The Medical Thread

Regret to inform you that the beans on toast island is at it again

The Times: Chemists to prescribe antibiotics under Coffey health plan: Patients will be able to obtain antibiotics from pharmacies without seeing a doctor under new plans aimed at reducing the need for GP appointments.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Oct 15th 2022 at 4:19:08 AM

EU MDR and IVDR is planning to be postponed for another 3 years.

Just scrap the law and get back to MDD if law is not plausible in the first place smh.

I think we are talking about Regulation (EU) 2017/745 but I don't know what the other thing is.

Yep, MDR is the regulation 2017/745 which is planned to regulate the medical devices such as X-rays or scalpels. On the other hand, IVDR stand for In Vitro Device Reguation, which is regulation 2017/746. This regulation is for devices that tests biological samples. This includes self-test kit for pregnancy or diabetes and much more.

Oh, and apparently only 10% of medical company's are getting MDR certificate right now according to EU council. It seem that if MDR was enforced, it would have been a total disaster.

Therapy service BetterHelp found to be selling users’ data

Another one? Feed everyone responsible to the HIPAA Hippo.

I had the idea that in my still untitled near-future post-apocalyptic scifi war story with the alien robots, the warlord is ultimately murdered by her personal doctor. She had committed tons of war crimes (though pretty much everybody does something in this. It's that kind of a story), but the doctor was mostly motivated by personal grievances^note  (like the warlord leaving his husband to die and later trying to ally with aliens who used his corpse as a Meat Puppet, and the warlord destroying the doctor's once proud and confident friend psychologically by using him as a human punching bag) and the warlord's recent attempt to have their 20 supersoldier test tube babies killed when they were 1-3 weeks from birth^note  (that was a failure because the scientist in charge had other ideas so he and the prototype kid grabbed them and ran away, so now their already understaffed-in-higher-ranks army lacks a head scientist and has made yet another enemy).

The warlord has been on undecided hard drugs (could be real or fictional; caused aggression, paranoia, and hallucinations as the effect/withdrawal), though i'm not sure if she's doing that anymore/right now. The doctor does it with some medication in his possession, propably when she's being treated for combat injuries. But there's a snatch as she's awake and lucid due to paranoid avoidance of anesthesia (that's the norm, she doesn't have particular suspicions about this).

What should the doctor do it with, and how should i describe the warlord dying? My first thought was painkiller overdose, but i'm not sure if it'd work. The warlord will attack the doctor if she can if she realizes what's up, and the doctor will be toast if people hear commotion or if the cause of death is too obvious. Though the army has a shortage of any kind of professionals so they might not be able to do a forensic drug test.

Edited by Nukeli on Jun 23rd 2023 at 9:24:15 PM

So through following the recent Titan submersible implosion disaster, I learned a little trivia about human body.

App average reaction time for humans is 0.25 seconds to a visual stimulus, 0.17 for an audio stimulus, and 0.15 seconds for a touch stimulus.

Meanwhile, the submersible's implosion apparently took 0.03 second, meaning that the occupants died instantly without feeling (direct physical) pain.

I guess that's at least one of the only good news about the incident.

The UK’s incredibly tightfisted with antibiotics. As one example that shocked me, they don’t even give them out for strep throat (or, they don’t test for strep, whereas in Canada it’s fairly easy to get tested for strep if you have a bad sore throat), with the consequence that people in the UK still get scarlet fever - a seriously dangerous disease. It’s practically unheard of for people to still get it in the US or Canada, it’s something out of the 1800s.

So I’m not sure this change is entirely a bad thing. Canada’s also been responding to the doctor shortage by letting pharmacists precribe for some things (it sounds like mainly for birth control, UTI, or pinkeye).

Edited by Galadriel on Jun 24th 2023 at 3:40:03 AM

Yeah, I wasn't really aware of the UK' strictness with antibiotics when I posted the article last year. It does seem a lot more reasonable when you take that into account (though the NHS' staffing issue goes a lot deeper than that).

Thoughts about my story's aforementioned assassination?

What should the doctor, who didn't really plan for this as much as had enough on the spot, use to kill the warlord?

Yeah, this is the first time I hear about UK's policy regarding antiobiotics. That's crazy.

Tornado damages Pfizer facility in North Carolina with Pfizer warning of long term shortages as the plant produced anesthesia and other drugs as well as 25% of the US's sterile injectable medications and the tornado damaged 50000 pallets of medication.

Well holy shit, that's a terrible news.

Random rambling.

Due to my medications being quite negatively affected by caffeine, I decided to quit caffeine for good. Well, at least as long as I'm prescribed those medicines, that is.

I don't drink coffee but my single biggest source of caffeine is Zero Coke. Like, multiple cans. And I think I'm already getting hit with withdrawal symptoms.

According to this page by National Institutes of Health, "typically, the onset of symptoms starts 12 to 24 hours after caffeine cessation, peaks at 20–51 hours, and may last up to two to nine days."

God. This might be a rough week for me. XP

The US FDA is claiming phenylephrine, the main ingredient in most over the counter nasal decongestants, does not work when taken as a pill.

Science: First malaria vaccine slashes early childhood mortality. Over the past four years, GlaxoSmithKline's RTS,S (aka Mosquirix) vaccine was administered to two million children in Kenya, Ghana and Malawi, in a pilot rollout program that the WHO said cut toddler deaths by 13%, as well as reducing severe malaria in young children by 22%.

The earlier clinical trial pointed to some possible safety issues, like cases of meningitis among recipients and higher rates of malaria deaths among girls who received the vaccine compared to those who received a comparator vaccine against rabies. These issues seemed to be absent in the pilot rollout, however.

Washington Post: Republicans delay more than $1 billion in HIV program funding.

Hey, this is amusing:

Having never broken any bone in my life, I didn't know you cut open casts with a specialized saw. I find it interesting how, as described in the linked video, it doesn't actually spin in circular way but rather oscillate back and forth.

...But I know damn sure that if I ever encountered that in real life and realized that it's gonna be used on me...I would freak the HELL out, even knowing and seeing that it's not dangerous.

I mean, how else did you think they opened up casts? The other ways I could imagine doing it aren't any less scary than a saw. For example, a hammer.

Honestly? Some sorta strong, specialized scissors.

Does anyone know why we refer to pills as "tablets"? I couldn't find a clear answer from googling.

Because they're usually (and were historically) flat on top, like a table, so it's the diminutive of table.

I mean they're still flat on top, often. But they historically were, as well.

And nobody thought that would be confusing with "tablet" as "small table"?

For what is worth, this is the first time I heard of such meaning of word tablet.

I see it all the time on the pill-form medication boxes. It seems to be the formal term, with "pill" being the colloquial counterpart.