It was a legitimately nonprofit hospital and he probably was overpaid, but at least he was a practicing physician at one point and did seem to give a damn about his staff.

I once worked at a hospital in the ER where the department director was a union-busting bastard, but the CEO was pretty reasonable. After I left, one of the other ER techs went to the CEO about our pay being messed up and got everyone $5-6/hour raises to actual market rate. Also, there were a few weeks when we were really understaffed that the hospital encouraged admin folks to volunteer as “candystripers” in the ER to do stuff like help clean/turn over rooms, and answer patient call lights for water, blankets, etc. And the CEO was down in the ER for a couple hours every evening helping out most of that time period. It was encouraging to see the CEO of the hospital putting on some gloves and helping us with basic stuff like cleaning and stocking.

NPs working under a physician with actual oversight is fine. The ones I have problems with are the ones that have a physician sign the hundreds of notes a month while maybe reviewing a handful, and worse, the ones pushing for independent practice without even that sham of oversight involved.

I’m asking about your opinion. If Hamas refuses to cooperate, how many Palestinians does the IDF have to kill for it to be too many in your mind? When does the mass murder of Palestinian civilians exceed a reasonable metric for “defense”?

Why does Hamas have insights into your personal opinions and beliefs?

That’s not answering my question. How many Palestinian lives is too many?

So how many is “too many” for Israel to have killed? Or do the citizens of Gaza not count the same way Israelis do?

You’re talking about a population with extremely limited resources that is literally 50% (or more) children that has been under two fascist boots for the last decade and a half. There does come a point where a level of desperation combined with a possibility of a better future will instigate a revolution, but right now? They don’t see a possibility of a better future. With Israel’s Likud on the other side of the wall and no resources to rebuild after a coup, what’s the point in gambling everything on maybe being able to overthrow the more local oppression?

Also, education in Gaza is very inconsistent and most political revolutions are started by people with education and nothing to lose.

They took power illegally years before the literal majority of Gaza citizens were even born.

Edit: My apologies, the ones that are almost legal adults would have been infants or toddlers at the time Hamas seized power. They really should have done something about that while they were learning how to walk and speak. /s

I’m going to print this out and carry it like a pain scale for working the ER when I’m done with medical school or make something like it. Thank you for sharing this.

Taking an ambulance to the ER does not ensure that you will be seen faster. A decent chunk of ambulance patients go right out to the lobby to wait like everyone else because everyone is triaged based on their illness or injury, not their mode of transportation.

I’ve worked in ERs before, and there is more to this story that the article sidestepped quite neatly. Most ERs these days are filled to capacity with dangerously low staffing ratios, and the general public’s definition of an “emergency medical condition” and the medical definition of an “emergency medical condition” are very different. Some nights I’ve worked, we had people with chest pain and a cardiac history wait in the lobby for 5+ hours because there were no beds available and their EKG was mostly okay for the time being. A big contributor to this problem is a lack of mental health resources which results in ERs losing beds for up to weeks or even months at a time to hold psych patients that have nowhere to go. It is heartbreaking when we had to turn away people who mostly needed a social work consult…but when there’s two doctors and twelve nurses for a 40 bed ER and 2 out of 3 resuscitation bays are in use for active codes, there just isn’t anyone or any resources available to help someone who isn’t actively dying.

The inpatient side isn’t a lot better. Skilled nursing facilities and rehab centers are increasingly rare and increasingly expensive, and the hospital can’t keep a patient forever if they don’t meet criteria for hospitalization. The nice thing about inpatient is that they get to enforce their staffing ratios so that each nurse only has so many patients to handle. In the ER with EMTALA, it doesn’t matter that a nurse is caring for 6 patients (3 of which are waiting for an inpatient hospital bed, and 1 is waiting for an ICU bed…), that nurse will have to take on another critically ill patient that is stuck on a bed in the hallway if that’s all that’s available. The inpatient problem exacerbates the ER problem, and then you have people stuck in the lobby for 12+ hours before there’s a physical space for someone to see them, that provider’s capacity to take on another patient notwithstanding. It’s a true crisis and it’s only going to get worse until the full healthcare system (i.e. all the non-ER parts) are as accessible and available as needed.

Most of my time as an EMT was as an ER tech in a peds hospital and kiddos are astonishingly good at getting all kinds of fluids all over the place.

Personally, when I’m doing direct patient care, I want as much of me covered as I can tolerate. Like, yes, it sucks horrendously doing CPR in full isolation gear, but I’d rather have that than have fluids touch my skin anywhere.

It depends on why they don’t pay attention to politics. Personally, I kind of have to go ostrich-mode and bury my head in the sand when school gets stressful because I just don’t have the mental bandwidth to deal with both. I’m not going to judge someone too harshly for protecting their mental health from the absolute shitshow that is the American political landscape.

PS: This is not to say that any degree of modern conservatism is okay. Bigots can go fuck themselves and I’d be out punching Nazis and being a medic at protests if it didn’t jeopardize my future so significantly. (Felony convictions make it really hard to get a medical license and I have to pay off my student loans somehow. Besides, I’ll be in a much better position to make a meaningful difference as a physician than as a heavily indebted student or EMT.)

Being lazy is vaguely kinda sorta correlated with cancer… but that doesn’t account for the fact that humans who are regularly active are also less likely to make other lifestyle choices that are more significantly tied to cancer like smoking and drinking.

This is the problem with a lot of population based studies. Obesity is linked with a lot of health problems like cardiovascular disease, but only some aspects of cardiovascular disease have causative links to obesity and others are sequelae of other factors that tend to be associated with obesity. For example, extra weight/adipose puts more stress on your heart by there just being more body mass to deliver blood to and more oxygen demand from muscles to just physically move the weight around (also a cause of joint problems)… but it’s the poor diet full of cholesterol that clogs up the arteries (aka atherosclerosis) causing myocardial infarction (heart attack).

Oh my fuck. I hate news stories like this. Aspartame falls into the same cancer risk category as eating red meat sometimes and being kinda lazy. A rigorous systematic review was conducted of dozens of studies of aspartame and they did not find a plausible biologic mechanism by which aspartame could cause cancer. Epidemiologically, it’s vaguely correlated, not causative of cancer.

Also, in the Reuters article it notes that a 132-lbs adult would have to drink 12 to 36 cans of diet coke a day for the dose/exposure to become relevant to the risk they’re talking about. This article is talking about one study that is at odds with the systematically reviewed data from 40 human observational studies, 12 experimental animal studies, and 1360 assay/experimental end points to look for the supposed link.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691522007475#sec5