It was a legitimately nonprofit hospital and he probably was overpaid, but at least he was a practicing physician at one point and did seem to give a damn about his staff.

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I once worked at a hospital in the ER where the department director was a union-busting bastard, but the CEO was pretty reasonable. After I left, one of the other ER techs went to the CEO about our pay being messed up and got everyone $5-6/hour raises to actual market rate. Also, there were a few weeks when we were really understaffed that the hospital encouraged admin folks to volunteer as “candystripers” in the ER to do stuff like help clean/turn over rooms, and answer patient call lights for water, blankets, etc. And the CEO was down in the ER for a couple hours every evening helping out most of that time period. It was encouraging to see the CEO of the hospital putting on some gloves and helping us with basic stuff like cleaning and stocking.

The current recommendation for colon cancer screening in those with a family history is to start routine colonoscopies at the age 10 years younger than the family member who was diagnosed. So if your Dad was 55 when he was diagnosed, you should start getting regular colonoscopies and screening at 45 (which is around the recommended age these days anyways).

The problem with AI and poorly educated professionals is not the ability to diagnose and treat based on evidence-based medicine. The problem is that you have to know enough about medicine, and enough about real human people to know what kinds of questions to ask in the first place. If nothing else, there is a massive amount of information gained from a patient’s body language, mannerisms, behavior, and the physical exam itself that would be extremely hard to quantify in a meaningful way for someone without the background education and experience to come to any useful conclusions.

Were I in any other field, I might agree with you, but given that I am in the medical field, stupidity and incompetence cost real human lives and I cannot tolerate that if it can be at all avoided.

It’s not quite a catchphrase yet, but when discussing cases or whatever, I frequently use the sentence: “I’m not sure, lemme go look that up.”

I worked professionally in medicine for a few years before starting medical school, and thus far my approach has been to entirely disregard anything they said on the subject and continue as normal unless the nonsense they’re spouting has the potential to cause serious harm. Our patient care professor is training us to listen attentively, then dismantle the nonsense as politely as possible while guiding the patient’s viewpoint back to something approaching reality.

There’s some things you look for that are difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t seen it before. That’s part of why experience is so valuable in Emergency Medicine, and it’s not uncommon to put your best nurses out in triage. People will do this kinda twitchy/wilting/loss of focus/change in pallor/change in posture right before they go down. I don’t have a good way to describe it, and it might be easier to draw even, because it really is a body language thing and the general appearance of the patient that can inform your decision making.

I have thought about trying to plan out a learning algorithm that could spit out suggestions for triage level and preliminary tests based on input data like vital signs, symptoms, and complaints… but I would never implement something like that as anything beyond a tool for the nurses at triage to use. There would have to always be an option to override the algorithm because there’s some aspects of patient presentation that are not easily quantifiable. I’d never be able to explain it in a way that one could input it into a computer, but even with my limited experience, I can tell which patients are going to crump on me.

NPs working under a physician with actual oversight is fine. The ones I have problems with are the ones that have a physician sign the hundreds of notes a month while maybe reviewing a handful, and worse, the ones pushing for independent practice without even that sham of oversight involved.

At least I can rest assured of the fact that AI will be next to useless in my intended field. Emergency medicine is an environment where you get a random constellation of symptoms and complaints with very little direction on which are related to the current illness, and which ones are not currently relevant. Also, in the time it would take to get all the info into the AI for a trauma/cardiac/code situation, the patient might be dead or rapidly heading in that direction.

I try to remind myself that I’ve only gotten as far as I have because of hard work. I don’t have any special talent, I’m not some kind of genius, I just know how to work hard for the things that matter.

As a medical student, I have a negative amount of trust in and/or respect for anyone in the healthcare sector that has a business degree.

Day by Day Cafe in downtown St Paul is lovely. They have a nice library room to sit in during the winter and a patio with a koi pond out back for summer. They have some of the best breakfast food I’ve ever had and their early bird special is a really good deal (especially when I’m on nights).

Yeah, I’m a grad student with limited funds and I contributed to the server when I joined last summer. I don’t really want to sacrifice this account, but if we can’t interact with anyone else, it kind of defeats the purpose of being federated.

For me, it just looks like he has a certain coldness in his eyes. It’s not a dead or vacant look, it’s just the way a smile, or any other facial expression for that matter, just doesn’t seem to make it to his eyes. There’s obviously life and intelligence there, but it’s not a friendly intelligence. I pulled up the most lizard-man pictures of Zuckerberg for comparison, and even at his most robotic, his eyes still look human. Like there’s some capacity for empathy in there somewhere. With Musk? His eyes just don’t quite read as human to me in an uncanny valley sort of way.

Makeship is having a sale on their new Glow in the Dark plushies. It’s not a huge discount, but the proceeds go towards supporting independent artists which is always a good thing.

https://www.makeship.com/shop/gitd-2023

Let’s rewind to the part where you look at why they are mortal enemies, and realize that the same problem is still happening in the West Bank at the same time as the mass murder in Gaza.

Israel lost 0.014% of its population to the Hamas attack. Gaza has lost about 0.52% of its population to Israel’s rampage and that over 40% of those deaths are children. How is that comparable at all?