FIP Warriors is who we went through, but it progressed too quickly because the fluid accumulation was in his lungs, not his abdomen.

That medication is quite new to the market and wasn’t available when this happened about 4 years ago, but I will mention this to our current vet so that she knows about it.

Careful with that one. Big pharma killed my cat once.

My cat came down with Feline Infectious Peritonitis which is a coronavirus that is lethal to cats when the virus mutates and becomes FIP. FIP is 100% fatal without treatment, and there is now a treatment (originally developed at UC Davis) that is now owned by a big pharma company. They shut down the feline clinical trials in 2020 because they also make Remdesivir, and there was a concern that if there were any problems with the feline drug trial, the FDA might not approve Remdesivir for COVID. You can buy the drug on the internet from China, but it’s a 12 week course of twice daily injections, and you’re gambling on whether you got a good batch every time you get a shipment.

By the time we found this out, it was too late to save our kitty, so he crossed the rainbow bridge.

I am quite familiar with this nonsense from the patient side as well. As a physician, I think I will be well-placed to ensure that my patients are getting appropriate care while not giving the insurance company bullshit reasons to deny claims.

I’m in medical school now and looking at either emergency med or family med, and either way, I am going to be exceedingly careful about how I construct my notes, diagnoses, evaluations, and treatment plans to leave as few cracks as possible for the insurance companies to try to weasel their way into.

I was the feisty little gremlin that fought with the insurance at a cancer-focused plastic surgery clinic. I got really good at stacking up all of the info in the first submission so that they couldn’t drag their heels on shit that was time-sensitive.

When I was a clinic assistant in a cancer-focused plastic surgery clinic, it was my job to fight with the insurance companies. I did prior authorizations for every surgery and they would do shit like approve the removal of a melanoma without requiring prior authorization, but performing the skin graft to repair the 10cm diameter hole required a prior authorization because the procedure code falls under the “Plastic Surgery” heading and they wanted to make sure you’re not getting skin grafts for cosmetic reasons.

Anterior Pituitary, Spinal Cord, Teeth, Thalamus, Limbs

I said old or injured.

I love the absolute chaos you’re bringing to this comment section. You’re my kinda people.

As a healthcare worker who has had a patient try to strangle her before…I would like violence not to be an expected part of my job.

I’m not outright trying to be contrarian, but for some older people or people with things like arthritis, foot injuries, hip injuries, etc. walking or running on a treadmill is vastly less painful than walking or running on concrete.

There is absolutely a huge commercialization problem with fitness and health in the western world (and in America in particular), but if going to a climate-controlled gym and getting your steps in on a treadmill or elliptical is what it takes to get you to exercise, I’m all for it.

For the potato chips, that’s really sleazy of the gym, but I do want people to know that even if you don’t/can’t make a bunch of changes to your diet and you don’t lose weight, getting exercise of any kind as often as you are able is still a positive thing for your heart and metabolic health. Please don’t let being fat, or out of shape, or an inability to overhaul your diet prevent you from doing something positive for your health. Losing weight and keeping it off is really only possible through major lifestyle change, and, for a lot of people, the only sustainable way to make the necessary changes is one at a time.

I was very grateful that none of the cadavers we had at my medical school were John/Jane Does, and that we have a memorial service for the cadavers every year and invite the families to express gratitude.

I worked as a scribe and as an ER tech in a Level 1 peds hospital. I’m not even done with med school and I’ve already punched that card more times than I care to remember.

That’s the thing though…I think it is part of their due diligence to know what’s going on in their own business. If they can’t guarantee that it’s safe, they shouldn’t release it.

The c-suites have the ultimate power and therefore ultimate responsibility for whatever happens in their organization. Similar to how parents can be held criminally liable for their children’s actions. It’s just that much more incentive for them to make sure things are in order in their organization.

Also, Citizen’s United ruled that corporations are people, so they can be held to the same standards of responsibility as other people.

I think the threshold for proving the “reasonable person” standard for companies should be extremely low. They are a complex organization that is supposed to have internal checks and reviews, so it should be very difficult for them to squirm out of liability. The C-suite should be first on the list for criminal liability so that they have a vested interest in ensuring that their products are actually safe.

I’d accept that if the makers of the self-driving cars can be tried for vehicular manslaughter the same way a human would be. Humans carry civil and criminal liability, and at the moment, the companies that produce these things only have nominal civil liability. If Musk can go to prison for his self-driving cars killing people the same way a regular driver would, I’d be willing to lower the standard.

The nuclear industry is heavily regulated by the government via the NRC, but they impose even stricter regulations upon themselves. Solar and wind are cheaper, but they are less reliable. A grid comprised of a mix of solar and wind, bolstered by nuclear is the most effective and least environmentally harmful option that we currently have.

The emissions are negligible on the grand scheme of things, especially compared to fossil fuels. The manufacturing of solar panels isn’t the cleanest either.

They require the certificate to be installed to have access to the network.