Seriously?!!? A chiropractor?!!?
Makes sense: all those supplements and “treatments” with magical Rube Goldberg machines aren’t covered, so if the chiroquacker can sell them on his “holistic” treatment plan, all the insurance is paying is a few bucks for the “office visit”.
Was the decision made on behalf of the insurance company by EviCore by any chance?
These assholes denied diagnostics and most of my PT visits for my frozen shoulder this year. It’s been awesome, lemme tell ya.
No, this was a Sentara product. Another company I just despise.
Would they accept notes from the Babadook instead? 
“The uptick in locally transmitted dengue cases across parts of the United States is concerning, as it signals how shifting environmental factors – such as warmer temperatures and increased travel – are creating conditions for mosquitoes to spread in new areas,” said Dr. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist and chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital and an ABC News contributor. “While the virus remains rare in much of the U.S., small outbreaks emphasize the need for public awareness and preventive steps to curb further spread.”
More stuff I never thought I would need to know. Not in VA yet, but travel to FL is pretty frequent here, and a lot who travel to PR regularly.
In addition to the anti-vaccine presenters and contributors, there were nearly 300 public comments blasting COVID-19 vaccines. Many people parroted the false information and conspiracies spread by the presenters, saying: “It is common knowledge the COVID-19 shots are poison” and “Ban the Covid Bio Weapon ‘vaccine.’” One commenter specifically referenced the Children’s Health Defense, a notorious anti-vaccine organization run by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Some commenters seemed to take aim not just at COVID-19 vaccines but all vaccines, writing in to say, “No more promoting ANY ‘vaccinations’” and “Stop the shots, stop killing our children!”
These are the assholes who will be in charge of our “public health services” if Tuesday goes sideways. Vote blue everywhere! Anywhere these asshats are in power will be a cesspit of despair and misery.
The situation in the southwest district may not be surprising given the state’s overall standing on vaccination: Idaho has the lowest kindergarten vaccination rates in the country, with coverage of key vaccinations sitting at around 79 percent to 80 percent, according to a recent analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Yup, that’s their goal. Then say “See, vaccines don’t work! Kids still get sick!” “They weren’t vaccinated.” “Lies!”
Marwan Al-Hams, director-general of field hospitals in Gaza, told ABC News on Tuesday the second phase of the polio vaccination campaign has been unable to take place in northern Gaza City and the northern Gaza Strip, with 110,000 children in need of a second dose.
With Israeli troops actively targeting medical and aid centers, this is not exactly shocking, but the potential implications are huge. Viruses do not respect geopolitical or sectarian borders. Once it gets itself reestablished, we could be in trouble.
Kids and teens can make some pretty hairbrained choices sometimes. But when a kid’s choice is to engage in a TikTok challenge that threatens their life, psychiatrists can struggle to understand if it was just an exasperating poor choice born out of impulsivity and immaturity or something darker—an actual suicide attempt.
I’ve seen a few of these, and anyone who has read my stuff much will not be shocked when I say I disagree with the binary nature of this description. These kids frequently are not clear in their own minds what their intentions were. Had one, probably unintentionally insightful, teen tell me “I don’t want to die, but I don’t really care if I do or not.” Given the increasing mental health strains on kids, especially those in marginalized groups, this kind of attitude will get more common. At least, so I suspect. What to do is both easy and damned near impossible. Love and support our kids. That’s the be all and end all of it. Way too many kids have no one who does this for them. Human beings cannot thrive without this. (Applies to adults, as well.) Given the heightened tensions and temperatures brought on by recent events, I am asking us to be kind and patient to our loved ones, even while I also urge no quarter for the racist, misogynistic, omniphobic asshats who put us in this place.
Isn’t that one of the forms of suicidality?
As in: active suicidality “I am going to end it” vs passive “I wish I would just go to sleep and not wake up”.
I used to think my mental health can’t have been that bad, because I didn’t have any plans. It took a long time to learn that “daydreaming happily about a horrible accident” was part of the same spectrum, and distinctly not normal.
Yes. Passive suicidality is not as emergently concerning as active, but speaks to a desperation to get help that is really hard to access right now.
Findings In a randomized clinical trial including 50 physicians, the use of an LLM did not significantly enhance diagnostic reasoning performance compared with the availability of only conventional resources.
This comes as absolutely no shock to anyone who actually does this. It has been decades that “they” have been trying to replace clinical experience with checklists, criteria and now AI. The human brain does not digitize well, and is capable of making connections and leaps that I do not think machines will match in the near future. Won’t stop idiots from marketing AI virtual docs, of course. But I think my job is safe long enough for me to get to retirement.
Conclusions and Relevance In this trial, the availability of an LLM to physicians as a diagnostic aid did not significantly improve clinical reasoning compared with conventional resources. The LLM alone demonstrated higher performance than both physician groups, indicating the need for technology and workforce development to realize the potential of physician-artificial intelligence collaboration in clinical practice.
Of course, it seems they are pushing to just get rid of the human element altogether. Good luck with a screaming toddler, Wally.
This. I know very clinically-minded physicians who have left practice for research because of the intense stress of following a mandated algorithm that fails to assess the actual patient’s needs. The more they care about patients, the more likely they are to leave practice under a mandated system. AI will just make that problem worse.
With Robert F. Kennedy Jr. now lined up to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, it appears his Make America Healthy Again movement is poised for real power.
MAHA… oh shit…
He says Kennedy’s approach will be to insist on what he terms “accurate science”
Let me guess how these asshats will define “accurate.” I am strongly suspecting it will begin with the desired conclusion and work backward from there.
Yeah, the next 4 years will be interesting. Fuck…
Like a paraphrase of the Mythbusters guys:
“I replace your peer-reviewed, double-blinded, large randomized clinical studies with my peyote-fueled fever dreams of how cartoon molecular biology works.”
2nd that.
When I was at the FDA, there was a big deal in the 2000’s among medical device companies and FDA management that computer simulations!!! were the wave of the future. Cheaper than bench tests, animal experiments, and clinical trials. We did studies with volunteer groups performing simulations of a problem we designed: fluid flow experiments on simplified blood contacting devices. The results submitted by the 28 participants world-wide didn’t agree on practically anything:
One problem was the codes used at the time were basically developed for aerospace development. Blood damage is really important for cardiovascular devices, but who cares what happens to air?
After Brand filed her lawsuit in 2013, other patients filed lawsuits against the IVC filter maker, Cook Medical, in 11 other districts. The lawsuits were later consolidated into one case. During the litigation, expert witnesses and lawyers discovered red flags in safety data and trial design that were not previously publicly reported or made available to patients. That included eight suspicious deaths among clinical trial participants and perforated veins among sheep used in animal experiments. But, those revelations have remained out of public view due to a court confidentiality order—until now, at least.
Gaaaahhh!!! I am just speechless. This is so fucking stupid, before we even get into the ethics of it. But yeah, let’s gut the FDA. That’ll make it all better.
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Enraging. It still blows my mind that any device that is permanently implanted in the body would be considered Class II (moderate risk). We know enough by now that even passive implants represent a high risk category.
FDA painfully reclassified external defibrillators from Class II to Class III (high risk) because one of the manufacturers had been dropping the ball on design quality. One of the roughly three manufacturers (not the one with the chronic quality problems) just completely dropped out of the market rather than spend the time and money to re-test their products. But it was the right call. They should reclassify all permanent implants as Class III, and include anything like vena cava filters that aren’t supposed to be permanent but all too often end up so.
The report showed a 47% increase in e-cigarette sales at U.S. retail outlets between 2019 and 2023, with flavors like fruit, candy, mint, menthol and desserts accounting for more than 80% of those sales.
Medical research will be conducted using MAGA research methodology: Googles and xits.