A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
My parents legitimately believe ivermectin is a cure all and are stockpiling it. They take it for just about anything. They also believe plenty of other wacky things like viruses don't exist and cancer is just a fungal infection.
My dad last year nearly lost his foot after it got infected. They let it fester for months and only treated it with like essential oils or some other pseudoscience. He eventually had to go to the emergency room and stay at the hospital and receive antibiotics. 🙄
And immediately saw the error in his ways? Absolutely not. These people get sick to the point of dying. Go to the emergency room and get healed through real medicine and the efforts of a dozen nurses and a doctor or two. Then they leave and brag to their friends and family "see told you I'd be fine" and never give credit to the REAL medicine that fixed the issue.
"See? Told you I'd be fine."
"Dad, you need to take off your leg to go through airport security."
thanks Obama
Many of my relatives are diehard MAGA. So, when Trump said not to wear masks or quarantine, my aunt and her husband and son went out of their way to basically spend every second they could at superspreader events. They were warned it was dangerous, not restricted in any way, but still felt the need to act out to validate political feelings.
Naturally, they all caught COVID in the early days. My uncle and cousin both passed, leaving my aunt as a devastated shell of a woman. When we would see each other at family dinners she would usually just sit with a far-off, forlorn look. Every once in a while she would tune in for a bit to spout some pro-Trump bullshit. I wanted to scream “He helped to kill your family!”
I decided to just stop spending time with these people before I said something I would regret.
My dad literally will not talk to me because I refused to say that ivermectin is a miracle cure. He’s angry at me for some study or article that he thinks I am obsessed with (I honestly have no idea what he’s talking about), and insists I retract my belief in it or we can’t have a relationship. Since I haven’t the first clue what he’s even on about, he made his choice..
Can’t wait for the next round of crackpot email forwards. Hopefully he sticks to his word and won’t contact me anymore.
Edit - the last time I spoke with him was at my step mom’s funeral, where she had just died of cancer, which they treated with….I’ll give you one guess.
We aren’t dealing with rational people.
I guess I can somewhat understand his obstinance towards you. If he admits he’s wrong, he also has to admit he had a hand in killing his wife through willful ignorance.
Truth hurts.
refused to say that ivermectin is a miracle cure
What sucks the most is that ivermectin is a miracle cure! It just isn't helpful again COVID or Hantavirus. The 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded (in part) for discovering ivermectin.
It's what frustrates me the most about discussion with people like this. They're willing to take a random drug, a drug that is fully backed by the medical community, but they're not willing to take the drug actually recommended by the medical community.
IMO, this is one of the consequences of not having universal health insurance that isn't talked about enough. If the bar for going to the doctor is "about to lose a limb from infection", then people become vulnerable to pseudo-scientific garbage, simply because they hardly ever receive advice from actual medical professionals.
This is one my comment talking point. When people have to think about "can I afford this?" anytime they need to goto the doctor, then they'll only go when it's serious. But they are not qualified medical professionals to decide what needs medical attention or not. So they seek advice from other people, past experiences and Internet and we have this problem.
Honestly, it shouldn't cost that much to just goto a doctor's office and return. We don't need MD for everything, have other professional people there that are qualified enough to tell you when something doesn't need attention, or simple solutions. Maybe just cleaning a scrap, or giving you a brace for minor sprain, all those without having to see MD.
Great point. Hard to trust doctors when it’s $500 to not find anything over and over and over and over.
In the US, people don't go to the doctor when they have a problem, they go as a last resort because they have to ask themselves how much it would cost.
18% of Americans haven't ever seen a doctor and 40% of Americans haven't seen one for 5 years.
A number of studies in low income communities in the south show that over 60% of people in those communities have intestinal parasites. That's just the ones we know of.
One thing we know for sure is that ivermectin is about as magic as they say it is for parasites only. It's a fantastic drug for that.
Over 60% of low income citizens would likely feel much better after getting their parasites removed from ivermectin. So what they are seeing, seems true. They could be sick from something else but get rid of a long standing comorbidity of a pariste infection, you bet they are feeling good. They just think that relief from the varied symptoms from parasite is actually something else cured.
This ivermectin religion has real miracles, it's just not the ones they think they are. This belief is entirely created because Americans don't have healthcare. That's why this belief isn't found elsewhere.
Doesn't even need to be eliminated parasites.
"I am solving the problem by taking the medicine, and I am smart because I'm using a secret medicine they don't want me to know about" causes the brain to release the good feelings chemicals which does make you feel better.
Covid spread easily; I don’t think hantavirus is as easy to spread. However, it’s much more deadly and can be dormant for 60 days, spreading itself.
We’re pretty fucked.
Settle down, we are not fucked. Hantavirus has been around forever, even this strain.
People on the floating petri dishes that are cruiseships are fucked. The rest of us are in no more danger from this than we were before.
Probably wouldn't have made much of a difference for a ship registered in the Netherlands that never made port in the US.
Will probably be a problem down the road though
What's the thing with ivermectin? Do they own shares from the manufacturers or something?
Early laboratory research indicated that ivermectin could kill the SARS-CoV-2 virus, but this was later found to require, in many cases, toxic doses far exceeding those approved for humans. Antivaxxers latched onto this and ran with it, spreading the misinformation far and wide.
So she thinks (I know, I know) that getting “natural immunity” to COVID protects her from hantavirus? The ivermectin is just the icing on the cake, honestly.
It's what happens when practicing medical physicians forget they are not really researchers. The main problem is that medical schools do teach research, but just enough to give people a false confidence in their own abilities. Medicine covers so much information that medical school is basically just a series of introduction courses. Like with most positions as a physician, your real knowledge comes from what you actually practice during your residency and specialty training.
I specialize in orthopedics and rehabilitation, I can understand the mechanisms and physiology involved in studies done over rna virus replication, but I wouldn't feel confident in my ability to draw conclusions from those studies that are not explicitly stated in the study itself.
From my understanding invermectin has show itself to have some promising potential for moderating rna viruses from replicating. However, it's not very water soluble and so there are currently no effective means to actually get the medication to the affected cells. Which is why none of the studies done on cell cultures in a laboratory can't be extrapolated upon and applied to people.
Even if you are taking 100x the recommended dose, it's mainly just going to travel through your digestive tract and cause more harm than good.
Why is ivermectin always the cure to every disease? My grandmother has tumors and my mom mentioned getting her ivermectin. Wtf am I missing here?
Someone told them NO. You cant do that.
That made them feel mad and feel stupid.
Then someone told them that they were right and that someone else was actually the stupid one.
Then they felt better.
Better than better, they now have the secret knowledge and everyone else are the stupid ones.
Honestly, my suspicion is that you can easily get the stuff. I've gotten it for my dog once or twice (it's a lot cheaper than dog dewormer, despite basically being the same thing), and all you have to do is go into a Tractor supply or the like and it's right on the shelf, no restrictions or anything. This is in contrast to actual medicine, where I have to go to a CVS or the like to pay an overpriced amount for something that is more regulated, and might even be a bit of a placebo effect in the first place (look at flu meds for an example of that).
All of this mostly seems to speak more to the degrading of the American healthcare system due to costs ballooning beyond what some of the poorer in society can afford, so they are more willing to try folk remedies that may or may not work. And in the case of your grandmother, is she gonna risk paying a lot of her life savings to cure her tumors if they aren't benign (without a guarantee that it will work), or is she just gonna hope that the $10 treatment might make her feel better? If they're benign, then the $10 treatment "worked", and if they're not, then she'll get expensive treatment anyway, just probably be in a worse position to get it.
And remember, if you get sick with the hantavirus you can get over it quickly by taking 2x the LD50 of Tylenol. A couple of days and you won't even feel sick. Be sure to tell all your conservative friends because the government likes to cover up this kind of information.
The new hot cure to hantavirus: bloodletting! Balance your humors and align your chakras with this one simple trick!
I love when science memes is just US politics.
I don't. Lots of people are gonna die or get disabled because of these idiots.
Just so everyone is clear, this is total bullshit — I understand MTG has had her broken clock moments but she's still batshit insane.
The vast majority of viruses are RNA-based so it appears that we have a pretty much universal cure here.
Ivermectin works primarily by paralyzing and killing parasites, such as worms and mites, by binding to specific glutamate-gated chloride channels in their nerve and muscle cells.
Nothing to do with RNA viruses.
Ivermectin comes in apple flavor if y'all are worried about the taste.
/s
This doctor was previously suspended for vaccine misinformation and now has a complaint against her by the texas medical board for numerous violations of professional conduct, including prescribing medication without ever meeting or examining a patient.
She filed a defamation lawsuit against the hospital which she lost. Ouch. Best of luck to her in keeping her certification, and in finding a new job! She should become trumps personal dr.
Even with the best medical care, Hantavirus has a 20% fatality rate.
Let’s just hope that conservatives continue being so anti-vaccine… a few more pandemics with human-transmissible highly-fatal viruses and maybe we can get that socialist utopia that the right always cock-blocks us from achieving.
This stupid cunt didn't learn a thing from Trump fucking her over, and back to the old song and dance. It's not even surprising... I really hope these tools load up hard on horse paste, hell, mainline it, I could use the entertainment...
Colloquial silver works wonders when taken in high doses
Spoiler: it'll turn your skin blue. These idiots should be labeled like smufs
colloidal?
In the streets we call it colloquial silver.
