Stellula
7d ago
Again, I am not a doctor. The response I am giving here is essentially me echoing the response I've gotten from telling this story to my doctor friends/family. Basically: "You had a fever for a week, you tested negative for the few viral things they tested for, and they didn't want to explore it further at all or put you on an antibiotic as a precaution?"
Maybe that's wrong. I don't know! What I do know is that "the only people who should be able to tell you anything about this have to make $250k/yr at a minimum, and have to have a seemingly endless number of administrators around them" seems outrageously inefficient to me. Maybe it's not!
My insurance changed last month, my PCP is no longer “in network” and the wait to get into a new one is long, which is why I was at UC. I did go to me “PCP” (a concierge group). That was the second doctor, which I paid cash for. As the symptoms worsened I could have gone back to them again, I guess. However when I was there, they seemed almost offended that I was because my insurance wasn’t usable to them. One reason the doctor said she didn’t want to do any tests (and tried to just get me to go to CVS for the Covid test instead of doing it there) was that my insurance wouldnt cover any of them.
So; just more ridiculous inefficiency in the inefficient healthcare system.
Kind of a meta point here, but I think you’re demonstrating maybe my exact frustration. You assume I’m stupid and don’t know how the system is supposed to work, or that I’m trying to abuse it in some way. I’m assuring you: I do know how it is supposed to work and I’m trying to use it correctly. It’s just that the system does suck
Stellula
7d ago
Patients will always ask for antibiotics even if we know in advance the issue is viral and antibiotics won't do anything, and that's not counting the goal of abx stewardship, or just minimizing side effect burden. No medications are safe, if you give everyone in the country a full course of antibiotics people are going to lose their kidneys, have joins explode, or just flat out die.
I was making a general point about the inefficiency of the healthcare system, but to address these point specifically:
I didn't ask for antibiotics. I was trying to do things exactly the way you are advocating here. I didn't just get antibiotics, I did go to the doctor four times, and the first 3 of them did essentially nothing. The first one had this interaction:
Do you have a fever?
Well yes, but I'm controlling it with tylenol every 4 hours.
So you don't have a fever?
Well if I stop taking the tylenol, my temperate goes over 102, so I keep on the tylenol and have been for a week.
Okay but your temperature is reading normal right now, it's not showing a fever.
Yes but like I said, I have been taking tylenol regularly to manage the fever, which I have now had for a full week.
Okay so no fever.
The second one was this interaction
Hi I've had a fever for a week and a half now, and the first person I saw said that if it didn't go away, to see my PCP, which is you.
Okay? You probably have a virus
Okay yes but is there anything else we could check for?
I guess I can give you a covid test if you want me to.
I'm asking you for your opinion here? I'm not a doctor, but I've never been this sick for this long before and it's got me concerned.
Okay a covid test I guess?
Sure?
The third one was a telehealth visit, literally not even a video just a text message with a doctor (maybe?)
The fourth was:
Hello I am now on week 3 of some sort of illness, the first week and a half was a 102+ fever, and now I have a sore throat that started one one side of my throat and then over a couple of days moved to both. I am having difficulty swallowing, and if you look deeply into my throat, you'll see it's covered in quite a few tiny white spots.
Those are tonsil stones
No I know what you're talking about, but to see what I'm talking about, you really would need a scope. I could only see the spots I'm talking about using a boroscope, and they're pretty deep inside my throat.
No i can see those from here, the two white spots at the back are tonsil stones
No, I mean a lot deeper than that.
Yeah I see it. Those are tonsil stones
etc.
Yeah probably a viral thing -> weakened immune system -> bacterial infection/secondary viral infection, and anti-biotics were a coincidence. My general point is that this entire escapade is only made worse by gatekeeping healthcare. Offhand I can think of 6 different doctors with different specialities in my very close family circle (either my siblings, or godparents of my kids), and all of them would easily just let me call them and give me recommendations on what do to while I'm sick. The point I'm making here is that I didn't do that, because I was just trying to use the healthcare system as prescribed, and that i was an inefficient joke.
Stellula
8d ago
Well first of all the family member is a doctor (just not a family doctor), and second: how does the doctor know? Are they given secret knowledge that is inaccessible to mere humans?
Doctors aren’t priests. The stuff that 90% of PCPs are doing could be replaced by a flow chart. As far as antibiotic stewardship, when China and India and Brazil and everybody else gets on board, maybe.
Stellula
8d ago
The parasites in this situation are the health insurance companies, and to a lesser degree, the actual providers.
I was recently sick, and it took four different doctor visits before somebody just gave me the antibiotics which fixed whatever problem I was having. The first one, an "urgent care" told me to just rest and hydrate. The second, my PCP, gave me a covid test, said that it was negative, shrugged, and said R&H, the third (telehealth) gave me a useless antibiotic and did no testing. The fourth, another UC, gave me a strep test, a mono test, and then some steroids and antibiotics.
This is retarded. A family member, when I was first complaining about being sick, offered to just write me a prescription for the cocktail of drugs he takes when he starts feeling sick, but me being a good little boy said I wanted to go see a doctor.
This should have been a 2 minute long discussion with a pharmacist at most where I tell them what drugs I want, then half an hour at my local lab where they do a few tests for me, and that's it.
As it is, with the retarded "health" cartel, there was probably thousands of dollars of useless waste spent on useless doctors and useless nurses performing useless tests (covid? Really? Flu?). Their goal is to gatekeep as many things as possible behind absurdly expensive gates, then when costs go to infinity, they demand the government subsidize them.
The couple you talk about in the beginning of this post suck, but so does the industry they're sucking.
As usual this is all made a lot worse when the government subsidises all of it.
Stellula
13d ago
I like it! My only request is that we build a giant dedicated building for it, preferably so tall that you can't see the top from the bottom, and give whoever is taking a turn speaking a levitating platform to stand on that can move around the chamber while they talk.
Joking aside (although I do really like the idea at first), how would various committees work? Just equally large?
Stellula
14d ago
I think you got it! Thanks!
Btw everybody here’s the patreon: https://www.patreon.com/themotte
Stellula
25d ago
E-collars are extremely common for people with dogs and land, especially people with hunting dogs.
https://www.garmin.com/en-US/c/outdoor-recreation/sporting-dog-tracking-training-devices/
Stellula
25d ago
It's completely mainstream to use e-collars for pets, but not like this.
The typical use for an e-collar is for recall, and there are multiple levels to it.
- Noise (it beeps)
- Vibe (it vibrates)
- Shock
You use these when you issue the recall command (usually: "come!") but the dog is too fixated on something to respond. You start by doing the beeps, then the vibe, and then only if the dog is totally locked into something would you use the shock. The shock isn't a punishment, it's just there to get the dogs attention.
There are people who use the shock as punishment, but they're the minority.
Is it lost on everybody that he was basically quoting the office? As in: the most normie of normie network tv shows from the early 2000s?
The quote “if I was in a room with Hitler, Bin Laden, and Toby, and I only had two bullets, I would shoot Toby twice.”
These were private text messages. He was trying to be funny. I don’t think this is in any way an indication of some secret desire to kill anybody, the jokes just weren’t landing.
I really hate this trend of taking conversations from one context, putting them into another context, and pretending that the person meant something they didn’t.
It was the same two weeks ago with libs hyperventilating over Trump saying “I hate my enemies”, just clearly him trying to be funny, and not the major escalation people seemed to want it to be.
Just absolutely stupid rage searching. This is nothing. There are plenty of examples of libs engaging in legitimately dangerous speech, like publicly calling Trump and his supporters “fascists” and “Nazis”, for instance. This was a guy having a private conversation that should have stayed private.
Also: it shouldn’t be lost on the people here that none of us are posting with our full names. The point of a place like this is to be able to pick up an idea and argue it even if you don’t agree with it. If somebody doxxed everybody here, and implied this was their true beliefs that they keep hidden, would they be right? (I don’t think so). The same is true of a private text message chain.
Stellula
1mo ago
I really wish you and the person below you would just link to the part of the speech you are talking about.
edit: I want to be clear that I enjoy this type of back and forth, but only if you do. I'm not trying to demean anybody here, I just enjoy this type of sparring. I still think the people who jumped on the "mormons are not Christian" thing immediately after (now 4) people were killed are bad people. If you want to keep arguing because you also think it's fun, then all good, but please don't take any of this as me wanting to attack you, or other mormons. If you want to know my feelings: I consider you guys brothers, and think that a lot of what the mormon church has done from a strategic and organizational perspective is impressive and something I wish my own church would take notes on, but I also think that the book of mormon is very obviously a hoax from a creative young man in 1800s upstate New York. From talking to mormons, I see a lot of overlap in the implementation of Christian philosophy, especially the emphasis on the importance of doing good work, with my own, Catholic beliefs. I think that's good. Okay I hope I've been reassuring enough that I don't mean any of this in bad spirit, just because I enjoy the game:
It seems like you’re claiming there really aren’t many differences.
Then why the need for the entire project? And if so many core theological beliefs of Mormons just eventually get erased out, as the “god was once a man” did in 1997 or so, then what is the point of any of it?
By the way, I think this is a good thing. Mormon beliefs like black people lesser-than (or in some cases outright demons), everybody getting their own planet, Kolob, polygamy, etc. are all things which I think are wrong, and all thinks which the Mormon leaders have later discovered that they think are wrong too.
They also seem like things a teenager in the 1800s in upstate New York would make up as part of a fantasy universe.
As far as the literal truth of the Book of Mormon: there’s obviously a ton of problems here. Horses not existing in pre Colombian America, for instance. Jews not sailing from the Levant to North America in ~600BC for another.
Stellula
1mo ago
What are the parts of Christianity that Mormons believe were missing for 1800 years?
Which differences would you accept as “yes these actually are the different beliefs we have”, that were so important that an angel had to come to upstate New York in the 1800s and reveal them to Joseph smith?
Stellula
1mo ago
I, luckily, have no idea what your first sentence is talking about. Could you expand on this?
Stellula
1mo ago
I would imagine so? This is a pretty unambiguous teaching which is routinely affirmed by their leadership.
Stellula
1mo ago
Jesus and Paul both believed that God was The Universal Prime Mover, that is: there is nothing before God. He set the universe in motion. Mormons do not believe this, but rather that God was a human that lived in an existing universe, and through good works ascended to God status.
No. Mormons are substantially less Christian that Christians are Jewish.
The mormons believe that God was once a man who then became a God, and their version of enlightenment/ascendance/heaven is that they will themselves become God. Christians and Jews believe in the same God. Mormons do not believe in the same God as Christians, Jews, or Muslims.
Here are some mormon redditors trying to figure out how to square this, btw.
I know there are quite a few mormons who post here. Feel free to just ignore all this, btw. I love a good debate about religion, but I love you guys more, and don't want it to come at your expense, or to feel like people are kicking you while you're down - what happened yesterday was horrific.
Stellula
1mo ago
American liberals do not understand that the US has by far the most permissive immigration policy in the developed world.
Stellula
1mo ago
My point is to illustrate how deceptive reporting is on these things. My choice of “coinbase app on my phone” was a deliberate choice for the exact reason you are stating.
Stellula
1mo ago
a loaded handgun, a hunting knife, and $3000 in cash.
Iowa is a constitutional carry state.
What percentage of men have hunting knives in their car? 100%? I've had some sort of knife on my person at all times where it was legal and practical since I was like 12 years old. A pocket knife is as much a part of my pants as my wallet is.
$3000 cash? Who cares?
If you pulled me over and tried to write this story about me it would be like: "man found with a loaded handgun (normal where I live), multiple tactical knives (a leatherman in my pocket, and the one that fell between the seats and I never found), spotting equipment (binoculars I keep in the glovebox for monitoring the situation), and hundreds of thousands of dollars of untraceable cryptocurrency (my coinbase account viewer on my phone).
I hate that this is highlighted on these stories.
The story here is: illegal immigrant given job as head of DMPS. Apparently the weapons charge he had was bad enough that he was given a deportation order by the Biden administration in 2024. Maybe that was a legit gun charge?
"Had gun in car" is a pointless non-fact.
We are arguing the exact same thing now. The people who are talking to those people should NOT be the person I am talking to for a fever and a sore throat. Thats the absurd inefficiency.
I basically need to talk to a pharmacist, not a doctor.
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