Readit NewsThe BBC article title now says "Assisted dying" not "euthanasia". Often, the distinction hinges on whether the patient or a medical practitioner administers a substance that brings about death. The Canadian policy actually provides for both, but as I understand it the stats being cited in the article combine both, so only a subset of the tally are "euthanasia" deaths.
To give an example, a wearable might indicate a sudden change in gait for an elderly person. Is that a sign of mental decline? Muscle deterioration due to age? A stroke? Or were they playing baseball two days ago with a grandchild and injured themselves? New shoes? It could be any of these and more besides. If the machine does not evaluate all the possibilities it can only choose from the ones it does implement, which raises the likelyhood it will be wrong.
A good example is screening for atrial fibrillation, an abnormal heart rhythm that is not uncommon especially as you age. All our guidelines right now on treatment and stroke prevention (a potential consequence of AF) is based on the population who is currently most often diagnosed - symptomatic patients with palpitations, or lightheadedness, or chest pain, which provokes them to see a physician.
If everyone is now wearing an Apple watch and suddenly we have 2x or 10x the number of people diagnosed with AF, our current evidence about the benefits of treatment suddenly do not apply, because these newly found patients would never have been included in the original studies.
So what do we do with these (presumably lower risk) patients? No one yet knows.
* The government is starting to catch on and might put an end to paying out dividends to non-working family members.
As a physician, it's a 15-20% pay cut for me :(
I have very little memory of those first few hours. I now know what it is to be insane. I was so disconnected from reality that people have told me that I had long conversations with them that I have zero recollection of. The only thing I clearly remember was telling the officer that I had a gun upstairs and that if he didn't take it, I was going to murder the man responsible for her death within the hour. It was the most matter of fact confession of planning a murder imaginable.
After a couple of hours, I saw a Facebook post of hers and lost it, the insane calm left me and I bawled my eyes out.
It's her birthday tomorrow. I miss her so, so much.
Anyway, the point of this post: my daughter died of an overdose. She was at a party, a man gave her powdered pure fentanyl claiming it was cocaine. I have no idea why. She snorted some and overdosed soon after.
All I want to happen is that someone somewhere reads about what happened to my daughter and reminds their kids that without proper testing kits, they have no idea what the fuck they are taking. Drugs may not be bad, but some people certainly are.
But if you can already buy any drug on the street, a doctor should be able to prescribe medicinal heroin to an addict and get them into the system to monitor them for treatment, with the end goal of getting them off of drugs. Putting unknown chemicals of varying strength and quality into their vein is what kills addicts. They do not typically OD because they are suicidal, it's because they unknowingly bought an extra strong stamp and then die.
I grew up in Massachusetts, and had a high school graduating class of around 300 people, and 6 people have died of overdoses in the last 10 years. One of the most popular girls in my class died a few months ago. I firmly believe that allowing her (and everyone else) to get her opioids prescribed would at the minimum keep her from overdosing, and let people who care know she has a problem. Dying on a toilet with a needle still in your arm is a terrible, useless way to die.
Opiates are bad news, and physicians unfortunately were duped into prescribing way too much for the last ~15 years.
In my mind, it certainly parallels the binary package (debian) vs build-on-demand package (arch? OS X brew) approach. Both seem to work, but I certainly prefer the debs.
No need to change your application or deviate significantly from a "vanilla" Ubuntu install - just add your nginx, Passenger configs to Ansible, build the server, and then deploy with Capistrano.
I have noticed that the line between condition and cause is often overlooked, even by doctors. For example this leads to people thinking Pinkeye/conjunctivitis is highly contagious, when it is still conjunctivitis if it is caused by getting something in your eye. I think that holds for everything that ends in -itis too Sinusitis, Arthritis, Tendonitis, etc.
I know that is a bit of a tangent, but you reminded me of someone who had bell's palsy telling me that it was actually shingles. I explained that just because it was caused by shingles doesn't mean it stops being Bell's Palsy, just like how it is still a cough if it's from the flu or from smoking. They ended up getting really angry at me about it, but I think hn might appreciate the semantics a bit more.
It definitely helps as a patient to advocate, and add anything that a physician like myself maybe wouldn't always ask, like if you've been a tick-infested area and/or discovered a tick attached to yourself recently.