Today I had to get a private patdown by two TSA agents because my incontinence pad set off their screening devices
Out trans people have talked a lot about how the screening devices stigmatize trans and intersex people, when they work by comparing the body being examined to the “normal” male or “normal” female body. But there’s also something to be said about the way that that “normal” body is presumed able bodied and neurotypical. My ear defenders have to come off before I go through. People with mobility aids and prosthetics have to either leave their aids or be subjected to a full body pat down. When they ask “do you have any metal in your body?” They are asking about medical devices; the system is designed on the assumption that people lack metal implants or bone replacements. Anything that deviates from the cisgender, not intersex, and abled norm is seen as an aberration, and our bodies are treated as a threat and as public curiosities
drug tests are evil btw and they should be illegal.
“but what if a school bus driver comes to work high” well they could also come to work drunk and literally nothing is stopping them from doing that besides their own judgement. so.
“Many of the individuals who rely on opioids to function are low-income people and Medicaid enrollees…prevalence of chronic pain and high-impact chronic pain are both higher among individuals living in poverty and adults with public health insurance.“
Clarification on my new “medication is morally neutral” blog title: I don’t wanna hear any bs jokes about mentally ill people “going off their meds” as though mental illness is any different from any other illness where sometimes pharmaceuticals are positive and life-changing or life-saving, and sometimes they’re just not that effective or the side effects aren’t worth it. Sick people (including brain-sick people) still have a right to decide what goes into their own body, and to decide what measures they are and aren’t willing to engage in in the pursuit of better health, which should be defined by their terms and not by level of convenience to other people.
Medication isn’t good or bad. Some people take a ton of meds and are healthiest/their best selves that way. Some people take a minimalist approach to meds, even when their doctors think they should be taking more or different medications. Neither approach is morally better than the other.
(Also, this isn’t primarily about ivermectin, it’s primarily about psych drugs, but it’s pretty shitty when people just brutally mock other people over their health decisions in the name of like…politics or whatever. Yeah, there’s overlap between the ivermectin people and the anti-maskers, but one of these behaviors actually harms others and the other, by itself, does not.)
I was listening to some healthcare providers talking about somebody who only really had movement in their fingers, and one said “he’s pretty much just wasting away in his own body,” in that ~sympathetic~ way that medical providers do. And I wonder what the bar is, exactly, for when somebody isn’t wasting away in their own body. I have as good mobility as would generally be expected from a “healthy” person, but my body hurts all the time and I’m frequently fatigued–am I also wasting away? Everybody’s body fails and decomposes eventually, and even able-bodied people are limited in what they can actually do, insofar as our species lacks so many potential capabilities and insofar as the extremes of our species are rarely embodied by anybody, let alone all at once. And is somebody whose body has always had a consistent level of mobility really “wasting away” in the first place? What does that mean?
(That’s also not getting into how they were talking about how he “plays video games, because, really, what else is he going to do?” Because somehow having “no choice” is a vice, but having options and choosing to do the same isn’t?)
and medications have none of the same requirements to label allergens as foods, and supplements don’t even need to be truthful about their content. im currently having to go through and throw out/replace my medications bc I recently had an allergy escalate to “potentially deadly” and am now finding that process was helped by the fucking thing being hidden in half my fucking medications
so yeah for anyone with moderate to severe allergies, check ALL the meds you take, especially if you’re reacting and don’t know why.
this is one of those “reblog to actually save a life” things i think
This @thebibliosphere’s life on this marvelous planet we call home
I’m allergic to the dyes the put into antihistamines. We found out one time in the ER when a nurse gave me the pink version of the tablet and my allergic reaction progressed from “probably going away but let’s just be sure” to anaphylaxis.
Same with epi-pens. I’m allergic to the preservatives used to keep epinephrine stable. I still have to use them in the event of anaphylaxis; it just means I’m at higher risk for biphasic anaphylaxis and need to be pumped full of about a bajillion other rescue meds and hope like hell they’re enough.
This is why compounding pharmacies need to be brought up to better standards of regulation than what they currently are and also become standard imo. The need the customize medications to better care for allergen risks is desperate.
There are a lot of versions of this post where people say that dyes are unnecessary components of drugs and that manufacturers should just stop using them.
I want to clarify that while sometimes that’s true, there are quite a lot of legitimately important uses for dyes in drugs.
For drugs with very narrow therapeutic windows, dyes serve as a critical safety precaution for that medical personnel and patients alike know that the correct dosage is being administered. Those manufacturers use the different colors so that it’s blatantly obvious to anybody handling the drug whether or not the correct one got dispensed. Warfarin and levothyroxine are examples of this.
With circumstances like extended-release formulations, it’s also useful to have the outside shell be a different color than the tablet itself. A damaged outer coating could result in potentially toxic amounts of a drug being flooded into a patient’s system at once.
And then there’s the simple fact that a lot of patients have limited vision or have regimens that include quite a lot of drugs. It’s important for them to be able to tell their meds apart at a glance without having to fumble, squint, and make out tiny markers on the surface of the drug. I saw one version of this post that said that the shape and inscription on the tablet should be enough, and that strikes me as actively hostile to people who cannot make those things out very well.
As for folks who have said that drugs should simply not use inactive ingredients, that’s just not possible. Fillers serve various functions, even if they don’t offer a therapeutic effect themselves. In order to get a powder to hold together as a tablet, you need binding agents. And if your dosage is something tiny like a fraction of a milligram, then you need fillers to create a reasonable-sized pill.
I imagine this is specifically why bibliosphere brought up compounding pharmacies and the need to customize medications to have different fillers and inactive components. The solution to conflicting access needs is not to deny some people their needs in favor of other people’s needs; the solution is to create an abundance of options so that every individual’s needs can be met through one alternative or another.
In any case, here are some further tips for folks with allergies in the US:
You can ask the pharmacy for a full list of ingredients in a drug. You can also look up the ingredients yourself in the National Institutes of Health National Library of Medicine database. Using a drug’s NDC code is the most efficient way to do this. It works with generics and OTC drugs as well.
Let your pharmacy know if you have any allergies or sensitivities. Your patient file should always be up-to-date. Ask to be counseled on any prescriptions you receive so you can ask the pharmacist about ingredients and things to be aware of. This is also a good opportunity to ask about the adverse reactions you’ve been having, in case they are actually related to the drug’s mechanism of action rather than an inactive ingredient sensitivity. Pharmacists can also answer questions about OTC drugs.
Stick to brand name drugs when possible. Brand names are required to have the same formulation every time, down to the inactive ingredients. They also tend to be more consistent in potency from batch-to-batch compared to generics, meaning you’re more likely to get precisely the same amount of drug across multiple fills, as opposed to jumping across the 5% margin of error board.
If you find a brand name formulation that works for you, request a DAW (dispense as written) prescription. This will stop the pharmacy from dispensing a generic substitute. You can also request that it be dispensed as written when you drop the prescription off, but insurance prefers prescriber-requested DAW’s.
If there’s a generic substitute that you know works for you, ask your pharmacy if they can dispense multiple refills for you at once from the same batch. That way, you’ll at least get to stick with a predictable formulation for a while before you need your next batch of refills.
Likewise, it’s worth asking the pharmacy if they can continue to purchase their generic from the same manufacturer or otherwise continue to stock that version for you.
Something about universal health care is that sometimes people are gonna do stuff with negative health consequences and neither you or I or anyone else gets to call that shot, because the instant that happens it’s a never-ending litany of excuses to exclude people until we’re all back to “free checkups” being a bold progressive move.
You ever think about how when people talk about how humans’ average height has increased over time, it’s always framed as “wow, we’re so much healthier and more nutrified! we’re progressing as a species!”
but when they talk about how humans’ average weight has increased over time it’s never framed as
wow, the majority of our species never experiences significant starvation! the majority of our population does not experience severe childhood disease! we are able to manage common illnesses like influenza and gastroenteritis so they very rarely have long-term effects! our food safety and storage safety have improved so there’s not a significant portion of our food causing us to throw up!
we’re fully nutrified through our whole lives and are able to grow healthy and robust!look how much we’ve progressed as a species!
Image: a tweet by des @DesGo that reads: Gateway drugs aren’t a thing. Gateway conditions, however, are very real. Trauma is the most common factor among people who struggle with drug abuse and addiction. Class is the factor that then determines whether we sympathize or criminalize those who suffer from addiction. End image
as an autistic kid I got criticized for not making eye contact. so as an adult I trained myself to make very consistent eye contact (easier said than done). this in turn has led to some people telling me it’s “kinda weird” that I “stare so much.” the moral of this story is there is actually no pleasing neurotypicals
I had a similar problem in Primary school, ‘cause I was always looking out the window instead of at the board. My mum would always be like:
‘Does she put her hand up to answer a question?’
‘Yes…’
‘Is it the right answer?’
'Yes…’
'Then what’s the problem?’
this! this is a great way to support your kid. behavioral quirks are only problems if they get in the way of a child’s personal progress or are actually disruptive or harmful. neutral behaviors like not making eye contact are fine, andwe need to change the expectation that a social behavior is 'wrong’ just because it is less typical.
SAME!!! When I was a kid, people would scold me for not looking people in the eyes, they said it was rude. So, I made myself look people in their eyes. At first, it was horrible, I hated it, but now I can look people in the eyes, but it’s harder to look away now, and I just stare at them like this o_o and people say that I look demented, which is cool, but goddamn, what do neurotypicals want from me?
When I was in middle school, my guidance counselor refused to help me unless I made eye contact with him. That’s when I got so good at forcing myself to stare directly at people’s eyes that the same guidance counselor ended up telling me it was freaky how intense my eye contact was. It’s a powerful trick to have in your pocket if you want to intimidate the NT’s with your uncanniness but goddamn do I resent being browbeaten into that behavior, especially given that it’s acceptable and even polite in my heritage culture not to make eye contact, so it’s a racist expectation as well.
Also had that goddamn classroom problem in college, as well. A professor got super offended because I was staring at the board and taking notes on the things she had written there instead of staring at her face. She told me it was rude not to look at the teacher, and she would deliberately bend down in front of me to stick her face in mine/wave her hand in front of my face. Literally looking at the class materials written on the board is offensive. Never mind that I was by far the top performer in the class and seriously didn’t need to be there.
People on here know its possible to spread content warnings about stuff with infantilizing or talking down to people right?
Like the DDLC post that’s going around is honestly really insulting, I have delusions and hallucinations and enjoy horror games, and played and enjoyed DDLC. Psychotic and otherwise mentally ill people aren’t children and we can in fact enjoy horror.
If you want to actually help someone figure out if the game is safe for them you need to list off what actually happens. So here are tigger warnings for Doki Doki Literature Club
Suicide and mental illness shown/discussed in detail
Graphic violence and murder
The game reads your computer files in order to talk directly to the player using info from them
The idea that everything is a simulation/ you are trapped in a simulation
Gaslighting
Child abuse and neglect
Bullying
Emotional abuse
Betrayal by friends/someone close
If any of these are a trigger for you I highly recommend being careful about if you chose to play and what kind of headspace you’re in if you do.
I played it and I deal with simulation based delusions and while it was intense I knew not to play it if I wasn’t in a good headspace and genuinely enjoyed it.
It’s gotta be more than “the most racist bigot I know is still deserving of rights and dignity.”
It needs to be: the least “productive” person I know is deserving of rights and dignity.
The least “functional” person I know is deserving of rights and dignity.
The least intellectual person I know is deserving of rights and dignity.
The least knowledgeable person I know is deserving of rights and dignity.
The neediest person. The most catatonic person. The person with the least will to live. The person with the least means to communicate thought to others around them. The person with the shortest life expectancy. The person least likely to recover. The person who poses the most danger to themselves and others.
“Fully automated luxury” is a thought-terminating cliché. “Even a racist can still contribute meaningful labor for the good of society” is an excuse to disengage. “Even people who can’t perform physical labor are still bearers of important historical knowledge/creativity/intellectual insight” is a prioritization of contribution potential over innate humanity.
For the roadmap to your ideal society to be progressive, you must be willing to grapple with the very real existences of other people, including people you may find unfavorable on more than just the most convenient and ideological axes.
