has accused them of "working with Dr. Fauci" to prolong the pandemic. Just complete nutball bullshit.
All of the quacks promoting these horrible "cures" while convincing millions of people to not get vaccinated should lose their licenses. I doubt there will ever be any consequences for the non-credentialed talking heads doing the same but man have they inflicted a massive amount of suffering on their viewers. I hope the culture war was worth the weight on their consciences.
I mean, sure, the ease with which people have decided they can argue against easily demonstrable facts over the past 5-10 years has been unsettling, but I thought when push came to shove, and their lives and their loved ones' lives were on the lines, people would come around. But a sizable portion of the country is now in a full-on death cult.
And to be clear, I can understand there are plenty of things about the pandemic and the pandemic response that can be debated, but a huge portion of the country is miles off the deep end into full on crazyville. Even Trump was loudly booed recently when he said he got a booster.
Somebody the vehemently believes that the rapture is coming and the Earth is 3,000 years old rarely gets a reason to punch anyone over such beliefs.
Trump publicly announcing that he got a booster made me respect him more. He could have (and politically should have) kept silent.
Plug for a friend: https://trustedoctor.com/
This is a two years old account but with only 9 months of activity. (> 1 year old can be sold, see https://www.soar.sh/sell-your-reddit-account/)
No activity in other health related subreddits
All posts are obviously militant and politically linked to topics related to QAnon and anti-vaxxers.
All the posts are generic advice and none of the writings reflect a profound expertise in science nor medicine. Most of the information posted by the author can be found on public government websites and news articles. Having listened to a lot of practicing physicians interviews during the last two years (and having family working in the field) the contrast in deep technical understanding and jargon is clear as day and night. At best he works in a hospital, maybe as a low-tier nurse.
I get it that nurses would quit and find other jobs, but a doctor with "14 years of medical school"?
He says that he worked "many decades" plus 14 years of school. Assuming he went med school at 20 and "many decades" is 3 decades, he would be at least 64 years old. That's very unlikely given Reddit's users demographics (https://www.oberlo.com/blog/reddit-statistics) where users of 65 only constitutes 1% of the user base. Being a militant progressive makes it even more unlikely for the same demographic reasons. If it is two decades or less, than this is not "many decades".
Good Lord, I thought HN was smart enough to see through the reddit garbage.
Nevermind the whole thing reads like fanfic: "Through tears, he rasped out sounds I could vaguely understand as a question. I guessed at what he was asking, and assured him that yes, his family was coming."
The whole post is awful, and even entertaining it here is absurd. When people complain HN is becoming like Reddit, this is what they're talking about.
I don’t know what I would have done in their situation but if it caused them to quit their job I wouldn’t put it past them not to uphold the duties of said job.
I worked in a similar environment and most violent incidents were not reported unless it was people doing violence on one another rather than staff.
Come on now
I really have trouble believing that this isn't just a propaganda meme. What proportion of the population actually believes that a vaccine will cure them post infection? More importantly, how are all of these people uttering vaccine requests when their lungs are failing? Isn't it a little hard to talk when you're in the end stage of a severe lung infection?
Linking these unvaccinated deaths to qanon conspiracists in the second sentence further makes me doubt that this is an actual doctor reporting on their experience. This is reddit, after all, a heavily astroturfed (and opaquely controlled) propaganda machine.
However, to your question: how many of these people are begging for the vaccine, and how?
It's a surprising number. These patients don't understand how vaccines work outside of movies and TV, and as such think it's either bullshit or at the last minute feel like it's a miracle.
Because at the end of the road, you realize that you've been told lies by those you trusted. There's a clarity in the end moments. Situations like these where you have no choice but to think about what you've been told and the ramifications of your actions.
And so these people fall back on the last thing that wasn't at least blatantly false, which is a social understanding of medicine. Vaccines cure diseases, or so we're told in our school days. So much of the American medical psyche is built around medicine being a solution for the current ailment, not a prophylactic for the likely future.
A huge part of the antivax rhetoric is "but I'm healthy now". They don't see it as preventing illness in the future. To them a vaccine is an antidote, a fix for a problem.
And so they beg for the antidote when it is obvious that they are at the end of the line. They don't understand that it's not a fix for now, it's prevention for later.
As for how they can: function degrades, yes, but its biggest impact is on duty cycle. You go from being able to talk constantly to mustering enough energy to speak a few minutes at a time to making it 30 seconds, to 4...5 seconds, to losing it entirely. You get bursts of energy, but each burst comes with a toll. Maybe a few more moments here but a long delay as you recover from it.
https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/22/us-coronavir...
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/07/22/health/hospitalized-patie...
https://www.wfxrtv.com/news/health/coronavirus/dying-covid-p...
First, she absolutely has been physically assaulted by a patient as well as family. This is not new to COVID and was more common when she worked in the ER. It's not an every day sort of thing and the hospitals don't put up with patients or family acting violently. However, I believe it's normal for them to have security available for when a patient codes since the families will often act out. Sometimes they're violent. Sometimes they scream. Sometimes they roll on the floor. Sometimes they throw things. Sometimes they don't show up at all and let their family die alone.
Second, patients and families will ask for all sorts of things that don't make sense normally. They will demand a COVID vaccine when they're about to die from COVID. They will demand invermectin. She had one patient that was noncompliant with his oxygen, proning (flipping on the belly), and other treatment who threw a fit, started screaming about how they were trying to kill him, recorded it on video, and posted it on Twitter. She had another patient on the brink of death, unconscious, intubated, pain controlled, that the girlfriend wanted to bring out of sedation, so they could get married because she was worried about their place in the afterlife (yes, there was in fact a theological consult.) She had another one where the family kept trying to feed an intubated patient soup. They will actively accuse you of trying to kill their loved one. This is particularly difficult emotionally because a lot of my wife's life is devoted to helping someone with difficult, long hours. No one likes to be accused of that.
Third, due safety difficulties with patients coming to a COVID filled unit, the ICU physicians started calling the families directly to give them update. Prior to this, it was more common for the nurse to provide updates and then forward questions to the physicians. Generally, this is a good thing, but it's also not particularly easy. Nowadays, the patient families not only question, but try to micromanage all elements of the treatment. For example, there's this new trend where the families will ask to see the vent during a video meeting and then demand changes to the treatment protocol. This is not safe and they are not qualified to make these changes. Now, generally speaking, if the family has questions, my wife is more than willing to answer them. However, trying to walk a family through a treatment protocol which they do not have the necessary background to understand is not particularly easy. Further, she really does not have time to do so either. Any time spent with the family working through the foundation of pulmonary function is time not spent actively working on patients who are quite literally dying. It really is hurting other patients and I believe it to be selfish. And, look, we get that they're worried and they want to be involved, but I don't think people acknowledge the cost of these demands. Time is not free.
As to how someone can better interact with their physician, I think everyone can achieve better results is they focus on what they want their goals and outcomes to be rather than the exact method to get there. For example, in end of life care, there are questions like: Do we do everything to keep them alive? Are we DNR? Are we DNI? These are hard questions, so it's easier to frame them as: What do we want life to look like after our hospital stay? If your goal is to be able to speak with family, hold your kids, and read books, then having the hospital do everything in their power to keep you alive while simultaneously ending up neurologically devastated in an LTAC (long term acute care) probably isn't a good outcome. I can assure you that the medical staff will work harder if you tell them, "Hey, I really appreciate what you're doing for my wife. She's really important to us and this has been really difficult to everyone. Our primary goal is to have her come home in a situation where we can have a conservation together. If that is not possible, we'd really like to be there with her and to have her pass in peace. Please keep us informed if there's anything that we can do to support her or if her status changes." Then, make sure to check in everyday, so that the hospital, nurses, and physician know that the family is involved.
I will also mention to the "this-is-the-new-normal" COVID crowd, it literally can't be. To me, new normal means that we've achieved a new stable point of operating in our everyday lives. However, the hospitals have not reached that point. Physicians, nurses, and other medical staff really are leaving. The units are not fully staffed and they have not been for months. Attrition is high. This affects all of us whether or not you believe in COVID or vaccinations because I can assure you that regardless of ailment, the level of care now is not the same as it was prior to COVID and it is getting worse. Please be safe.
I’m glad my parents droned into me that nobody can take care of my health except myself.
Covid, the virus, doesn’t typically kill you directly: the cytokine storm that some people seem to have afterwards is what kills them.
That’s why people making statement about “my immune system is strong” are speaking from a position of ignorance. You don’t want an over-reaction of your immune system in response to viral load. This is what the vaccine helps with by giving your immune system a chance to develop an immune response without having to go nuclear trying to clear the infection.
The storm is why people are ok at day 7-10, then suddenly crash on day 11-4, seemingly out of the blue. They have a hyperactive response that begins destroying healthy tissue, particularly the lungs and the heart, given the concentration of ACE-2 receptors, which is where the virus binds easiest to. Your immune system, still trying to develop an answer to this novel infection, goes scorched earth to attempt to clear any and all rogue RNA that is detected.
That’s when you lungs start to hardened and fill and pneumonia kicks in; it’s all the dead tissue in your lungs from your now CoVid-induced autoimmune disorder.
This is why steroids are given - they blunt the various inflammatory responses a cytokine storm brings on. Problem is, your immune system do go hard in the paint, and sends EVERYTHING it has.
This is why using an anti-parasitic in this moment makes a whole lot of no sense.
This is why HCQ makes no sense at this stage.
The new oral anti-virals have the same issue: you have to get tested, diagnosed, and get these into you AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. The oral antivirals that are being tested stop the replication process of the virus, or that’s the goal.
The less viral load, hopefully a more blunted immune response, the less or no organ destruction.
Make sense?
That doesn't mean that COVID isn't bad, or that people shouldn't consider getting the vaccine (especially if they are old, obese, or have diabetes). It just means that his experience is not representative of what COVID is like for most people.
So the stories are the exception.
However, they're also very common.
If 1 out of every 50 people who ate at a McDonald's in America died, 50,000 people would die every day [https://financesonline.com/number-of-mcdonalds-in-north-amer...].
I have no idea why you think they did, but that never happened.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
> Up to 95 percent of people infected with polio have no symptoms. However, infected persons without symptoms can still spread the virus and cause others to develop polio. About four to five percent of infected people have minor symptoms such as fever, muscle weakness, headache, nausea and vomiting. One to two percent of infected persons develop severe muscle pain and stiffness in the neck and back. Less than one percent of polio cases result in paralysis.*
Despite most cases being harmless, polio was considered a huge public health issue worldwide. The small percentage of cases that developed paralysis added up, essentially becoming a roulette for the majority of children. This is because it was still transmitted easily and rapidly, so it spread through millions of people quickly.
Covid can be seen similarly. Yes most people are fine. The same way that most people that get into car accidents are fine. And yet I don't think it'd be a stretch to say most people probably know at least one person that has suffered serious health complications due to covid
* https://www.health.ny.gov/diseases/communicable/poliomyeliti...
And
‘History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.’
Around half of those admitted were unvaccinated people in their 50s, the other half vaccinated and in their 80s. The former group was something like 5-7 times more represented. I think 90% of them were overweight or obese.
So, yeah, seems like if you get admitted to the ICU today, you're either a fully vaccinated very old senior citizen, or unvaccinated high-risk individual in your 50s.
This is the number of people you will spread the infection to.
Flu has a R of 1.
Covid Alpha/Beta have a R of 3-5.
Delta has a R7-9.
Omicron is allegedly 15+, and unlike anything we’ve ever seen outside Measles.
Giving you a death rate of 1% infected, to keep it easy. Current numbers in the US are 1.56%.
So, 1% dead of spread of a R1 is going to be a lot slower and manageable versus 1% of R7. The exponential (Logarithmic?) rise of infections will kill a lot more, a lot faster, and have knock-on effects everywhere within the healthcare system, and society as a whole.
The only hope is that by rule, typical virus evolutions are less virulent, but we’re still not sure of that at this time. The big fear with omicron is that the spike protein mutations are immune-system dodging and faster infecting/more contagious, but that the payload within is still functionally the same. The mutations not on the spike are not changed enough that virologists are hopeful at this time.
Sorry, wall of text. Hope this addresses the question.
The role of a doctor, when someone is sick, is to offer good advice and stop them doing anything that will be really damaging to themselves. I'd see this as more similar to a dying man getting access to a priest than anything else.
Maybe this woman would have been screaming at him anyway, but I can see why she would be angry. He is obviously being a bit arrogant. The dude was dying, let the family believe what they want at that point.
He'd have made life easier for himself and the family by saying "this won't work, but if you can foot the bill and will feel better about it then OK".
Ivermectin is prescribed (not proscribed) mostly for treating parasitic infection. Using it at therapeutic doses for Covid is dangerous.
But I'm not forcing my standards on anyone. If this family wants a silly treatment and there isn't anything better to do, then they should get what they want if they are willing to pay.
One of the reasons this doctor got screamed at is because he took responsibility for making all the decisions and the patient died anyway. Which is good doctoring, I respect that. But if he is surprised that a family is angry that he ignored their wishes without a good reason then he is not paying attention to how the world works. He could have easily just agreed with them and kept the peace, at no undue cost to anyone.
Are you a doctor, healthcare provider, or even in the medical field? If not, I urge you to stop spouting your amateur theories about medicine on the internet, where they can spread and cause further harm.
This isn't a conflict situation and there is no obvious downside for anyone. The doctor isn't giving in to anything. The family is making a stupid request, yes. No skin off the doctors nose to grant it though and if it'll make them happier he may as well. If he thinks it is significantly harmful then he needs to make that argument instead of dismissing them.
Also the doctor made no mention of other therapeutics that do have more expert consensus of helping like monoclonal antibodies or fluvoxamine. I'm sorry to hear that they have decide to leave medicine and that they were assaulted. Violence is never called for. That said, it's unclear if all tools in the current tool belt were used in this patient's case.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/dying-covid-19-patient-recover...
edited to reference another site: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-ivermectin-e...
i totally get that it's anecdotal. my point is more about just allowing people the opportunity to try therapeutics especially ones that have been proven to help in many cases like monoclonal antibodies or have little to no risk of harm.
[1] https://www.scribd.com/document/538389544/Action-Order-Man-K...
Then certainly you can cite, say, one factual error they have published this week. Or month?
Or does "rag" simply mean "doesn't parrot the narrative I prefer"?
> If someone is on downward trajectory towards death, why not give them cheap generics at human safe doses?
What is a human safe dose for someone whose body is so compromised that they’re close to death? If the doctor prescribes a medication that doesn’t have, at a minimum, peer reviewed research showing its effectiveness in these situations, they are going to be liable for negligent manslaughter, if not murder.
And rightly so, when you think of the broader implications of allowing doctors to do whatever they want to the dying.
hmm could they then not simply allow patients to sign liability waivers?
It’s probably more accurate to say that when you do sign such a waiver, it’s going to be an exceptionally involved process that includes a lot of time providing information to provide for genuinely informed consent (2nd, 3rd, 10th opinions, counselors, hospital lawyers, your lawyers, etc) when you’re in your right mind.
Experimental medicines for terminal patients are hard to get, for a good reason.