• 14 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Lucille: How’s my son? Doctor: He’s going to be all right. Lindsay Funke: Finally some good news from this guy. Doctor: That’s a great attitude. I got to tell you, if I was getting this news, I don’t know that I’d take it this well. Lucille: But you said he was all right. Doctor: Yes, he’s lost his left hand. So he’s going to be “all right.” Lucille: [Jumping on the doctor] You son of a bitch! I hate this doctor!

    My favorite running gag, love the literal doctor




  • I’ve never heard of urgent care requiring referral from a pcp, that wouldn’t make any sense as the whole point of urgent care is being seen more urgently than your primary physician can accommodate. And seeing people who don’t have a primary physician and keeping them out of the ed if not necessary. I would ask your insurance for that policy in writing, that can’t be right. And if it is it should be reported to that state insurance commission because that’s totally asinine. I mean never underestimate the dumbness of insurance companies but I think something might be being lost in translation here.


  • This is mildly infuriating, I can give you a little more context though if you’re interested. I don’t know exactly about contracts between insurance companies and CVS so I can’t speak to that definitely. Probably something related to how much insurance is willing to pay minute clinic for such a short visit, and what things are feasible to address in such a short visit (hence CVS only allowing certain complaints).

    I think this is something to do with the concept of “uncomplicated” vs “complicated” uti. Complicated utis are when there’s an increased danger of serious complications from a uti or increased likelihood of failing a typical antibiotic therapy. Utis in men are much much rarer than women, and are considered to be an automatic “complicated” uti by many. The greater length of the urethra in men helps prevent bacteria from being able to travel up to the bladder, whereas in women the short distance allows for this to happen much more frequently. So when a male has a UTI there is a much greater chance there will be complicating factors like prostate issues, structural problems, kidney stones, kidney infection, catheter use, atypical bacteria, etc. If you look more into their info on utis, they also state if they suspect any of those things, even in women, they won’t treat it and will just refer you to someone else, probably the Ed or a real urgent care clinic. Since the odds of that are much greater in men, they probably aren’t allowed to have longer appointments in minute clinic based on what insurance will pay for what they’re providing, they just decided to not see that at all in minute clinic. Looks like they do see men for sexually transmitted infections though, which are actually the most common cause of utis in young men, so if that’s a concern looks like they would be able to see people for that.

    But I totally agree with you, fuck insurance companies in general.




  • I agree with this. The area of medicine I’m most involved in has had a crazy rate of new medications approved and innovations with a giant pipeline of possibilities on the way. The article focuses on crispr a lot, which is cool and always get the headlines, but I think in the nearer term oligonucleotide therapies or even viral vector gene therapies are already here. Oligonucleotide therapies use rna to affect gene expression, usually decreasing it. Theoretically it can be used in any toxic gain of function mutation, which covers a lot of genetic diseases. It’s not really a question of do we have the ability to treat genetic diseases anymore, it’s more getting all the time, money, expertise, and prerequisite natural history work done on the sheer number of them so these tolls can be tested in all these diseases and brought to patients.

    The importance of high quality natural history studies and biomarker development cannot be overstated too. When you design a clinical trial you need to know how many patients need to be in it and how long it needs to run, or else you might accidentally throw out a treatment that works by designing the trial incorrectly. Natural history studies are where you get that information. Biomarkers can help provide more sensitive measures of change so you can more quickly figure out if a treatment has potential or not (ideally followed up by proving efficacy with clinical measures too).

    The availablity of the these tools for making new treatments but limited resources for testing them is also leading to ethical issues and inequality. For instance there have been a number of “N of 1” trials where treatments were made specifically for a particular patient. I hope that benefit would then flow to other patients eventually too, but it does raise a lot of questions.




  • Neuron@mander.xyztoMetroidMetroid Prime 4 or Metroid 6?
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    1 year ago

    Rip my heart out, geeze. Alright, I’ll go with metroid 6 just since the development of metroid prime 4 has been so rocky. I do appreciate that when Nintendo sees a game isn’t working they’ll scrap it and go back to square one and try and make it good though, rather then just releasing something subpar. While usually at least. On the other hand who knows when metroid 6 will come out? Anywhere from 2-15 years is the range apparently.









  • Totally, like if you were an alien trying to study a computer, you can look at an individual transistor all you want but at some point you need to look at how all the different complex network systems work together to make a software program.

    The language of computer programming has worked it’s way more and more even into clinical neurology. I talk about motor programs for instance when trying to explain dystonias, where the brain activates a set of movement patterns that’s not at all what the person was trying to do. You might find functional neurologic disorders interesting. Super common problem that needs a lot more research. Many patients have trouble grasping the idea of a “software” problem in the brain so don’t talk about it and don’t realize just how common it is. Fmri has started to help uncover the abberant patterns that lead to these disorders.


  • Neuron@mander.xyztoMemes@lemmy.mlWhat the h...
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    1 year ago

    Appreciate the funny post, but for anyone reading too much into this it’s misleading at best (also just barely passing at 60% only correct). It’s referencing a portion of the test with multiple choice questions. So that’s relatively easy for a language model, since it can predict an answer from a focused question. Please don’t ask chat gpt individualized questions about your health. It does decent for giving out some general information about medical topics, but you’d be better off at going to a reputable site like mayo clinic, Cleveland clinic, or all the resources at national library of medicine who maintain free very nice medical knowledge databases on tons of topics. It’s where chat gpt is probably scraping it’s answers from anyways, and you won’t have to worry about it making up nonsense that looks real and inserting it into the answer.

    And if chat gpt comes up with sources in an answer, look them up yourself no matter how convincing they seem on their face. I’ve seen it invent doi numbers that don’t exist and all sorts of weird stuff.