Creatine found to improve cognitive performance during sleep deprivation
medicalxpress.com
medicalxpress.com
Although, I could see this being beneficial in fields where labour is scarce (e.g.: the medical field), I fear it could lend towards a "sleep deprivation is okay, just take creatine" rationale in other fields.
I would not say it's only acceptable for unintended shortages, or maybe very brief and rare shortages since those tend to be the kind you can't reasonably plan around.
As for saying the AMA kills people, not sure I'd go that far without doing more research. But I wouldn't be at all surprised if the effect of some of their policies is more deaths than there otherwise would be.
That effect is eventually balanced out by exhaustion, sleep deprivation, etc taking the same toll they do on everyone. Theoretically If you could reduce the impact of sleep deprivation, we could push shift lengths further, reduce the amount of turnover in carers a patient sees even more, and receive even further benefits in health outcomes.
Can we try to improve the handoff problem before trying to make sleep deprived doctors and nurses able to suffer for even longer?
Not enabling the same burnout for even longer shifts.
Burnout and just simple short term fatigue both also create patient risk.
We have drugs that would allow very long completely alert shifts, with few side effects for single use. But there is no way to do that regularly in a mentally (or physically) healthy sustainable way.
I can see those being used by a battlefield medic, or in a disaster zone, for one off critical situations.
The difficulty of getting these on a vegan diet is the reason I started consuming bivalves
For me it has worked fine.
However, among the nutritional supplements for a vegan diet I make a temporary exception for cod liver oil (or other fish oil). Even if there is an adequate vegan substitute (Schizochytrium oil, which is produced by a cultivated fungus-like organism, despite being marketed as "algae" oil), for now it is still too expensive. Its price has been slowly decreasing, so I expect that in a few years its price will become no greater than double in comparison with fish oil, when I would consider switching to it as acceptable.
I'm fortunate to have access to some decent Omega supplements, but bivalves are also excellent sources of Omegas (in addition to Taurine, Choline, and Creatine). If your vegan diet is motivated by vegan or environmental ethics, I'm curious why you've landed on fish oil rather than bivalves (since fish have brains and I believe oyster farming specifically is supposed to also have a positive impact on the habitats it's performed in)?
Moreover, fish oil is much more convenient, because after I buy a liter, that is enough for more than 3 months, so I have to take care about this only very infrequently.
Bivalves can be stored only frozen and even in that case they occupy a huge volume in comparison with the equivalent amount of fish oil. They would also require additional time each day for preparation and cooking (even if that takes only a few minutes when done in a microwave oven). With cod liver oil or other fish oil, I just add a minute amount of it to the vegetable oil that I add to food anyway, so the extra time for it is just taking the bottle from the refrigerator and putting it back, which adds perhaps ten seconds to the cooking time.
When well prepared, bivalves are very tasty and healthy but they are not an optimal solution for ensuring an adequate daily intake of essential fatty acids, except perhaps in places on marine coasts, close to some farming site, where there might be possible to have continuous access to a guaranteed supply of cheap fresh bivalves.
I would rather not use fish oil, so as I have said, I am waiting for the production process for Schizochytrium oil to become more efficient, so that the premium price over fish oil will decrease enough. When I have tried for the first time Schizochytrium oil, a few years ago, it was at least eight times more expensive than fish oil. The last time when I have checked, it could be found (when searching enough) for as little as three times the price of fish oil (per its DHA+EPA content), so there is hope for a further price reduction.
For me, I may spend the same amount on bivalves as I would on an equivalent (by protein content) amount of mock meat products or veggie burgers. The bivalves are no doubt much healthier, but have fewer calories which is either a good or bad thing depending on what you're trying to optimize for.
A big surprise I got early on was that my previous coffee habit of 5+ cups per day just kind of disappeared. No longer needed to keep going, I think.
Edit: it’s 5g, not mg.
If you are taking weight lifting doses for cognitive effects, you are effectively 'doing it wrong' and will notice a significant weight gain from the extra water retention.
It's most popular in sports training and adjacent aesthetics, and the norm among that community is in grams. While most products are available as powders that you could perhaps measure out in milligrams, their reference dosage for advertising is usually 5g.
I figured, if it's good enough for fighter pilots pulling 8g maneuvers, it should be good enough for me accidentally getting out of bed too quickly. And turns out it works!
A normal schedule is 3-5g per day with an optional loading phase of 10-20g per day during 7 days.
In the study they used a single dose of 0.35g/kg which means 20-40g per dose. How do they not get diarrhea? The loading phase is usually split into several doses to avoid diarrhea and I can personally attest to that being a good idea.