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If you think this is bad, wait till you hear about [insert field of medicine here]!

In all seriousness, fraud is rampant, and cash pay or low regulation fields like dentistry can easily take advantage of patients and their health literacy.

In ophthalmology, you hear of “laser” cataract surgery, “floaterectomies”, telling patients they need cataract surgery well before they are symptomatic, dry eye treatments.

Hell, in cardiology there have been multiple cases of fraud uncovered where doctors were putting pacemakers and defibrillators in people that didn’t even need them!

Maybe I’m jaded, but when there exists such a profit incentive, we as healthcare providers struggle to “do no harm”. I’m lucky to be surrounded by mentors and other doctors that try and exemplify the moral behavior patients expect in healthcare, but imagine if I had a mentor early on like Dr Lund in the article..

I got to spend a couple of weeks as an internal medicine intern with a medical oncologist who incidentally worked at memorial sloan prior to coming to my university. You could tell how excited he was about the current state of cancer research and new treatments, especially with immunotherapy.

Wonder if docs will start off-label treating earlier with immunotherapy. There's tons of immune checkpoint inhibitors meant for different types of cancers and mutations.

You can change the keyboard to be the small size keyboard in the settings (something like 'one-handed use'). Hope that helps

interesting article: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/how-a-worm-gave-the-so...

This is kind of unfair given TVs are usually kept for a very long time. You buy the TV, didn’t understand why the price was cheaper than competitors, and a year later regret your decision. It’s not really feasible for most consumers to get a new TV at that point.

funnily enough, phenylephrine is used daily in ophthalmology for dilated eye exams. On that note, there's a bunch of esoteric drops that used to be used because of their useful pharmacokinetics, diagnostic/therapeutic abilities (cocaine, hydroxyamphetamine, pilocarpine 0.125%, homatropine), but are no longer being manufactured due to cost.

Can someone provide an example of where this would provide value? I'm not sure I understand.

The examples I see in the article (picking the 'best' pain medication or antidepressant) aren't all that interesting to me. Like, of course naproxen wins, it has the longest half life of all of the listed medications...and the comparison of SSRI are well known at this point. I find it hard to believe that a board certified psychiatrist (Susan) wouldn't know which medication has better efficacy in which scenarios.

Perhaps this is meant for providers that don't understand the pharmacology and evidence behind the drugs they're prescribing. If that's the case, maybe we should be asking ourselves if we should be the ones prescribing that medication or if a specialist should.

And maybe it can elucidate useful findings quicker than academia, but I doubt by much. And funnily enough, there are already tools that exist to make meta-analyses and systematic reviews a lot quicker than they used to be.

How I imagine you:

cracks knuckles

"time to open up west's respiratory physiology again"

No, these things just happen for a variety of reasons. Smoking/vaping puts you at higher risk. There's probably other risk factors too.

If I understand correctly you want to pull your focus range in a little bit more, at the loss of some distance sharpness.

Essentially, you just want to add a little bit of “plus” sphere to the first part of the prescription.

That’s essentially the ethos behind the article, btw. Computer glasses mosty add plus to the spherical part of your prescription.

All of this being said, if you’re older, you’re becoming presbyopic, whereby the intraocular lens has lost its elasticity and will no longer be able to change its shape to modulate focus. And thus prescriptions will almost never meet your demands, short of some major improvements in artificial lens implant technology which may be available in the next few years. Some currently available surgically implanted intraocular lenses do have some measure of this (Alcon panoptix, j&j symfony, to a lesser extent Alcon vivity/J&J tecnis), but you can’t cheat physics and will end up with aberrations that could frustrate you more than your current issues.

I see that a lot, and as a former biomedical engineer I would like to reframe this a bit.

Regardless of field of study in college, be it engineering, humanities, science, etc, you learn valuable skills that are almost certainly applicable to beyond your field of study. I for one saw many of my peers enter software engineering roles, project manager roles, or even consulting roles that all pay well, likely 80-100k+ right out of college. Speaking to my siblings who graduated a year ago, they appear to concur, and many are being paid more. Could this be a factor of where you go to college? Perhaps, but I'd argue it's also a bit about selling yourself to wherever you are trying to go.

Additionally, there are many folks that obtain further specialization in a different area of study via a graduate degree, such as a PhD like you mentioned, but also Master's level degrees. They can do biomedical engineering in undergrad, pursue other engineering master's, and succeed in their desired career. I found many peers that pursued this route especially for computer science.

To further push against the thought that biomedical engineers are without opportunity: The US Bureau of Labor Statistics states the mean annual wage of biomedical engineers is around $98,000, and the growth projections are around 6% over the next ten years, while lower than the average of 8%, is not "bad".

Would certainly like to see any other anecdotes from other biomedical engineers to refute or support my statements above; I'm no longer an engineer and thus my insight is likely limited compared to currently employed engineers.

I went through a few weeks of debating with myself the benefits of getting an e-ink tablet for note taking, reading, etc.

I need color for the majority of stuff that I read/study/work on, which was certainly one point against remarkable. Additionally, I couldn't really justify getting a tablet to replace paper. Paper is ubiquitous. It is thin. It goes everywhere. I can fold it. And there's something fun about writing with a good pen (I mainly use fountain pens nowadays).

Eventually, my workplace just gave us all iPads, so I use that for annotating PDFs, otherwise I'm still just using trusty pen and paper for jotting things down. Can always scan them if needed.

Never for mRNA vaccines though - will be interesting to see how the administration/FDA handles this

Disclaimer: I have not read this article. However, there are multiple known genetic epilepsy disorders that have specific ion channels that are either missing/mutated.

I'll do you one better for what I would want - iPhone that could slot into an iPad chassis a la Asus Padfone of old, which in tern docks onto bottom shell that contains keyboard/trackpad. The hardware is more than capable, heat output would be one concern for sure. I wouldn't mind a Mac that is even 70% as fast as the M1

Tried this with a galaxy s10e with magnetic dock attached to the back of a 10.6" 16:10 2560x1600 touchscreen display, and it went well, however software support for a desktop mode (DeX) was still lacking.

Could you comment on what about the culture you like, and maybe what you don’t like?

Motion and color amplification from wu et Al are underused in my opinion. Maybe because under patent?

Note that I don’t condone the actions at all by this company or individual.

However, this story demonstrates why the publish or perish model is so screwed up today. When your promotion, funding, livelihood are directly connected to positive research findings and publications in high impact journals, deception in the face of desperation will certainly happen. Ethics be damned.

Frankly, this is one of the reasons I think I want to only do research part time, focusing the majority of my time on clinical work as a physician. My salary would not entirely or really even remotely be dependent on grants or publications, and I could just slowly build up on some projects. Is progress slower, could your project be scooped? Certainly, but it sure wouldn’t force me to falsify results to make publications more appealing.

Who knows, though. Maybe everyone is susceptible to the rat race.

Back in the day, I worked in a lab studying the effects of an alternative NF-kB pathway on osteoclast differentiation (osteoclasts eat up bone) and growth. One of the papers demonstrated that certain anti-cancer drugs (used in breast cancer, not the ones described in this paper however) drove up regulation of that pathway, leading to increased bone resorption (thus causing osteoporosis). Now, clinically, this was probably managed fairly well with bisphosphonates, however it raises the question of whether or not these types of combo regimens are going to lead to similar types of side effects.

Regardless of that, if the results in this article are trialed, I suspect this will go exceedingly well for therapies that immunotherapies have been hard pressed to treat (alluded to in the conclusion, of course). Kudos to the group, well done.

Ha, I still use an intel 5775c in my home server!

This loses sight of the lack of incentive missing from hospitals and even residency programs from funding their own positions. There’s literally no regulation preventing a program from funding their own without Medicare dollars. They just need ACGME to sign off on it.

Turns out if you hand out free money for minimum wage employees that rely on your training to not kill people, there’s very little incentive to pay out of pocket. Especially so when programs realize that their trainees will just work harder/longer for the same pay without much complaining.

I also think there’s a method to the madness of training program length and number of spots (namely, ensuring you have enough exposure to the common things/uncommon things you will encounter on your own to be competent), but I agree more scrutiny would weed out inefficiencies in the training process. But like, there’s an obvious reason neurosurgery residencies don’t take that many trainees every year, not just to create artificial scarcity.

I think this reporting is dancing around the issue, that the vaccine supply is most concentrated in countries that have essentially reached their maximum vaccination percentage. By not providing access to those developing or smaller countries, larger countries are shooting themselves in the proverbial global foot. I don’t think countries like the US and Canada aren’t trying to do that, I just think these experts would like more of a conscious effort.

I also think this advice feels like a slap to healthcare workers like myself who desperately want to continue taking care of patients as safely as possible. When your coworkers can spread virus more easily due to less immunity, being unvaccinated, etc, it would be more reassuring to continue to have stronger immunity to continue seeing patients. I don’t have the luxury of waiting for a patient to test negative before seeing them in the emergency room or clinic.

Isn’t the latter a possible consequence of the former?

I’d imagine the limiting factor in all of these is still functionality of these organs. We can reorganize them to look somewhat like the actual organ (like in the linked article), but whether or not the organ functions the same is still under much investigation.

I’m sure you’ve seen a large volume of research involving cross linking and such related to keratoconus. It’s my hope that in the future we find patients like yourself well before they have progressed to later stages and have therapies affordable enough to prevent further progression.

Edit: I forgot to mention but newer techniques for corneal transplant are within reach, and current techniques in the right hands are very successful at giving usable vision.

Best of luck!

Would note that the report found 21% reduced risk of infection in required mask use for students vs optional. Not considered statistically significant because the confidence interval included 1.0. (CI was 0.50 - 1.08)

One could argue that an increased sample size would yield a statistically significant result, and on the flip side another could argue that the effect size would be minimal if you need a larger sample size.

The rebuke, of course, is that even one extra case could kill a loved one that the kid would spread disease on to.

Personally, perhaps reframing the argument that one should wear a mask at school so that they shouldn't have to wear one at home would be a more compelling argument, but I suspect many would disagree..

I tried that but it wouldn’t load for me

Am I doing something wrong by having my passwords stored in iCloud?

What is the best way, paid or otherwise, to attempt OCR on a pdf of old typewritten text?

No, we definitely don’t. If the treatment arm is seen as largely effective, the data safety and monitoring board will most definitely recommend unblinding participants and publishing the results as is. Please educate me with trials that do what you say if this is not true.