Eh, unless the sky is green, you’re probably fine.

He’s doing what he can in Minnesota. He’s done a hell of a lot more than just talk here and has made meaningful changes for the better for Minnesotans.

You’re right. My brain is absolute pudding because I’m studying for my board exams. Doing a few hundred multiple choice questions about complex medical topics in a row doesn’t leave a whole lot of processing power left for anything else.

Unfortunately, it appears that you are correct. They released a list of qualifying conditions and while COPD and brochiectasis are on the list, asthma is not.

Edit: I’m kinda braindead right now. Asthma is the first thing on the list. whoops.

That will usually qualify, especially since Covid is primarily a respiratory illness.

I’m saying that they aren’t going to boycott Walmart because they don’t have the option to do so.

I have the suspicion that you aren’t really familiar with what rural poverty looks like. These are people that cannot qualify for credit cards, get taken advantage of by payday loans, and struggle to meet the basic necessities that don’t actually even add up to a reasonable standard of living. These are people that can’t afford to put enough gas in the tank of their car to drive to those other stores, and literally their only source of groceries is likely to be a Walmart if they’re lucky enough to have one in their town.

There is a good amount of Schadenfreude to be had when it comes to Trump voters, but when you’re in the position of trying to help them control their diabetes and high blood pressure on a diet of cheap, processed, high-sugar, high-sodium crap, you’ll lose that spiteful glee real quick. These are people that are inextricably trapped by poverty, food deserts, healthcare deserts, and failing education systems that never really had a chance and it’s hard for me to find any real satisfaction in seeing them suffer.

No there are not. In many smaller/rural communities, the nearest non-Walmart store can be up to hours away and be more expensive. If you’re barely scraping by and you have to work long hours or multiple jobs to do so, you don’t have the time or spare income to tack on an extra 2 hours to your grocery shopping and pay 10-20% more. Walmart has done an exceedingly good job at wiping out the competition in small communities that have no alternatives. That’s why you don’t see as many Walmart stores in larger, more populated areas…their entire business model relies on killing the competition.

And that’s not even getting into how their new employee orientation has to include information on how to sign up for food stamps.

They’re probably having a better time than the ones that aren’t intubated. The intubation is to make sure they’re still breathing while they’re anesthetized. The ones without tubes are just awake and angry/scared.

The crossovers between veterinary medicine and pediatric medicine are a lot more significant than most people like to think about. The Venn diagram isn’t a perfect circle…but it’s close.

Yeah, my old desktop computer is getting turned into my first dedicated Linux machine and my current desktop isn’t getting updated to 11 until October 13th.

Tim signed the bill that guaranteed free breakfast and lunch for every K-12 student in Minnesota public schools. No needs-testing, no “lunch debt”…just free healthy food for children.

I worked in a nursing home/assisted living facility for a little while for minimum wage. I quit when I found out that they were expanding the memory care unit without increasing staffing requirements. Most of my 8 hour shifts were by myself caring for 9 adults with severe dementia that required help with everything…and they were talking about increasing that to 13 residents. I left because I did not want to be responsible for one of them falling and getting hurt while I’m stuck trying to clean up another one that forgot how to use a toilet about 10 years ago.

There is no proposed solution. The proposed solution is for the poor people to just die already.

There are many healthcare facilities here in America that would pay minimum wage if they could get away with it (and many of them do). Hospital administrators and managers hate the word “union” with a fiery passion and will fight tooth and nail to prevent their workers from forming or joining unions.

And this is part of the problem with the reduction in Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements. The community hospitals and clinics are already strapped for cash to pay their workers well enough, and if the majority of their patients are on government-funded insurance, then the cuts to that insurance will mean that the hospitals and clinics (and thereby the workers) get paid even less than before.

It’s like that in some other countries as well. In the UK, the NHS funding has been whittled away to the point that people with the means to do so are turning to private healthcare because of the wait times and the physicians are going on strike because of the poor pay and working conditions.

Healthcare around the world is a house of cards right now, and we really didn’t do anything to reinforce it in a meaningful way during/after the pandemic. The next pandemic is going to be quite bad.

Given that my background includes working as an ER tech, I am planning on writing some pieces about EMTALA and its implications. Everything you brought up is spot on (if sometimes a little understated) in my experience.

It absolutely was not the right call. In the ER, we use stuff like Haldol for combative patients, it’s substantially less dangerous for the patient, but it takes a couple minutes to kick in.

The biggest risk with ketamine is the tachycardia, but the other most common twilight sedative, propofol, runs a higher risk of the recipient slowing or stopping their breathing. In my medical experience, ketamine is commonly used for twilight sedation to set broken bones, and propofol is commonly used for short procedures like colonoscopies.

Compared to other sedatives, ketamine can have a safer effect profile in that it doesn’t mess with the person’s breathing and doesn’t massively slow down their heart rate. An excessive dose can result in a heart rate that is too high and that can collapse into cardiac arrest, but other fast-acting sedatives usually mean that you have to intubate the person because they aren’t going to be breathing adequately on their own until the drug wears off.

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