We still have the same infection control protocols to prevent spreading an illness from an infectious patient to other patients that we've had since before the pandemic. That includes wearing a mask (and usually gown, gloves, face shield) when in a room with an infectious patient. We're just not wearing masks in the hallways and break rooms anymore, and it's caused some outbreaks among staff.
One significant contributing factor to this is the ridiculous American expectation that people should work unless they can't stand up anymore, and if you take a day off, it comes out of your vacation time or it's possible that it could be unpaid. We incentivize people to ignore mild symptoms of illness that result in them arriving to work in the early infectious stages of illnesses. We need to change that, to encourage people to stay home even if they mostly feel well, but suspect they're coming down with something without it eating into their already scarce PTO.
It's difficult to communicate with an elderly person whose hearing aid battery has failed (or who refuses to wear them). Communicating with them while wearing a mask is nearly impossible. It honestly complicates their care, and we did it through the entire pandemic.
When my hospital lifted its mask mandate, I thought I would wear a mask forever. It wasn't discouraged, left totally up to us. But then one time I pulled it down because I couldn't communicate with a patient. Then I did it again. Eventually I was routinely pulling it down to talk to people, and I thought why even bother?
Naturally I continue to wear one if someone is diagnosed with an actual respiratory illness. But the ease of communicating with the people who compromise the majority of the patient population in a hospital is my primary barrier to going back to wearing one all the time.
One thing we need that would really help is better protections for sick workers so people don't try to skirt the rules and talk themselves into coming to work in the early stages of an illness.
There are many many other classes of medications for depression. SNRIs, tricyclics, mood stabilizers, bupropion is a completely different mechanism of action, even drugs that were originally developed to be antipsychotics are used off label.
I agree with others who have suggested that you should see an actual psychiatrist. Other prescribers just don't have the same training and experience as a psychiatrist with a medical doctor license. There are lots of medications available.
What do you think would be the mechanism of death when he gets hit by an arrow? Even bullets rarely kill instantly. Bullets stop people because they hurt and people go into shock. A properly trained soldier absolutely is capable of continuing to fight through this. Short of a head shot, the most likely mechanism of death is blood loss, which takes a little time. When. Boromir dies, he is ashen pale the way a person with catastrophic blood loss would be. I think that death scene is more realistic than you realize.
California already had health insurance for undocumented immigrants, as does Massachusetts. It's just limited to emergency care and pregnancy care.
California is expanding their existing coverage to comprehensive health care including primary care, which is cheaper than letting medical conditions get so completely out of control that they require expensive and disabling emergency hospitalizations.
Yes, a stopped heart shows up as a flat line with no activity on an EKG. We don't shock people when their hearts have completely stopped because it doesn't do anything and can actually damage the heart. Defibrillators are named that because they're intended to shock a heart that is in a chaotic electric rhythm called fibrillation where the heart is just kind of shivering instead of beating fully.
If a person has flatlined, you can do CPR and administer epinephrine, and if you're extremely lucky get their heart to start fibrillating so a shock might have a chance of being effective at restoring a normal heart beat. This is why someone whose heart has stopped completely is 2-3 times less likely to survive CPR than a person experiencing fibrillation.
Additional context about these "training" fees. The people coming over from the Philippines are TRAINED NURSES. They're properly educated, often already working, and in my experience generally excellent nurses. These "training fees" are literally wage slavery. These nurses require very little training, mostly about US healthcare laws and facility policies. These facilities are not teaching them how to be nurses.
As long as they don't let it be run by private equity firms like the US. In theory our combination long term care/short term rehab facilities provide this care model. They contain a doctor, nurses, aides, social workers, and physical therapists. Who are all paid rock bottom wages and criminally understaffed while the owners rake in millions by literally bankrupting vulnerable elderly people.
I'm assuming the UK facilities will be public like NHS unless the Tories get their way and kill that too.
"The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano — which violently erupted in January 2022 and blasted an enormous plume of water vapor into the stratosphere – likely contributed to this year’s ozone depletion. That water vapor likely enhanced ozone-depletion reactions over the Antarctic early in the season.
“If Hunga Tonga hadn’t gone off, the ozone hole would likely be smaller this year,” Newman said. “We know the eruption got into the Antarctic stratosphere, but we cannot yet quantify its ozone hole impact.”
Much needed as I'm finishing up shop vaccing around 50 gallons of water off my basement floor because I'm a complete idiot who likes to overflow bathtubs.
Not even N95s. If people just did the bare minimum and wore a surgical mask and washed their hands frequently the instant they felt like they might be sick, we would work wonders to reduce spread, morbidity, and lost wages/productivity. We just need the same simple politeness around respiratory illnesses that already exists in some Asian nations.
No, dracaena species in particular are sensitive to minerals and fluoride in tap water. I water my dracaena with bleach sterilized rainwater (after a livingroom-wide leaf spot outbreak a couple years ago). They're just fussy.
As a critical care nurse, the miraculous CPR recoveries are such a horrible disservice to our patients and their families. CPR is not two minutes of some light exercise and then the person wakes up and is ok forever.
It's 20-30 mins of intense, brutal, scary, undignified activity followed by best case scenario, we put you in the ICU, deliberately make you hypothermic for a day or two, and hope you wake up. That increases your chances of surviving the incident to a whopping 64%.
Surviving to discharge and having a meaningful recovery is a whole other ballgame, and depends a lot on the condition you were in when you had cardiac arrest in the first place. Your elderly grandpa with cancer, sepsis, bad kidneys, etc. is probably not going to go home. Your middle-aged wife who came in because she was having a heart attack actually stands a good chance.
I'm happy to leave some leeway in fictionalized depictions of medical care for the sake of story progression. But the complete ignorance currently common in fictional resuscitation scenarios feeds a really malignant sort of magical thinking that keeps us torturing elderly people. I'd really appreciate less of that in my job.
I moved here because this is what exists lol. I didn't design this place. It's what's here.
I'm obviously not forcing my opinion on anyone because we live in a democracy. I'm allowed to have a different opinion from my neighbors. I hope you realize that. Maybe ask why you're allowed to force your preferences on ME even though I have actual data and evidence that it's nicer on my side of things and you'll be happier here even though you've been taught to believe otherwise.
Let me introduce you to some great resources on just how modern and terrible an anomaly American suburbs are. Really, they're terrible. Terrible for your health, terrible for the environment, terrible for society and the economy. Ugly, soulless, fragile, useless Ponzi scheme that needs to end.
We still have the same infection control protocols to prevent spreading an illness from an infectious patient to other patients that we've had since before the pandemic. That includes wearing a mask (and usually gown, gloves, face shield) when in a room with an infectious patient. We're just not wearing masks in the hallways and break rooms anymore, and it's caused some outbreaks among staff.
One significant contributing factor to this is the ridiculous American expectation that people should work unless they can't stand up anymore, and if you take a day off, it comes out of your vacation time or it's possible that it could be unpaid. We incentivize people to ignore mild symptoms of illness that result in them arriving to work in the early infectious stages of illnesses. We need to change that, to encourage people to stay home even if they mostly feel well, but suspect they're coming down with something without it eating into their already scarce PTO.