medgremlin
@medgremlin@midwest.social
- Comment on Do you still remember? 3 days ago:
I just use nonsense answers or answers that make absolutely no sense to anyone else. (Inside jokes and the like)
- Comment on ifixit was NOT fucking around with that repairability score of...1 LMAO 3 days ago:
When explaining why I need to go into Emergency Medicine as a specialty I tell people that I’m a naturally nocturnal basement -dwelling gremlin with weapons-grade ADHD.
It usually gets a laugh.
- Comment on ifixit was NOT fucking around with that repairability score of...1 LMAO 4 days ago:
I didn’t take it as a negative! Just expressing that you’re right on the mark about my username being quite relevant.
- Comment on ifixit was NOT fucking around with that repairability score of...1 LMAO 4 days ago:
Look, I’m a 4th year med student in my 30’s. I know what I’m about. My undergraduate degree is in History and I worked in IT and sysadmin for a couple years before I went back to school to go into medicine.
- Comment on ifixit was NOT fucking around with that repairability score of...1 LMAO 4 days ago:
I had so much fun cracking open my Surface Duo 2 phone to fix the hinges. I literally cracked the glass shell and had to get a laminate skin to hold the glass together. I ended up getting another phone after I broke the hinges and couldn’t find someone to repair it quickly, so now I just use it as a very fancy mini-tablet. I’m so pissed they killed the platform because I adore the 2 separate screens that can run apps side-by-side and the fact that my Surface pen works on it flawlessly.
I don’t know why I keep trusting Microsoft to keep supporting good platforms, but here I am with multiple Zunes (someone else gave me their old one when they got an iPhone), and a Surface Duo 2 phone…
- Comment on ifixit was NOT fucking around with that repairability score of...1 LMAO 4 days ago:
I worked in the bookstore computer repair shop in college and I was one of 2 techs that was actually willing to crack open Windows laptops and work on them. The bookstore had to have an Apple Certified repair shop to be allowed to sell Apple products, so most of our folks got certified as Apple technicians. I never bothered because I always had plenty of work with the myriad random models of laptops that folks brought in that the Apple bros didn’t want to touch.
- Comment on ifixit was NOT fucking around with that repairability score of...1 LMAO 4 days ago:
I wish they were more repairable. I have a Surface Pro 8 that serves my needs quite well and I was able to upgrade the SSD to a TB from the 256GB it came with, but I had to do some shenanigans with power settings and whatnot because the only SSD I could find was technically only compatible with the Surface Pro 9 and newer. But it works now and it has been a very good machine for getting through medical school. An iPad would not have met my needs and as much as I hate to admit it, having my Surface and my desktop terminal linked through OneDrive has actually been very helpful.
Full disclosure, I am one of those nerds that bought and used a Surface Duo 2 phone until I broke the hinge by dropping it wrong. I did eventually crack it open to mostly fix the hinges, but shattered the glass in the process. I fixed that with 2 layers of laminate sticker things after assembling the shards back onto the phone.
- Comment on Chickenslap 3 weeks ago:
Look, I just finished my medical board exams recently. My brain is running on the power of about 2/3rds of a yukon gold potato here.
- Comment on Chickenslap 3 weeks ago:
You need the chicken to be 165F or 74C to be food safe. It takes a long time to cook at 100-200C because the heat is being transferred much slower. If we’re using this instant slap-based cooking method, it only needs to get to the food safe temperature.
Using the OP’s calculations and a cooked temperature of 74C:
It would take 8315 average slaps
or
A slap at around 756m/s or 1691mph (numbers are rounded to whole integers).
- Comment on How do you think early humans survived without water bottles? Did they just live next to water sources all the time? 4 weeks ago:
I do this now and didn’t have to as a kid…however, I have a weird kidney problem where my kidneys will just dump water, whether or not I have the water to spare. This means that I have a minimum water requirement of 4 liters a day. It’s not as bad as when I was on a really horrible medication that started the whole issue. When I was on that medication I had to drink about 4 gallons of water a day.
End result: I have a stupid party trick where I can down a liter of fluid in about 10 seconds, and a gallon of fluid in about 5 to 10 minutes depending on how recently I’ve eaten. (I did give myself water poisoning once, but that took 8 gallons over about 14 hours)
- Comment on More like a bacterial infection imo 5 weeks ago:
The issue is that the title of the story implies that it was entirely due to the organism that the Irish people suffered so many deaths. Context matters and they framed this in the worst way possible.
- Comment on More like a bacterial infection imo 5 weeks ago:
The Irish people were growing tons of crops besides potatoes, but the British landlords took everything besides the potatoes as cash crops/taxes, leaving them only the potatoes to actually eat. There was more than enough food to prevent those deaths, but the Irish people weren’t allowed to eat it.
- Comment on Anon measures up 1 month ago:
From the perspective of human fetal development, the structures will develop into a vulva, vagina, uterus, and ovaries unless the fetus has its own DHEAS and testosterone to alter the growth pattern. There are plenty of people that have XY chromosomes that have entirely female genitalia because their testosterone receptors are broken.
- Comment on What is an example of a supermax prison? and how do you get sent there? And a regular prison in your state? Or what movies call club Fed which is the easiest? How do you get sent there? 1 month ago:
That is astonishingly stupid.
- Comment on What is an example of a supermax prison? and how do you get sent there? And a regular prison in your state? Or what movies call club Fed which is the easiest? How do you get sent there? 1 month ago:
Ft Leavenworth is the military’s prison. They don’t send civilians there.
- Comment on "You can't just have Geralt for every single game" says his voice actor, and if you think The Witcher 4 making Ciri the protagonist is "woke," then "read the damn books" 1 month ago:
That’s why the trailer has me so hyped for this game. It looks like the game is going to be different because Ciri is the protagonist. Her experience, reactions, and approach to saving a young woman from being sacrificed are totally different than what Geralt’s would be. I hate it when games like Mass Effect are like “Oh! You can play as FemShep! That totally counts as representation!” even though it changes literally nothing about the story.
I want more games that actually address the real and significant differences in the experiences and perspectives of different characters. I’m always disappointed when there’s a “female” option that’s just a re-skin of the male character with no changes in how the character interacts with the world and the story. (This happens a lot in non-video game media too.)
- Comment on Oof 2 months ago:
I didn’t say they paid no taxes at all, but I was explaining how the bottom 50% of earners in the country pay very little, if anything. The 19.3% is the bottom 19.3% of earners in the country, not a percentage of the bottom half.
I would argue that if you get everything (or most of your withheld taxes) back on your return…that means that you effectively didn’t pay federal income taxes or paid very little. If you get most of your withholding back every year, you could look at how you filed your exemptions on your I-9 and increase the number to the maximum allowable. I know some people that put the maximum allowances so that no federal tax is withheld from their paycheck and they just pay the balance at the end of the year when they file their taxes instead of getting a return.
- Comment on Oof 2 months ago:
They just try to slide it under the radar by not showing the taxes on your payslip because you’re more likely to look closer at that than your receipt from the grocery store.
- Comment on Oof 2 months ago:
And that’s not even getting into state income taxes, Medicare taxes, and Social Security taxes. Those all have different brackets and some states are more regressive than others. There are states like Texas that don’t have income taxes, but they make up for it by taxing everything else through things like sales and property taxes.
Of note: sales tax is always the most regressive taxation model, and tariffs are basically sales taxes on steroids.
- Comment on Oof 2 months ago:
The bottom 50% of Americans make less than $40k a year. They do pay some federal taxes, but with the standard deduction, the 19.3% of working Americans that make less than $15k a year don’t pay any federal taxes. The standard deduction goes up to $22.5k for a head of household (i.e. a single working parent). Given that the federal minimum wage still works out to $15,080, that means a full-time minimum wage worker doesn’t make enough to get hit with income taxes.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
It is absolutely nonsense. People are subjected to stronger, more direct magnetic fields all the time in MRI’s, and MRI’s are substantially safer than most other imaging modalities in medicine (besides ultrasound). The amount of radiation from non-atmospheric sources vastly outweighs the cosmic (non-UV) radiation humans are subjected to, to the point that it’s not really even worth considering outside of maybe astronauts or people who take long-haul high altitude flights extremely frequently.
The amount of ferrous material in blood is negligible at best, and there’s an estimated 3 to 4 grams of iron in the entire human body. The pressure from your heart pumping and the relatively high percentage of blood’s mass that is not iron (about 5kg) means that the effect of the iron if it was responsive to magnetic fields is slim to none.
- Comment on doctors 2 months ago:
For a lot of doctors, the incentive to not do risky procedures is the fact that you have to live with the guilt of your patient’s death, even if you did everything perfectly. Or, you do everything perfectly, but they still have a poor outcome because they weren’t healthy enough to go through the procedure and the recovery, and you get sued for millions of dollars because you didn’t spend 4 hours going through the informed consent with the patient to ensure that every single possible complication was adequately discussed.
I’ve worked in emergency medicine and I’ve had patients die in my care that we had absolutely no way of saving. The screams of their families still haunt me and I will carry those cries of anguish and loss to my grave. I would not perform a procedure that was not 1000000% necessary if the risks are too high because I have enough blood on my hands already, and I haven’t even finished medical school.
- Comment on doctors 2 months ago:
Sometimes. It depends why the first surgeon would be unable to do the procedure. If the problem is that the patient might not wake up from anesthesia because of problems with heart disease, lung problems, or other metabolic issues, then it doesn’t really matter what the surgeon has to say about actually doing the procedure because the anesthesiologist is the one saying “no”. If it’s an issue of too much adipose, sometimes it would mean that the surgery would take longer than it’s safe for the patient to be under anesthesia.
Another possibility is that the first surgeon operates at a facility that doesn’t have access to more advanced technologies or other medical specialists in the event that something goes wrong. And there are some surgeons that are just more willing to accept the risk of a bad outcome, and I would argue that that’s rarely in the patient’s best interest. There are alternative options that the surgeon should discuss with the patient as part of the informed consent process, and sometimes, the alternatives to surgery are just safer than the risk of the surgery itself, even if they aren’t as effective or are a long term treatment (ongoing) as opposed to a definitive treatment (cure). If the patient has a high risk of serious complications, up to and including death, then attempting the curative procedure might be more risk than it’s worth compared to a long term medication that mitigates the disease.
You’ll see this with pregnant patients too. For elective procedures that have safer alternatives or temporizing measures (a holdover treatment until surgery is safe), those are generally preferred to putting a pregnant patient under anesthesia because of all the cardiovascular, immunologic, and other physiologic changes that happen during pregnancy alongside potential risks to the fetus.
- Comment on doctors 2 months ago:
There’s a reason you have to get a pre-op physical exam for any non-emergent surgery. Figuring out if you’ll wake up from the anesthesia at all is part of the calculus that determines whether the benefits of the procedure outweigh the risks.
- Comment on How do children address a non-binary parent? 2 months ago:
I’m in my 30’s and my Dad still refers to me as “kiddo” sometimes.
- Comment on doctors 2 months ago:
Another option for diabetes are the SGLT-2 inhibitors like Jardiance. They work by making you pee out all the excess sugar. You won’t have the diarrhea issues, but you will be peeing a lot. (It’s basically a special diuretic, so it’s also really good for blood pressure.) Bonus: they’ve also gained approval for slowing the progression of diabetic nephropathy (kidney disease), so if that’s something you have any trouble with, it can help get it covered.
- Comment on doctors 2 months ago:
One of the biggest problems with the GLP-1’s (Ozempic, etc) is the fact that people lose weight by just not eating as much, and the things they do eat aren’t likely to be very nutritious. Protein malnutrition and muscle wasting are very common sources of weight loss on Ozempic. That’s why it’s standard of care to get your patient to a licensed dietician before starting them on one of those drugs if at all possible.
- Comment on doctors 2 months ago:
The BMI number that is calculated just from weight and height is really just a number that tells us we need to go look at some other numbers. The other numbers are things like body fat percentage, cholesterol levels, blood pressure, blood sugar, etc. It is entirely possible for someone to have a “normal” BMI and still be very fat and unhealthy, and those people are pretty easy to identify visually, just as someone with a “high” BMI who is a powerlifter or something is very easy to visually identify.
- Comment on doctors 2 months ago:
I’m a medical student and I have some direct experience with this. Sometimes, the difference between the surgeon who will do the procedure versus the surgeon that won’t do the procedure is the availability of specialized facilities and equipment that they have access to. An elective surgery (i.e. not an emergency surgery) can go from routine to very high risk depending on the amount of adipose tissue the patient has.
And it’s not just a matter of the fat tissue overlying the surgical site. Morbidly obese patients are much more likely to have things like sleep apnea which can make anesthesia more risky and might require more specialized equipment than a particular surgeon/hospital/anesthesiologist might have access to. The “morbid” part of “morbid obesity” also refers to the fact that people above a certain threshold of weight are much more likely to have other health conditions like heart disease that make anesthesia more risky.
- Comment on Pictures of Animals Getting CT Scans Against their Will: A Thread 2 months ago:
They’re probably having a better time than the ones that aren’t intubated. The intubation is to make sure they’re still breathing while they’re anesthetized. The ones without tubes are just awake and angry/scared.