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The problem with AI and poorly educated professionals is not the ability to diagnose and treat based on evidence-based medicine. The problem is that you have to know enough about medicine, and enough about real human people to know what kinds of questions to ask in the first place. If nothing else, there is a massive amount of information gained from a patient’s body language, mannerisms, behavior, and the physical exam itself that would be extremely hard to quantify in a meaningful way for someone without the background education and experience to come to any useful conclusions.

Were I in any other field, I might agree with you, but given that I am in the medical field, stupidity and incompetence cost real human lives and I cannot tolerate that if it can be at all avoided.

It’s not quite a catchphrase yet, but when discussing cases or whatever, I frequently use the sentence: “I’m not sure, lemme go look that up.”

I worked professionally in medicine for a few years before starting medical school, and thus far my approach has been to entirely disregard anything they said on the subject and continue as normal unless the nonsense they’re spouting has the potential to cause serious harm. Our patient care professor is training us to listen attentively, then dismantle the nonsense as politely as possible while guiding the patient’s viewpoint back to something approaching reality.

There’s some things you look for that are difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t seen it before. That’s part of why experience is so valuable in Emergency Medicine, and it’s not uncommon to put your best nurses out in triage. People will do this kinda twitchy/wilting/loss of focus/change in pallor/change in posture right before they go down. I don’t have a good way to describe it, and it might be easier to draw even, because it really is a body language thing and the general appearance of the patient that can inform your decision making.

I have thought about trying to plan out a learning algorithm that could spit out suggestions for triage level and preliminary tests based on input data like vital signs, symptoms, and complaints… but I would never implement something like that as anything beyond a tool for the nurses at triage to use. There would have to always be an option to override the algorithm because there’s some aspects of patient presentation that are not easily quantifiable. I’d never be able to explain it in a way that one could input it into a computer, but even with my limited experience, I can tell which patients are going to crump on me.

NPs working under a physician with actual oversight is fine. The ones I have problems with are the ones that have a physician sign the hundreds of notes a month while maybe reviewing a handful, and worse, the ones pushing for independent practice without even that sham of oversight involved.

At least I can rest assured of the fact that AI will be next to useless in my intended field. Emergency medicine is an environment where you get a random constellation of symptoms and complaints with very little direction on which are related to the current illness, and which ones are not currently relevant. Also, in the time it would take to get all the info into the AI for a trauma/cardiac/code situation, the patient might be dead or rapidly heading in that direction.

I try to remind myself that I’ve only gotten as far as I have because of hard work. I don’t have any special talent, I’m not some kind of genius, I just know how to work hard for the things that matter.

As a medical student, I have a negative amount of trust in and/or respect for anyone in the healthcare sector that has a business degree.

For me, it just looks like he has a certain coldness in his eyes. It’s not a dead or vacant look, it’s just the way a smile, or any other facial expression for that matter, just doesn’t seem to make it to his eyes. There’s obviously life and intelligence there, but it’s not a friendly intelligence. I pulled up the most lizard-man pictures of Zuckerberg for comparison, and even at his most robotic, his eyes still look human. Like there’s some capacity for empathy in there somewhere. With Musk? His eyes just don’t quite read as human to me in an uncanny valley sort of way.

Makeship is having a sale on their new Glow in the Dark plushies. It’s not a huge discount, but the proceeds go towards supporting independent artists which is always a good thing.

https://www.makeship.com/shop/gitd-2023

One thing that Blizzard has always been good about it making games that can run on a potato. It’ll look like crap and your view distance will be obnoxiously short, but you can run WoW on a potato of a laptop and still participate in the core gameplay. Obviously, there’s lots of options to crank up the graphics to 11/10 if you have a powerful computer, but I really appreciate that they lower the hardware barrier to entry where they can.

An interesting thing about Benadryl (diphenhydramine): if you look at “PM” meds or things that are supposed to help with sleep, diphenhydramine is usually the active ingredient. Benadryl is a sleep medication that happens to also work as an antihistamine which I find a bit amusing.

I won’t be buying one for quite a while. I’m driving my 2021 Crosstrek with a manual transmission until it dies and I can’t reasonably repair it anymore. It’s the first new car I’ve ever had, it’s my first manual transmission car, and I’m not giving it up for anything besides another of the same in a newer model. (and unfortunately, it looks like manuals are getting phased out throughout the market)

(Edit to add: I would be sorely tempted by a BRZ though.)

Just based on build quality and reputation, I’d take a Subaru Solterra over even the highest-end Tesla any day. I live in Minnesota, and my bigger concern about Teslas is the lack of ground clearance. If I can get out of the snow bank in the ditch, I don’t need my car’s heating system to last 12 hours.

So it’s more like “grandparents’ rights” without having to admit that they screwed up somewhere along the way that lead to them being grandparents in the first place.

Apparently? I think it’s something they need to look into fixing that, especially given how low the federal poverty line is set.

I was lucky in that I worked in a specialty clinic, then a Peds ER during the pandemic and that I only caught it after getting the vaccination. I still got pyelonephritis as a bonus though. The roughest thing about the specialty clinic was that it was in oncology, so all of our patients were high risk and we still had asshats who whined about having to wear a mask in the clinic. During the worst of it, I was helping our plastic surgeon do in-office excisions of malignant melanomas as a temporizing procedure until the ORs opened up for the lymph node biopsies and radical excisions where needed.