All joking aside, if you start having pencil-thin poop all the time (or even just frequenly), that can be a sign of colon cancer and you really need to go see a doctor.

I’ve been noticing more of this recently and it doesn’t encourage me to spend too much time here. There are so many posts that I don’t even open the comment section because I know it’s going to be a disaster and make me feel like I’m intruding on the boys’ online clubhouse.

The vast majority of rapists are never even convicted, let alone end up on the registry.

It is an actual, accredited medical school and we still take the same board exams. The subjects where the religiosity shows the most are the ethics classes, abortion, and LGBTQ+ healthcare. Otherwise, the most prominent manifestation was prayer at the start of lectures and exams.

The Hippocratic oath doesn’t cover this at all and actually explicitly forbids abortion and euthanasia. It’s really quite antiquated which is why I wrote an oath for myself that I hold to.

There’s a lot of debate about the specific meanings of the text, but there are many Christian physicians that will latch onto those passages as an excuse to apply their own beliefs to patient care. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath

As someone who attends a medical school attached to a religious university, I can tell you this is a mindset that exists quite commonly in the medical field. Many of these people get careers in the multitudes of Catholic hospitals that abuse religious freedom laws to deny certain kinds of healthcare and face absolutely no repercussions for their persistent bigotry.

I wish this is how it was at my medical school. My med school is attached to a deeply religious university and some of our professors said some pretty wild shit in lectures. I was almost always the one to key up on the mic in recorded lectures to fight them on it.

I’m sad to say there were a couple lectures that I was just too demoralized to fight back directly, but I did talk to my classmates to correct the record after those lectures.

Here’s the sanitized AP reporting: Woman’s lawsuits say sci-fi author Neil Gaiman repeatedly sexually assaulted her

Here’s the full account from the victim (ALL the trigger warnings): “There is no safe word” - Vulture

As a nerdy gal on the Internet, I envy Joanna.

And with only a passing familiarity with actual women.

The woman in the picture looks like a contender for Escher Girls or the Hawkeye Initiative. Her posture and anatomy make very little sense.

Ancient Egypt as we think of it had archeologists that studied the original smaller kingdoms that unified to become Egypt. Cleopatra is closer to our time than she was to the building of the Great Pyramids.

And if some dumbass wants to make some kind of argument about the US being a super special first Christian country, they should know that Ethiopia was the first country to declare itself as a Christian nation in the 300’s CE…and has been a contiguous sovereign state since then.

This is true and the healthcare access problem is more than just cost. If you’re an hour and a half away from any specialists, then the ER you went to likely doesn’t have access to set up those referrals. I have worked in both metropolitan and rural medical systems, and the biggest problems in rural healthcare are almost always access-based. If a hospital/ER is not in the same medical group as a specialist, they can’t put in emergency referrals to that specialist, and I have worked in rural hospitals that don’t even always have imaging services available. There’s an MRI on a trailer that gets brought around to the various hospitals in the group meaning that each hospital has one day a week or one day every other week where an MRI is available. The other option a small, rural ER has is to call EMS to transfer you to another hospital with more resources, but if your insurance doesn’t like the reason they give, you end up on the hook for that 90 minute ambulance ride. Small community hospitals are really between a rock and a hard place when it comes to connecting patients with resources while trying to avoid unnecessary expenses.

The best advice I have for anyone in a rural area with poor healthcare access is to establish care with a family physician for primary care because, most of the time, the primary care physician is the one that actually gets to the bottom of things or coordinates the referrals for specialists. If you have a standing relationship with a physician, it’s a lot easier to make an appointment and they have a baseline to work from as opposed to starting from scratch like an ER physician has to.

Unfortunately, a solid diagnosis can be really hard to find and there are a lot of diseases and conditions that require more testing than can be completed in the ER. Part of why the ER is expensive is because the tests they do get come back almost immediately, but they very rarely order the tests that take a long time anyways. Expediency and staffing are the main contributors to the cost of emergency care.

With the example of your case, how would the ER get you the diagnosis of a food intolerance without spending weeks on an elimination diet? There are some allergies that can be tested for, but that testing involves injecting a sample of the offending agent under the skin and watching to see if it causes irritation… but allergies and food intolerances are not the same thing and the only way to test for food intolerances is an elimination diet. For the allergy testing, the ER doesn’t have the samples to do the subcutaneous injections. It’s really only allergy specialists that have those available.

I’m very sorry that you went through that. I know it sucks with the American healthcare $ystem, but you are always allowed to seek a second opinion and any provider that is opposed to that is a bad provider and you shouldn’t see them again anyways.

One thing to keep in mind about the ER though, is that they’re there to rule out anything that is going to kill you quickly, and if you didn’t lose enough blood to drop your hemoglobin count (a measure of how many red blood cells you have), it is perfectly within the standard of care for them to discharge you and tell you to follow up with your primary care physician or a specialist. The ER has a lot of resources, but not enough resources to fully diagnose every possible problem. They can make sure you’re not on death’s doorstep, and stabilize you if you are, but beyond that, they’re pretty strapped for resources and staffing which make it hard to fully work up every mystery diagnosis.

Painless hematuria (blood in the urine without pain when peeing) is one of the first (and frequently only) signs of bladder cancer. Especially if it’s frank blood (meaning that you can see it without a microscope).

Don’t feel bad about that! There are no stupid questions when it comes to your health and it’s important to ask someone who can give you accurate answers (and there’s no one better to ask than your own physician that you have a relationship with).

If they are proportional to each other, you shouldn’t really be able to get more in your mouth than your esophagus can handle. There are some conditions that make the esophagus tense up wrong instead of making peristalsis.

You should ask about getting a swallowing study done to find out what’s going on because that isn’t normal. It might be an esophageal stricture or spasm that can be fixed.

This is entirely unsurprising. Hopefully they can wrangle something functional out of the insurance at some point.