This maybe sounds mean, but I think we should be able to send doctors “hey, you were wrong” letters.
I was misdiagnosed with asthma when I was 12 and took asthma meds daily for seven years, and then it turned out I hadn’t had asthma in the first place; I actually have a different breathing problem. I don’t think the doctor who told me I had asthma (my pediatrician, who I was no longer seeing by that point) ever found out she’d been wrong. (This is one of at least four misdiagnoses in my life, from a variety of doctors, that I can think of off the top of my head.) Similarly, my first therapist told me she didn’t think I was autistic because I wasn’t obsessed with trains. I don’t think she ever found out that I am, in fact, autistic, because I wasn’t seeing her by the time I was diagnosed.
I get that it might be demoralizing to have someone contact you specifically to tell you that you messed up, but I think it would be useful for doctors to have data on how often they misdiagnose patients, especially since some doctors tend to think the patient is generally wrong when attempting self-diagnosis. It would be useful for my former therapist to move me from the mental column of “people who erroneously think they’re autistic” to “people whose autism I did not notice when they were right in front of me.” It would be useful for my pediatrician to realize she needed to look more closely and listen to kids when their breathing symptoms weren’t the classic asthma ones.
Doctors can get on their high horse and refuse to believe patients a lot of the time, and the power dynamic makes that dangerous in plenty of situations. I think it would be helpful to have a way to at least alert doctors when we have proof they messed up.
Hi, I’m a doctor. PLEASE WRITE THOSE LETTERS.
Please. It’s one of the worst things about being a doctor - you give someone a diagnosis, based on your best understanding and a handful of tests, and then they go out into the world. And unless you’re a specialist working in a relatively small community, their health story just goes away.
I’ve had hours of sleepless nights wondering about patients and what’s happened to them, and I work in in-patient-only specialties. My friends and colleagues working in clinics have this so much more. I’d be delighted to get a letter telling me the answers.
the girl who is comfy in bed yearns to be On The Computer. The girl who is On The Computer yearns to be comfy in bed. Thus does desire become the root of all suffering
The more-radical-than-thou “America has always been fascist” types really make it difficult to point out all of the ways in which America has materially gotten vastly worse for just about everyone within the last year. Like at this point I regard it as basically just a “leftist” way of telling people that they’re overreacting and suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome”.
When it’s “America always does X to Y, and you’re only noticing now that they X Zs!” That in itself is a scary escalation, because finding more groups of people to unperson is bad for obvious reasons.
When it’s “America has always done X just now you’re noticing!!!!” that in itself is a scary escalation, because it means that the state no longer feels like it has to hide the shameful things it does, either because it expects the population to approve of it or because it can crush dissent with force.
“the woke left keeps giving me idiotic advice like ‘let go of the pickles and your hand will easily slide out of the jar’ which has driven me into the arms of the far right, the only ones giving expert advice on how to be a based alpha picklemaxxer”
genuinely one of the saddest parts of this new era of the internet is how hard it is to rick roll someone now. with people’s attention spans shortening so much, they wouldn’t even get through the first few bait seconds before clicking off the video. like i saw a comment that ended with “btw i made all of this up” and the replies kept treating it so seriously because none of them finished the entire 4 sentence comment. and We’re no strangers to love You know the rules and so do I (do I) A full commitment’s what I’m thinking of You wouldn’t get this from any other guy I just wanna tell you how I’m feeling Gotta make you understand Never gonna give you up Never gonna let you down Never gonna run around and desert you Never gonna make you cry Never gonna say goodbye Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you
Donald Trump, let’s be clear, is circling the drain. His mind is well and truly going. When they put him in front of a camera, he mumbles and confabulates wildly and forgets the names of his own cabinet and mispronounces words egregiously. Or just falls asleep. Donald Trump is still a clear and present danger, because he’s a sadistic, spiteful old man with all the self restraint and sophistication of a spoiled toddler. But we need to be mindful of the fact that not only do we know that he’s on his way out, but his donors and puppeteers and handlers know it as well, and they have to be feeling extremely urgent about securing their efforts, but even more so their position and safety. As Steve Bannon said, if they lose the midterms, a lot of them aren’t just out of power, they’re going to prison.
So yeah. He’s sundowning, hard. But that makes this a really dangerous time, and we can’t just sit and wait for a good housecleaning at the midterms. We have to get out there and protest and organize and fight and call our reps and support each other in every way we know how. We have to put massive pressure on Congress to stop these insane threats of war. They’ve made it clear they don’t want war; but they need to actually act to make that happen. We have to slow the administration down in every way we can. Because they’re running out of time.
As always:
Not sure what you want to do but you want to help? ACLU has actions you can take broken down into time intensity:
Got 15 minutes to call your representative, senators and governor? 5Calls has hundreds of scripts you can read off and will auto connect you! (It genuinely takes less than 15 mins for all of them and frequently you get a voicemail so you don’t even have to talk to them!)
The day is won through thousands of individual acts of resistance hitting them on all sides! These resources are just a drop in the bucket, I guarantee there is something you can do to help!
Never Forget what Childhood Vaccines and Antibiotics have done.
The two most powerful words in the English language, owed entirely to the efficacy of vaccines, are thus;
“Smallpox was.”
For most of history, smallpox was (!!!) the scourge that haunted human civilisations. We have evidence of smallpox from mummies c. 1350BCE in Egypt. It’s speculated to be one of causative agents of the Plague of Athens c. 430BCE. There were outbreaks of smallpox in Angola in 1484, in South Africa in 1731 that wiped out entire clans of Khoisan people. There was at least one major smallpox epidemic almost every decade across Europe.
Smallpox was transmitted by droplet/aerosol infection; it tore through even the smallest population centres. Typical smallpox incurred a blistering fever, raised pustules, debilitating joint and back pain; if you lived — and that was a fat fucking if, as typical smallpox had a mortality rate of 30% — you’d have tell-tale pockmark scarring, and face stigma for the rest of your life. Some were left blinded.
The worst form of the disease was haemorrhagic smallpox; all the agony of typical smallpox, with the addition of skin haemorrhage and pinpoint haemorrhage in the spleen, liver, kidneys and gonads. Near-universally fatal, haemorrhagic smallpox made up 5-10% of all cases. Of this number, 72% were children.
The global smallpox vaccination campaigns of 1958 to 1977 were a monumental effort by the World Health Organization and its global associates, backed by incredibly diligent public health work and epidemiological monitoring.
Wherever there were outbreaks, there was herd immunisation. Health bodies campaigned tirelessly for the general population to be immunised. In the ‘70s, a concerted effort was made by the WHO to ensure vaccines were administered in the most remote and vulnerable communities in the Horn of Africa, South Asia and the Pacific.
In 1980, the world was officially, finally free of one of it’s oldest adversaries; universal vaccination had been achieved, and there was no population that could act as a reservoir for smallpox.
If mankind has only one great achievement, it’s the smallpox vaccine; to date, smallpox is the only human disease to be completely eradicated.
After over two millennia of suffering, mass disability and death, humanity finally had the means to give one of it’s biggest threats the biggest possible fuck you, and through scientific and public health collaboration, careful epidemiological monitoring and countless hours of on-the-ground vaccination efforts, managed to blot it from existence entirely.
Where there is vaccine coverage, childhood diseases with high morbidity and mortality rates like whooping cough, diphtheria, influenza B and have dropped.
We have vaccines for TB, another of our greatest and longest adversaries.
With enough effort to counter misinformation, more people fighting for vaccine equality, patent free medication for communicable disease, and universal vaccine coverage, and everyone making sure to keep up to date with their vaccinations, one day, we could be fortunate enough to be able to say;
“Tuberculosis was.”
“Smallpox was.”
Fuck. That hit me hard.
death and the stars
I’m quite fond of the heroes of my field have slain one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse
it’s frustrating when you’re talking about an inherently oppressive institution that dehumanizes everyone who is subjected to it and someone is like “it’s especially bad for those it is incorrectly applied to!” as though being the intended victim of an injustice makes it less of a tragedy
been thinking about this lately after some discussions about historical marriage where people have chimed in about how extra awful it would have been for trans men forced into The Wife Role because of dysphoria. which like. yeah. but the thing about The Wife Role in the context of not having civil rights and being the property of a husband is that it is inherently dysphoria-inducing to anyone who identifies as a human being instead of an object.
To this day I still don’t believe that anyone actually thought you could generate infinite chocolate via an optical illusion. That’s a thing people tell themselves to feel superior
The defining feature of tumblr is not “the website where people actually think infinite chocolate is possible”, it is defined by a group of people refusing to break kayfabe, another group being genuinely confused by an optical illusion (NOT the same thing as thinking infinite chocolate is possible) and a third group who is certain they are a lot smarter than the other two.
