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The headline (and the article for that matter) are very sensationalist and I don’t think they’ve presented this in a balanced way. They are discussing how sorbitol behaves in zebrafish with limited data presented on human biochemistry, and they discuss it in a vacuum without quantifying the amount of sorbitol it takes to cause a problem. Yes, any substance in excess can be harmful, but the amount of sorbitol in food compared to the amount of high fructose corn syrup makes it the substantially lesser evil. The artificial sweeteners are vastly more potent than actual sugar, so you don’t need very much of it to get the same amount of sweetness. High fructose corn syrup is used in massive amounts in food and is much worse for you on the scale that either substance would be consumed.

They once tried to prove that DNPs (Doctorate of Nurse Practitioner) was just as good as an MD or DO education. They did this by taking the top DNP grads from the best programs and gave them a dumbed down version of the easiest part of the medical license exam, and only 40% passed it.

For context, to get a medical license, a physician has to have passed Steps 1-3 of the USMLE (US Medical License Exam) or Levels 1-3 of COMLEX (Comprehensive Osteopathic Medical Licensing Exam) to be eligible to apply for a medical license. Step/Level 2 is usually considered the hardest one of the three, and Step/Level 3 is the longest exam (2 full days), but generally considered to be the easiest. This DNP exam took the easiest 20% of questions from Step 3 and made a half-length version of the exam…and 60% of the DNPs still failed it.

The NP/DNP education is almost entirely algorithm-based and doesn’t meaningfully get into the anatomy, physiology, pathophysiology, and pharmacology that the first 2 years of medical school are devoted to. I have seen NPs miss life-threatening diagnoses because they were rare diseases that don’t come up outside of those first 2 years of drinking from a firehose of textbooks in medical school. Their education just isn’t long enough or in-depth enough to actually be equivalent to an MD or DO degree.

Also, MDs and DOs have almost 4000 hours of supervised medical practice where a physician is checking their work and directly observing or guiding their clinical experience before finishing medical school. Residency is, at minimum, another 8000 to 10000 hours of supervised practice in the specialties that only require 3 years of residency (it ranges from 3 to 9 years based on specialty).

NPs don’t have any standardized requirements for supervised practice to get their licenses and most programs only require 1000 hours or less of shadowing where they are just observing a licensed NP practice and not actually doing anything hands-on themselves… And they try to argue that this education is sufficient for them to be equal to physicians. There are some NPs who are amazing providers, but they’re usually the ones that were bedside nurses for 10+ years before going back to school for their NP license. The newer NPs that are going straight through from their BSN without any actual experience are the really dangerous ones.

TO BE CLEAR: I love the nurses I work with and I value their work and their input immensely. I was an EMT/ER tech before med school and it’s really sad when nurses are so confused when I help them clean up patients or reposition or whatever as a med student because most physicians and medical students don’t stop to help the nurses clean up poop. You can always tell which physicians have never had to clean up poop before, and I try very hard not to be like them.

Actually, the problem is the number of residencies. Once you graduate from medical school, you MUST complete an accredited residency program to be able to practice independently. The number of residency programs is controlled by Congress because residencies are funded through Medicare, and the last substantial increase in the number of residencies was when they added 1000 more in the Covid Omnibus bill.

It’s actually a growing crisis because more medical schools are opening and existing ones are increasing their class sizes, but the number of residencies isn’t keeping pace. This means that more and more people are going to be medical graduates with no way of obtaining a medical license without a residency and therefore no way to pay off their student loans. There’s a couple stories every year about medical graduates that couldn’t get into residency or couldn’t complete residency that end up dying by suicide, but it gets pretty effectively swept under the rug.

The problem is that the largest voting bloc is the Baby Boomers and they’re just electing their peers because they refuse to recognize that they’re old enough that they should have passed that baton about 20 years ago. Not that Gen X would be substantially better given their demographic’s track record and history of lead poisoning during developmental periods, but it would at least be a slight nudge in the right direction. It’s going to be decades before the Millenials and younger have enough votes to overcome the older, more conservative blocs, but that’s not accounting for the proportion of younger people that have been entirely brainwashed by monsters like Kirk, Tate, and Fuentes.

Disclaimer: I am not diagnosing anything and I am not a physician, just a medical student.

My guess: Congestive heart failure, possibly with dilated cardiomyopathy, and AFib that’s throwing clots into cerebral circulation causing microvascular damage and TIAs. They put you on pretty hefty blood thinners (WAY more than aspirin) if you have AFib and signs of previous embolism/stroke.

In high end circuses, the clowns are the most experienced acrobats and performers. There’s a decent chance the clowns are the coaches for the new performers doing the fancy stuff. It takes a ton of practice and experience to do acrobatics and gymnastics “badly” without getting horribly injured.

If the GOP leadership won’t even allow Congress to be in session for votes to happen in the first place, it doesn’t really matter.

If you’ve never actually watched a child die from a preventable cause, I can see why you would be more willing to give up on fighting the parents on these things. I worked at a pediatric level 1 trauma emergency room before starting medical school. I have watched far too many children die because of some stupid mistake/decision their parent made to be willing to let it go.

Having to do chest compressions on a baby that went into respiratory arrest then cardiac arrest because of a vaccine preventable illness does something to you…and if it doesn’t? Something is seriously wrong with you.

Yeah, but it’s not the baby’s fault their parents are kool aid swilling morons.

Yeah, I like the idea of keeping them here to live in the hellhole they’re making. It’s bullshit that they get to turn this country into a nightmare and bop off to tropical vacations while we try to keep people from dying from their shitty decisions. (I work in healthcare and get to try to convince people to get vaccines. It’s a painful conversation to have multiple times a day.)

I’m in a similar boat, but I have a couple Democrats in my state that I think are good eggs. For one, Tim Walz has been an amazing governor and I really hate what the Harris campaign did to him and his reputation. Also, Ilhan Omar and Peggy Flanagan are pretty nifty all around. Outside Minnesota, AOC seems pretty decent to me and I have high hopes for Mamdani (although, he explicitly identifies as a Democratic Socialist)

I’ve met a POC transwoman who was a sex worker and receiving Medicaid that showed up to her medical appointment in a bedazzled MAGA tank top in 2019. She was…interesting.

I’ll be getting my hysterectomy in the new year. I’m looking forward to it.

Blood thinners can make minor head trauma that shears the small veins between the skull and the brain a problem. A ruptured aneurysm can kill almost anyone regardless of whether or not they’re on blood thinners. The difference is venous bleeding (slow, low pressure) versus arterial bleeding (fast, high pressure).

The original Hippocratic oath forbids abortions. So do many of the modern versions. There are plenty of physicians that keep true to that oath.

And if people can’t get the care from that physician that was arrested for saving someone’s life, that is the state’s problem

Yes, and when informed of the fact that it is responsible for the lives of its’ citizens, the state said “lol no” and went right back to dismantling every single system constructed to support human life in this country.

We have already seen GOP state congresses overturn the will of the voters. No amount of outcry or protest will reverse the course of arresting and persecuting physicians and women involved with abortion care will ever overcome the gerrymandering. You’re advocating for physicians throwing away everything they’ve worked for their whole lives for a single patient in a way that will also leave all of their other patients without care.

I know you are passionate and vehement about this, but unless you’re in the position to trade your entire life for this one ethical principle without regard for all of the knock-on effects, your opinion means extremely little to those who are in that position.

So you’re saying all of the OB/Gyns in abortion ban states should give up their license and likely go to prison thereby leaving all pregnant patients without care?

Because that’s what you’re proposing here, functionally. OB/Gyns are already leaving these states in droves because of these bans and it’s leaving massive maternal care deserts across the South. There are already millions of people living in areas without OB/Gyn care within 100 miles drive, and now critical access rural hospitals are closing. Also, OB/delivery services are the first thing on the chopping block for budget cuts at struggling hospitals because 41% of births in America are covered by Medicaid. This number is substantially higher in the areas that are also affected by healthcare deserts meaning that up to 90-100% of births might be covered by Medicaid in some of these rural hospitals. With the Medicaid cuts, that means that the hospital loses thousands of dollars for every baby born there when they’re already deep in the red.

Your “all or nothing” approach to what physicians should be doing leaves absolutely no consideration for the secondary effects of such actions. If providing one abortion meant the complete loss of an OB/Gyn physician to a community, the tradeoff simply is not worth it. There are so many things that can go wrong with pregnancy and delivery that are not fixable with abortion (and what if it’s a wanted pregnancy?). Depriving communities of qualified physicians is a death sentence for many women that will then be unable to access the prenatal care that could have saved their life.

For physicians in these total ban states, defying the law would mean the loss of everything they have. Under your edict here, OB/Gyns would lose their license no matter what. They’d lose their license under your plan if they refused to provide abortion care and they’d lose their license and face prison time if they did provide abortion care.

Yes, it means that the women who need abortion care are going to suffer immensely, but there’s already a dire shortage of OB/Gyn physicians, so losing more of them to prison is not going to help all the women that need regular obstetric or gynecologic care and the women who need abortion care.

This is the definition of “between a rock and a hard place” and there’s maternal mortality on both sides because when women can’t get prenatal care, it drastically increases the chances of them dying from pregnancy or delivery complications.

Alternatively, maybe we should keep him to ourselves as a shield against whatever bullshit the federal government is getting up to.

Walz was all set to get feisty with the GOP when Harris, et al put a leash on him.

As a Minnesotan, I’m partial to Walz. I’m furious about how they set him up to fail in 2024 by putting him on the ticket then promptly shoving him in a corner.