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The headline (and the article for that matter) are very sensationalist and I don’t think they’ve presented this in a balanced way. They are discussing how sorbitol behaves in zebrafish with limited data presented on human biochemistry, and they discuss it in a vacuum without quantifying the amount of sorbitol it takes to cause a problem. Yes, any substance in excess can be harmful, but the amount of sorbitol in food compared to the amount of high fructose corn syrup makes it the substantially lesser evil. The artificial sweeteners are vastly more potent than actual sugar, so you don’t need very much of it to get the same amount of sweetness. High fructose corn syrup is used in massive amounts in food and is much worse for you on the scale that either substance would be consumed.

They once tried to prove that DNPs (Doctorate of Nurse Practitioner) was just as good as an MD or DO education. They did this by taking the top DNP grads from the best programs and gave them a dumbed down version of the easiest part of the medical license exam, and only 40% passed it.

For context, to get a medical license, a physician has to have passed Steps 1-3 of the USMLE (US Medical License Exam) or Levels 1-3 of COMLEX (Comprehensive Osteopathic Medical Licensing Exam) to be eligible to apply for a medical license. Step/Level 2 is usually considered the hardest one of the three, and Step/Level 3 is the longest exam (2 full days), but generally considered to be the easiest. This DNP exam took the easiest 20% of questions from Step 3 and made a half-length version of the exam…and 60% of the DNPs still failed it.

The NP/DNP education is almost entirely algorithm-based and doesn’t meaningfully get into the anatomy, physiology, pathophysiology, and pharmacology that the first 2 years of medical school are devoted to. I have seen NPs miss life-threatening diagnoses because they were rare diseases that don’t come up outside of those first 2 years of drinking from a firehose of textbooks in medical school. Their education just isn’t long enough or in-depth enough to actually be equivalent to an MD or DO degree.

Also, MDs and DOs have almost 4000 hours of supervised medical practice where a physician is checking their work and directly observing or guiding their clinical experience before finishing medical school. Residency is, at minimum, another 8000 to 10000 hours of supervised practice in the specialties that only require 3 years of residency (it ranges from 3 to 9 years based on specialty).

NPs don’t have any standardized requirements for supervised practice to get their licenses and most programs only require 1000 hours or less of shadowing where they are just observing a licensed NP practice and not actually doing anything hands-on themselves… And they try to argue that this education is sufficient for them to be equal to physicians. There are some NPs who are amazing providers, but they’re usually the ones that were bedside nurses for 10+ years before going back to school for their NP license. The newer NPs that are going straight through from their BSN without any actual experience are the really dangerous ones.

TO BE CLEAR: I love the nurses I work with and I value their work and their input immensely. I was an EMT/ER tech before med school and it’s really sad when nurses are so confused when I help them clean up patients or reposition or whatever as a med student because most physicians and medical students don’t stop to help the nurses clean up poop. You can always tell which physicians have never had to clean up poop before, and I try very hard not to be like them.

Actually, the problem is the number of residencies. Once you graduate from medical school, you MUST complete an accredited residency program to be able to practice independently. The number of residency programs is controlled by Congress because residencies are funded through Medicare, and the last substantial increase in the number of residencies was when they added 1000 more in the Covid Omnibus bill.

It’s actually a growing crisis because more medical schools are opening and existing ones are increasing their class sizes, but the number of residencies isn’t keeping pace. This means that more and more people are going to be medical graduates with no way of obtaining a medical license without a residency and therefore no way to pay off their student loans. There’s a couple stories every year about medical graduates that couldn’t get into residency or couldn’t complete residency that end up dying by suicide, but it gets pretty effectively swept under the rug.

In high end circuses, the clowns are the most experienced acrobats and performers. There’s a decent chance the clowns are the coaches for the new performers doing the fancy stuff. It takes a ton of practice and experience to do acrobatics and gymnastics “badly” without getting horribly injured.

If you’ve never actually watched a child die from a preventable cause, I can see why you would be more willing to give up on fighting the parents on these things. I worked at a pediatric level 1 trauma emergency room before starting medical school. I have watched far too many children die because of some stupid mistake/decision their parent made to be willing to let it go.

Having to do chest compressions on a baby that went into respiratory arrest then cardiac arrest because of a vaccine preventable illness does something to you…and if it doesn’t? Something is seriously wrong with you.

Yeah, but it’s not the baby’s fault their parents are kool aid swilling morons.

Yeah, I like the idea of keeping them here to live in the hellhole they’re making. It’s bullshit that they get to turn this country into a nightmare and bop off to tropical vacations while we try to keep people from dying from their shitty decisions. (I work in healthcare and get to try to convince people to get vaccines. It’s a painful conversation to have multiple times a day.)

I’m in a similar boat, but I have a couple Democrats in my state that I think are good eggs. For one, Tim Walz has been an amazing governor and I really hate what the Harris campaign did to him and his reputation. Also, Ilhan Omar and Peggy Flanagan are pretty nifty all around. Outside Minnesota, AOC seems pretty decent to me and I have high hopes for Mamdani (although, he explicitly identifies as a Democratic Socialist)

I’ve met a POC transwoman who was a sex worker and receiving Medicaid that showed up to her medical appointment in a bedazzled MAGA tank top in 2019. She was…interesting.

I’ll be getting my hysterectomy in the new year. I’m looking forward to it.

They can get your actual region off your billing details for subscription pricing. The content availability might vary by IP, but the pricing is going to go off your billing address. That’s why I pay taxes on some of my subscription services is because my state has a tax on that while other states don’t. When signing up for a new service, it doesn’t show me the total with tax until I enter my address.

I have the pixel watch 2, and waterproofing is very important to me when it comes to a smartwatch. I work in healthcare and have to wash my hands upwards of 30 times a day. If I had to take off my watch every time or gamble on a rubber flap adequately covering the charging port, it simply would not be worth the hassle.

I can’t condone this because the children don’t really get much choice in what food their parents provide them with. There is no reasonable world in which we can expect children to make good choices for themselves when their parents are the ones being absolute idiots.

It’s been around for quite awhile. I use Turo more than I use regular car rental services because you actually get to choose what car you’re getting and the prices are better.

Use Turo. You can rent basic or fun/interesting cars directly from the owners.

Most people with heart problems have too big of a heart. Cardiac hypertrophy and dilated cardiomyopathy (too much overgrown muscle and stretched out floppy muscle, respectively) are common end points of poorly managed hypertension (high blood pressure).

I was fairly young, but I do remember using Windows 95 or 98 with Netscape and there were popups that had to be killed through the task manager (or equivalent, it was 30 years ago, so I don’t remember precisely).

Back on Windows 95 through XP, each individual window was a process that could be killed in Task Manager, and popups opened in a new window.

Yeah, my old desktop computer is getting turned into my first dedicated Linux machine and my current desktop isn’t getting updated to 11 until October 13th.

Time to prepare is very important because we have crap labor laws. It can be very hard for people to get time off work and missing a day can be very painful. For folks living paycheck to paycheck, missing a day of pay means missing a rent payment or not being able to afford food. In a lot of jobs, time off is very limited, even for illness, and is highly likely to be unpaid.

The robber barons have done an extremely good job at nailing our bootstraps in the pits of Tartarus through debt and indenture.