medgremlin

I really want to know what percent of the emergency department was blocked with boarders. This is the number one reason for prolonged wait times in US emergency rooms. The inpatient hospital floors frequently have physical space for more patients, but not enough nurses to take care of that many patients. The severe injustice of this to the ER staff is that, under US law, ERs are not allowed to turn people away without a medical examination and appropriate stabilizing treatment for serious conditions. This is why you might get shoved in a chair in a hallway with blinds around you so that the ER providers can see you.

This is also why ER nurses are hideously overworked. Floor nurses are usually limited to 4 to 6 patients, depending on complexity (ICU nurses get 1 to 3 depending on complexity).....but ER nurses can be stuck with up to 8 patients. I've worked in ERs where a single nurse had 4 patients that were supposed to be in inpatient hospital beds upstairs, 1 ICU patient, and 3 ER patients because they had enough day shift nurses to keep the ratios down, but weren't able to discharge or transfer the patients and the night shift was understaffed.

No, it'd be the Orange Cube.

"Take only pictures, leave only footprints."

It was so zoomed in and cropped that I thought this was one of those weird corner scenes in a Bosch tryptic.

I think I need to boil this down a bit. Some people lack the emotional intelligence and personal convictions to make meaning for themselves. This is not a bad thing. I do not think less of people for having shortcomings compared to others, I see it only as variance between people. Just as I do not think less of my patients with diabetes or heart disease or substance use disorders, I do not think less of people for not being able to adjust to sudden changes in their lives with perfect poise and rationality. Everyone has differing strengths and weaknesses, and there is no shame to be had for any of them.

For your argument about choices in life: There are many American children and young adults that pick their education and future career based on external influence/instruction or necessity rather than actually choosing for themselves. Most of the people I know that joined the military out of high school did so because they would have been homeless and unemployed if they didn't. (I graduated high school in 2009, by the way). So there really isn't all that much in the way of true free will in this country unless you come from a wealthy family or take on a lot of risks and debt forging your own path. This isn't even touching on the rampant propaganda in our youth telling us that we will amount to nothing without a college degree.

For the point of being a physician in a post-work world, a lot of people are trying to replace physicians with AI despite the fact that these overgrown algorithms simply do not have the capabilities to do the job properly....but it's not like they're taking that into consideration for any other jobs/professions either.

The discussion is not centered around a post-work world that people have grown up in. This is a discussion about what happens to hundreds of millions of people when the fabric of their lives changes suddenly because the vast majority of people alive today have grown up and lived in a reality where their life is functionally defined by work. I'm not saying that this is a good thing, but it is the reality of the situation. Most people are not comfortable enough to sit with themselves and decide who they are as a person and figure out their real internal motivations because the necessity of work has made it fairly easy to avoid doing that difficult work.

It isn't a pleasant opportunity, but the experience of being left rudderless, of having to sort things out on your own without a script or a clear path forward is one that many people don't get, and one that many others fail to seize upon. There are enough people, particularly in America, that have been just comfortable enough to never have to really think about back up plans or contingencies for what to do with their life in the absence of its current structure.

And there are many reasons why people may not have the wherewithal to find meaning in their lives. Some people are so focused on survival that meaning hasn't even occurred to them. Others are depressed or traumatized or otherwise miserable and it's hard to find meaning in blinding pain. Some people have been spoon fed meaning by way of work since the day they were born and literally do not know any other way to exist. Personally, I was stuck in a blend of these things when I was still working in tech and it was in the throes of abject despair that I finally forced myself to make the changes required to pursue my life's meaning through work as a physician. Getting into and through medical school has been a brutal process and it has been immensely painful to try to imagine alternatives after the amount of work I've put in to pursue this goal. I'm now within 6 months of graduating and will be starting residency next summer, but it won't be in the specialty that I had hoped (and that I had already staked a piece of my identity to). I've suffered more hardship than many, but I have also been more comfortable than plenty of other people, but I would find a great deal of turmoil and misery trying to restructure my life without being able to work as a physician (and that's not even getting into the financial nightmare of my student loan situation.)

If society really collapsed, and for some reason the post-society world didn't leave space for me to be a physician or a healer of some kind, I would probably figure it out...but it would be so incredibly painful to do so. It would be horrible to give up on everything I have worked so hard for to have to replace it with whatever I could manage and I would be unlikely to be happy with whatever that solution ended up being for a long time until I finished grieving what could have been, because that's what this process is. Losing everything you've structured your life on is a form of grief and not everyone is equipped to handle that grief gracefully and effectively while being able to carry on with their lives.

So it must be that others are capable of that too, right?

People are capable of a great many things, but most people do not accomplish everything they are capable of.

I look at it this way: hypothetically, everyone is capable of running a marathon...until you consider that most people have not had the time, resources, or opportunities to train for a marathon, or are out of shape, or have physical injuries or disabilities, or they just don't have time to train for and run a marathon. I don't see it as "empathy" to assume that everyone is capable of the same things or that everyone has had the same opportunities that I have. If I expected everyone to have the knowledge and experience that I have sought out and worked for, I would be an atrocious physician because I would just assume that my patients were "non-compliant" instead of understanding that there are barriers that prevent people from achieving the things they want or need to do.

This is the difference between "Equality" and "Equity". "Equality" gives everyone the same resources, assumptions, and expectations, regardless of where people are starting from. It's the top-down approach. "Equity" is the bottom-up approach where you adjust resource allocation, alter expectations, and make educated assessments instead of assumptions to try to get everyone to the same end-point.

"Equity" is justice is how we build a better world. "Equality" is when we assume that everyone is capable of everything that we are, regardless of the barriers that others may face. It is not pity, devaluing, or dehumanizing to recognize that some people need more help than others. Not everyone is actually capable of everything, and we succeed as a society when we work to our own strengths and help to cover each other's weaknesses.

Your allegations of "intellectual laziness" are evidence of a lack of understanding of or empathy for the mental state of many (if not most) people. There are billions of people alive today that don't have the mental framework to cope with this kind of change because our education systems are abysmally incapable of teaching people how to think critically, structurally, and existentially.

But occasional use for moderate pain is quite reasonable and people should not be afraid to take medications at the doses and frequency listed in the instructions. For those with liver or kidney problems, listen to your doctor about what medications to avoid and what to use in their place, but don't suffer unnecessarily.

Taking these meds once in a while is perfectly safe if you don't have preexisting organ damage or dysfunction.

It's quite hard to actually overload your liver with the artificial sweeteners unless you are drinking literal gallons of zero sugar pop a day or eating nothing besides artificially sweetened foods. The stuff is used in such tiny concentrations that someone would have to deliberately seek out overdosing on this stuff to get the same effects as the experimental animals are getting (because the experimental animals are being fed pure sorbitol in doses that no human could reasonably consume.)

That's the problem with articles like this is that they don't emphasize that they are only seeing this in animal models and they don't disclose just how much of the stuff they had to give to the animal for the negative effects to occur. It's also a bad study because it doesn't account for the differences in the physiology and biochemistry between humans and zebrafish, nor does it account for the confounding factors in humans. You know who drinks and eats a lot of artificially sweetened things? People with diabetes and people who are trying to lose weight. These are people that are likely to already have fatty liver disease and the sorbitol didn't really have much to do with it.

Copied from another posting of this article:

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.

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.