This is a thread about diseases, medicines, treatments, medical insurances, hospital policies, and everything else interesting about human body here.
IMPORTANT NOTE: This is NOT a place for medical diagnosis and advice. For those, please consult certified medical professionals of appropriate fields.
Edited by dRoy on Feb 20th 2020 at 2:33:51 AM
Oh, bother.
As always, if this happens again, the best advice is to go see a doctor.
Disgusted, but not surprised
Didn't happen agsin, but now I have another question:
In many polities physicians have to report suspected child abuse. I was wondering, what kind of findings would induce a physician to suspect child abuse (or abuse in general)? I am thinking in terms of specific scenarios, not overly generic nor super blatant.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
More shady practices by Insurance Companies:
From his bedside, the device was tracking when he was using it and sending the information not just to his doctor, but to the maker of the machine, to the medical supply company that provided it and to his health insurer....
....As many CPAP users discover, the life-altering device comes with caveats: Health insurance companies are often tracking whether patients use them. If they aren’t, the insurers might not cover the machines or the supplies that go with them.
In fact, faced with the popularity of CPA Ps, which can cost $400 to $800, and their need for replacement filters, face masks and hoses, health insurers have deployed a host of tactics that can make the therapy more expensive or even price it out of reach.
Patients have been required to rent CPA Ps at rates that total much more than the retail price of the devices, or they’ve discovered that the supplies would be substantially cheaper if they didn’t have insurance at all.
Experts who study health care costs say insurers’ CPAP strategies are part of the industry’s playbook of shifting the costs of widely used therapies, devices and tests to unsuspecting patients....
Dr. Ofer Jacobowitz, a sleep apnea expert at ENT and Allergy Associates and assistant professor at The Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, said his patients often pay rental fees for a year or longer before meeting the prices insurers set for their CPA Ps. But since patients’ deductibles — the amount they must pay before insurance kicks in — reset at the beginning of each year, they may end up covering the entire cost of the rental for much of that time, he said.
The rental fees can surpass the retail cost of the machine, patients and doctors say. Alan Levy, an attorney who lives in Rahway, New Jersey, bought an individual insurance plan through the now-defunct Health Republic Insurance of New Jersey in 2015. When his doctor prescribed a CPAP, the company that supplied his device, At Home Medical, told him he needed to rent the device for $104 a month for 15 months. The company told him the cost of the CPAP was $2,400.
Levy said he wouldn’t have worried about the cost if his insurance had paid it. But Levy’s plan required him to reach a $5,000 deductible before his insurance plan paid a dime. So Levy looked online and discovered the machine actually cost about $500.
Levy said he called At Home Medical to ask if he could avoid the rental fee and pay $500 up front for the machine, and a company representative said no. “I’m being overcharged simply because I have insurance,” Levy recalled protesting.
Levy refused to pay the rental fees. “At no point did I ever agree to enter into a monthly rental subscription,” he wrote in a letter disputing the charges. He asked for documentation supporting the cost. The company responded that he was being billed under the provisions of his insurance carrier.
Levy’s law practice focuses, ironically, on defending insurance companies in personal injury cases. So he sued At Home Medical, accusing the company of violating the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act. Levy didn’t expect the case to go to trial. “I knew they were going to have to spend thousands of dollars on attorney’s fees to defend a claim worth hundreds of dollars,” he said.
Sure enough, At Home Medical, agreed to allow Levy to pay $600 — still more than the retail cost — for the machine.
So an interesting scientific deed has been done: World’s first gene-edited babies announced by a scientist in China. To whit, they have used the CRISPR gene editing procedure to create babies which lack the CCR5 gene that is a key entry receptor for the HIV virus. It has already kicked up ethics issues, I see.
Bunch of thoughts from me:
- CRISPR gene editing has so far never been used on a live person. Embryos, cell colonies, animals, yes. But not actual people.
- There is concern (still debated) that this gene editing method may be prone to off target effects. Such off target effects may include cancer growth.
- The scope of this particular experiment was to thwart an incoming HIV infection. There are about one million HIV infected people in China and apparently so were the parent(s) of the children involved.
- One often ignored concern about gene modifications- and eugenics in general - is that we often don't know enough about the function of a gene to predict the consequences of mutations. In the gene here discussed - CCR5 - the loss of its function might make people more susceptible to the common West Nile Fever virus
- There are questions about the veracity of the whole story, and it's not that long ago that massive fraudulent practices were uncovered in Chinese pharmacology research.
The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer
It's a fact that the exact amount of sleep required by the human body varies from one person to another, with the 7-9 hour range only applying as an average of observed values that can be safely said to be representative of the majority of our species.
That being said, have scientists figured out why some humans manage to get by with sleeping only half as much per day as the average person does (i.e. 3-4 hours) without suffering any of the health problems that come with prolonged sleep deprivation?
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.
Is there any medical anomaly recorded which allows someone to live much long ala Methuselah Syndrome? I know there's a cat that lived to be 30, so presumably there was some genetic quirk that allowed it to live so long
The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer
Well, you'd first have to address the fact that the reason old-aged people don't live much beyond 100 years is the whole assortment of medical problems that they suffer due to the natural atrophy of their bodies' physiology. To quote one other troper on a different thread, the phrase "died from natural causes" is technically misleading, as all of the "natural causes" being referred to are diseases, either due to pathogenic infections that the immune system has become too weak to fight off before the already deteriorated condition of the body collapses under the weight of infection's negative symptoms, or due to failing organs/systems as a result of accumulated damage (including deleterious chromosomal mutations, which often lead to cancer).
Rather than a single genetic quirk, I'd say a complex of multiple genes that makes the individual more resilient to the above-mentioned "natural causes" could plausibly lead to extreme longevity. Or maybe a single gene that interacts with and affects the expression of multiple other genes.
Edited by MarqFJA on Dec 24th 2018 at 9:20:28 PM
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.
The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer
I have two questions about asphyxia.
- It gradually sets in, right? As in, it's not that you're perfectly fine while your body receives less and less oxygen until you reach a certain level, at which point the effects hit you full force; but rather, past a certain point, the effects begin to manifest at initially low severity that increases with the amount of time that you spend with an insufficient oxygen supply?
- At which point does asphyxia starts? Is there a specific minimum amount of oxygen that must be present within the air held inside the lungs in order to keep arterial blood adequately oxygenated, and thus not instigate this condition? note
The Mod with the Migraine
My understanding (mainly from safety lectures about entering closed industrial spaces that might have high toxin/fume content and/or low oxygen content) is thus:
Normal oxygen in the air is around ~20%. As it gets lower, you get dizzy, possibly a drunk kind of feeling before going more towards bad hangover territory, coupled with loss of motor skills and the ability to focus. By the time it dips to around ~12%, you're facing unconsciousness within a few minutes at best, and under 10% is enough to kill you.
Honestly the Other Wiki can probably give you a better idea than the forums.
That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw
Have they figured out how to make the bionic eye yet?
In an anime, I'll be the Tsundere Dark Magical Girl who likes purple MY own profile is actually HERE!
The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
I'm more interested in asphyxia that is caused by being cut off from breathable air, whether by willingly holding your breath, being submerged underwater, or being choked by someone/something else.
Edited by MarqFJA on Jan 15th 2019 at 10:33:10 PM
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.
Sacklers Directed Efforts to Mislead Public About Oxy Contin, New Documents Indicate
When evidence of growing abuse of the drug became clear in the early 2000s, one of them, Richard Sackler, advised pushing blame onto people who had become addicted.
“We have to hammer on abusers in every way possible,” Mr. Sackler wrote in an email in 2001, when he was president of the company, Purdue Pharma. “They are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals.”
That email and other internal Purdue communications are cited by the attorney general of Massachusetts in a new court filing against the company, released on Tuesday. They represent the first evidence that appears to tie the Sacklers to specific decisions made by the company about the marketing of Oxy Contin. The aggressive promotion of the drug helped ignite the opioid epidemic.
The filing contends that Mr. Sackler, a son of a Purdue Pharma founder, urged that sales representatives advise doctors to prescribe the highest dosage of the powerful opioid painkiller because it was the most profitable.
Since Oxy Contin came on the market in 1996, more than 200,000 people have died in the United States from overdoses involving prescription opioids, and Purdue Pharma has been the target of numerous lawsuits.
For years, Purdue Pharma has sought to depict the Sackler family as removed from the day-to-day operations of the company. The Sacklers, whose name adorns museums and medical schools around the world, are one of the richest families in the United States, with much of their wealth derived from sales of Oxy Contin. Disclosure of the documents is likely to renew calls for institutions to decline their philanthropic gifts.
In a statement, Purdue Pharma, which is based in Stamford, Conn., rejected suggestions of wrongdoing by the company or members of the Sackler family, describing the court filing as “littered with biases and inaccurate characterizations.” The statement said the company was working to curtail the use and misuse of prescription painkillers.
Asked for a response from Richard Sackler and other members of the Sackler family, a Purdue Pharma spokesman, Robert Josephson, said that the company had no additional comment.
In 2007, the company and three of its top executives pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges that Purdue had misrepresented the dangers of Oxy Contin, and they paid $634.5 million in fines. The Sacklers were not accused of any wrongdoing and have not faced personal legal consequences over the drug.
But last June, Maura Healey, the Massachusetts attorney general, sued eight members of the Sackler family, along with the company and numerous executives and directors, alleging that they had misled doctors and patients about Oxy Contin’s risks. The suit also claimed that the company aggressively promoted the drug to doctors who were big prescribers of opioids, including physicians who later lost their licenses.
The court filing released on Tuesday also asserts that Sackler family members were aware that Purdue Pharma repeatedly failed to alert authorities to scores of reports the company had received that Oxy Contin was being abused and sold on the street. The company also used pharmacy discount cards to increase Oxy Contin’s sales and Richard Sackler, who served as Purdue Pharma’s president from 1999 to 2003, led a company strategy of blaming abuse of the drug on addicts, the suit claimed.
In 1995, when the Food and Drug Administration approved Oxy Contin, it allowed Purdue Pharma to claim that the opioid’s long-acting formulation was “believed to reduce” its appeal to drug abusers compared with traditional painkillers such as Percocet and Vicodin.
At a gathering shortly afterward to celebrate the drug’s launch, Mr. Sackler boasted that “the launch of Oxy Contin tablets will be followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition. The prescription blizzard will be so deep, dense, and white,” according to a document cited in the legal complaint.
Edited by megaeliz on Jan 16th 2019 at 9:15:29 AM
Rule of thumb is that it takes someone about 3 minutes to pass out without air, and 5-8 to die. There’s no hard number, it varies a lot.
One big source of variation is the environment. We mammals have something called a dive reflex that encourages us to hold our breath underwater, which is why there are people who have been able to hold their breath submerged for more than 20 minutes. In space it’s the opposite, people have been known to lose consciousness in a vacuum in a couple seconds.
They should have sent a poet.
The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer
Well, yeah, being surrounded by vacuum without complete isolation of your head's orifices from it makes it trivially easy for all the air in your lungs to forcibly rush out of them. You know, because physics dictates equalization of air pressure, and since the outside has zero air pressure...
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.
Doctors saved man's life by pumping 15 cans of beer into his body
I guess this isn't a conventional way of treating methanol poisoning?
Spiral out, keep going.
Oh, bother.
Eat that, Peter Thiel.
Disgusted, but not surprised
...This is as close to Lizzie Bathory-level shit as it is humanly possible.
Spiral out, keep going.
To be fair, unlike in fictional scenarios with Life Energy and such in Real Life there is evidence that blood donations increase lifespan for the donor. Still, such a thing looks fairly creepy and quackish.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
For the donor. Not the recipient (I'm obviously not talking about the cases where blood and/or plasma transfusions are a necessity). Even if we put the creepiness factor out of the equation, it's still an extremely wasteful thing to do.
Edited by Millership on Feb 21st 2019 at 9:09:57 PM
Spiral out, keep going.
The amount of quackery in the anti-aging space* is a huge problem for people doing real science on aging, age related diseases, and longevity. There's actual science supporting the notion that there are factors in the blood of individuals in early adulthood that could enhance longevity in elderly individuals. Nowhere in their study did the researchers suggest parabiosis was something remotely appropriate to attempt in humans, but thanks to the impatience/desperation of some folks with more money than sense and the cynicism/delusions of the people selling this snake oil, it's going to be considerably harder to get funding for work to identify the specific mechanism(s) at work here and develop therapies that don't sound downright satanic.
* For my part, I suspect this is due to how the treatments of modern biomedicine for age related diseases are lacking; as bad as anti-vaxxers are the amount of snake oil going around in that space was vastly worse back in the days before there were effective treatments for infectious diseases, that's the era where the term originated.
Edited by CaptainCapsase on Feb 21st 2019 at 12:44:56 PM
^^The whole reason why this (quackish) thing started up is because of evidence that the transfusion of blood from younger people can prolong life. There are similar concepts in fiction such as Life Drinker and Life Energy but they often imply that the donor's life be shortened whereas here in Real Life transfusions there is no evidence of that. I agree with Capsase's assessment of the quackery issue here though.
That said, IMO this is biologically probably a symptomatic/palliative treatment; to me a "cure for aging" would require targeting the root causes, which in my opinion include stem cell exhaustion, lipofuscin accumulation, advanced glycation end products such as glucosepane, the increased occurrence of chronic not-so-indolent viral infections such as cytomegalovirus and nuclear pore damage.
Yeah, honestly to me it seems like a slightly less monstrous version of just getting organ transplants to replace all your old organs with younger ones, and working on the same principle. It's not some miracle anti-aging remedy. It's just that younger blood, with blood cells formed by younger bone marrow, probably performs better than blood cells formed by old bone marrow.
It seems at least plausible that certain plasma factors might be enhancing immune function, which is itself a root cause of aging and could potentially impact other hallmarks related to immune surveillance, ie emergence/accumulation of aberrant cells.
Edited by CaptainCapsase on Feb 21st 2019 at 12:34:03 PM
Sure, but it is not a "root cause" since it has to have a "why".
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
I think it more likely that you managed to either get yourself out of it by waking up enough (nightmares can do that), or your wish to move got translated into the experience before you woke up enough to shake the state off.