Biden absolutely has some control over this, but Netanyahu is the bigger problem at the moment. Biden has influence over Netanyahu (with a lot of caveats and red tape due to decades of foreign policy), and Harris has influence over Biden…but that’s not the same thing as absolute control. There are also parts of this that have to get approved by congress and there’s only so much the office of the president can do unilaterally.

They can be doing more, and they should be doing more, but Harris’ role and capability is limited to that of an advisor (under strict scrutiny from everyone) right now, and that doesn’t actually give her that much power.

I’m not terribly old, but I’ve been around long enough to know that the lower offices are where you actually affect change in this country. The higher the office, the less they listen to their constituents.

There are lower ranking Democrats that are espousing the right ideas about things like the filibuster, gerrymandering, and even some that are agitating about the electoral college BS. The best strategy I see right now is to clear as many Republicans out of office as we can, and support the newer, lower-level representatives that are aiming to affect real change.

My voting strategy has always been to “vote blue, no matter who” on the top of the ticket, then do my research and be more selective about the offices lower down, especially in the primaries. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter if more progressive candidates take hold of the House and the Senate if everything they pass just gets vetoed by the fascist in the Oval Office anyways.

You do realize that she’s the Vice President and doesn’t actually have any authority or power unless Biden kicks the bucket, right?

Because it really seems like you think that she has any ability to make unilateral decisions or enact her policy platform right this second, and that simply isn’t the case.

America is, unfortunately, a two party system. If not enough people vote for Harris, Trump wins. Period. There are no options besides Harris and Trump, and only one of them has talked about how Israel should literally nuke Gaza (I’ll let you take a guess on which one it was.)

I see your idealism, and I agree that any amount of genocide is unacceptable, but letting Trump win will just accelerate the genocide in Gaza, expand it to the West Bank (more noticeably, anyways), and likely start new genocides here in America. I’ve been writing to my representatives and sending them articles about the atrocities being committed by the IDF and imploring them to do something about it…but I’m not dumb enough to withhold my vote from the Centrists and allow the Fascists to take over.

I repeat: withholding your vote from Harris is effectively a vote for Trump because America is a two party system, and there’s only two options to pick from.

This is the mindset I have to keep myself in while working in medicine. I can’t save every patient. Some of them will die in my care, but that won’t stop me from trying to help the next one.

These are incredibly important reports to publish and spread awareness of…but I kind of wish I hadn’t read them today.

That’s why it’s a disagreement. I’m not necessarily saying their opinions are factually incorrect, just that they are devoid of empathy, morally reprehensible, and antithetical to the teachings of the religious figure that they are statistically likely to claim to be faithful to. A lack of empathy should not be rewarded.

Typically, the things I disagree with are the things like bad faith arguments, lies, rudeness, or bigoted ideals that purport that not all humans deserve equal rights, etc.

Usually, when I disagree with something, it is because it is incorrect, lying, or particularly mean-spirited. I disagree with people that do not think that every human deserves the same rights. I disagree with people that push for ideologies that would strip other humans of their rights, or that would inflict needless suffering. I don’t downvote people when I disagree with what media they think is good or something. I downvote those that express ideas that are antithetical to what I see as basic human decency or that are factually incorrect.

Personally, I use downvotes to say “I disagree with this and/or it is a stupid/bad/bigoted/etc take, but I do not wish to spend the time and effort to respond and get dragged into a text-based mudfight with someone who is unlikely to speak to me politely, no matter how polite I try to be in my rebuttal.”

I like having a way to say “no, bad, stop that” without having to spend time trying to explain things or engage with someone who I think is beyond convincing anyways.

Yeah, caffeine is a good vasoconstrictor, so it can help with headaches that are not from something like high blood pressure. Paracetamol/acetaminophen is really good for headaches on its own because it gets into the brain better.

Alternating the paracetamol and ibuprofen on a schedule is the best recommendation I can give. Severe pain, especially post-operative pain, is best managed by taking the pain meds before the pain sets in. The ibuprofen is also an NSAID and the swelling and inflammation are big contributors to pain.

The schedule that I always recommend is:

• 0800: 650-1000mg paracetamol (acetaminophen)
• 1200: 600-800mg ibuprofen
• 1600: 650-1000mg paracetamol (acetaminophen)
• 2000: 600-800mg ibuprofen
• (and in the first day or two after surgery, set alarms to wake up and take pain meds at 0000 and 0400 on the same pattern if the pain is really bad.)

This pattern keeps you covered on pain control, and you can shorten the intervals to every 3 hours if this isn’t enough without exceeding daily dose limits on either medication. If you are an American reading this and you’re also taking something like Norco, make sure to account for the acetaminophen/tylenol/paracetamol that’s in those because exceeding the recommended dose on that one is bad news for your liver.

Like some other folks have said, warm saline (salt water) rinses and soft or liquid foods are going to help as well.

I think there are some techbros out there with sleazy legal counsel that promises they can drench the thing in enough terms and conditions to relieve themselves of liability, similar to the way that WebMD does. Also, with healthcare access the way it is in America, there are plenty of people who will skim right past the disclaimer telling them to go see a real healthcare provider and just trust the “AI”. Additionally, there’s enough slimy NP professional groups pushing for unsupervised practice that they could just sign on their NP licenses for prescriptions, and the malpractice laws currently in place would be difficult to enforce depending on outcomes and jurisdictions.

This doesn’t get into the sowing of discord and discontent with physicians that is happening even without these products existing in the first place. Even the claims that an AI could potentially, maybe, someday sorta-kinda replace physicians makes people distrust and dislike physicians now.

Separately, I have some gullible classmates in medical school that I worry about quite a lot, because they’ve bought into the line that chat GPT passed the boards, so they take its’ hallucinations as gospel and argue with our professor’s explanations as to why the hallucination is wrong and the correct answer on a test is correct. I was not shy about admonishing them and forcefully explaining how these “generative AIs” are little more than glorified text predictors, but the allure of easy answers without having to dig for them and understand complex underlying principles is very alluring, so I don’t know if I actually got through to him or not.

There are way too many techbros trying to push the idea of turning chat gpt into a physician replacement. After it “passed” the board exams, they immediately started hollering about how physicians are outdated and too expensive and we can just replace them with AI. What that ignores is the fact that the board exam is multiple choice and a massive portion of medical student evaluation is on the “art” side of medicine that involves taking the history and performing the physical exam that the question stem provides for the multiple choice questions.

I once had ideas about building a machine learning program to assist workflows in Emergency Departments, and its’ training data would be entirely generated by the specific ER it’s deployed in. Because of differences in populations, the data is not always readily transferable between departments.

People just need to understand that the true medical uses are as tools for physicians, not “replacements” for physicians.

Especially after Trump’s antivax BS during COVID.

I’ve heard the neonatologists say that they make the parents repeat back, write down, and sign a consent form that says “I understand that refusing the vitamin K shot significantly increases the chances of bleeding, including brain bleeds that can lead to significant disability or death.”

Not many people seem to want to sign that form for some reason.

I’m currently a medical student in my clinical rotations…

Me: “So it looks like we’re due for our (blank) month/year vaccinations. Have those been done already or do we need them today?”

Parent: “Oh, we’re not vaccinating.”

Me: screaming internally