godzillabacter
You mentioned trying board games, any interest in TTRPGs like Dungeons and Dragons and the like? The game is basically designed to forge friendships. If you or your partner is willing to learn to be the Dungeon Master, you’ll have no trouble finding players, in fact you may have so many interested individuals you have to do brief interviews lol.
Awesome! Let me know if you have any questions about DM’ing. I highly recommend Matt Colville’s Running the Game series. You absolutely don’t have to watch it all. If you watch the first three real episodes (Your first adventure, Your first session, and Running your first dungeon) you’ll be set!
Pharmacist and 4th year medical student here. Medical tests are ordered based upon their statistical ability to alter your likelihood of a diagnosis. No test is perfect in either direction (negative result meaning you don’t have disease or positive result indicating you have disease). Tests cost money, take resources of the healthcare system, and have the potential to be wrong. When a test is wrong, it can result in financial, emotional, and physical harm to an individual.
Example: you’re an otherwise healthy 34 year old and you feel a little under the weather and are coughing. It’s only been going on a few days, mild fever, but you’re worried and you go to the doctor. Your doctor thinks this is most likely a viral infection, recommends Tylenol and ibuprofen and sends you home. You imply to the doctor you’ll sue if you don’t get antibiotics and a chest x-ray just to be safe. The doctor, rather than argue with you when they have a dozen other patients to see, just orders the stuff and moves on. The chest X ray doesn’t explain your cough, but there’s a small lesion of undetermined significance on the X-ray. Now you need a CT. The CT says “probably a self-limited granuloma from a fungal infection, can’t rule out cancer, correlate with biopsy”. Then you have to go get sedated, put a camera down your throat, and have a pulmonologist take a sample of your lung to see if you have cancer. Maybe you end up with a complication from the sedation or a pneumothorax. Meanwhile the antibiotics you took didn’t really improve your cough but now you have this uncomfortable itchy rash. Are you allergic to the amoxicillin? Or did you just develop the typical rash seen in people who have mononucleosis that also take amoxicillin? Will you get allergy testing for the amoxicillin? Just avoid amoxicillin, an awesome antibiotic, for the rest of your life?
We are restrictive in our prescribing of medications and tests not because we don’t care about you, not because we want to save the hospital or the insurance company money (in fact the hospital prefers we order more things because they make money on testing). We are restrictive because we want to maximize benefit while minimizing risk, and everything we do has risks and benefits.
AI, especially as it relates to completing daily tasks. I cannot wait until an AI can efficiently sort, delete, and categorize my email so I don’t have to deal with all the junk and FYI emails.
4th year medical student. AI is not ready to be making any diagnostic or therapeutic decisions. What I do think we’re just about ready for is simply making notes faster to write. Discharge summaries especially, could be the first real step AI takes into healthcare. For those unaware, a discharge summary is a chronological description of all the major events in a patient’s hospitalization that explain why they presented, how they were diagnosed, any complications that arose, and how they were treated. They are just summaries of all of the previous daily notes that were written by the patient’s doctors. An AI could feasibly only pull data from these notes, rephrasing for clarity and succinctness, and save doctors 10-20 minutes of writing on every discharge they do.
Pharmacist and 4th year medical student here. Fun fact is TPN (total parenteral nutrition, i.e. IV food) is usually somewhere around 2L of volume daily, and the limiting factor preventing us from concentrating it more is the protein component. We can make some really concentrated sugar solutions, fat is so calorie dense it doesn’t take up much space either, but protein isn’t particularly calorie dense and can’t be concentrated very high before it starts to crystallize.
That’s not true. HIPAA covers anyone handling protected health information in a professional manner. If some office clerk at the VA is mailing out copies of HIPAA-protected information, they’re bound by HIPAA. If a consulting IT firm has access to a hospital’s servers as they’re changing something about the EHR, they’re bound by HIPAA. Protected information cannot make its way from a “covered entity” to a non-covered entity like a totally unrelated bakery who would not have an obligation to protect your information without either: 1) violating the law, 2) you personally disclosing the information to the non-protected party, or 3) you or someone authorized on your behalf signing a disclosure waiver permitting the covered entity to disclose
