It’s quite hard to actually overload your liver with the artificial sweeteners unless you are drinking literal gallons of zero sugar pop a day or eating nothing besides artificially sweetened foods. The stuff is used in such tiny concentrations that someone would have to deliberately seek out overdosing on this stuff to get the same effects as the experimental animals are getting (because the experimental animals are being fed pure sorbitol in doses that no human could reasonably consume.)

That’s the problem with articles like this is that they don’t emphasize that they are only seeing this in animal models and they don’t disclose just how much of the stuff they had to give to the animal for the negative effects to occur. It’s also a bad study because it doesn’t account for the differences in the physiology and biochemistry between humans and zebrafish, nor does it account for the confounding factors in humans. You know who drinks and eats a lot of artificially sweetened things? People with diabetes and people who are trying to lose weight. These are people that are likely to already have fatty liver disease and the sorbitol didn’t really have much to do with it.

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.

The ACE mods have single-handedly kept Arma 3 alive for over a decade. They add so much complexity to the game with so many options for customization by both mission makers and players. It’s amazing to me how much difference the ACE modset makes to the game.

It was unharmed.

It’s just a diamond cutting wheel on a dremel.

The last time I saw this in the ER as a medical student I had to teach the fireman how to cut with the diamond dremel correctly. I never really expected my metalworking and blacksmithing hobby to be particularly useful in emergency medicine.

It did take 3 hours to get the damn thing off because we had to make 2 cuts to get it open.

Nier: Automata has a special place in my heart and I’m seriously considering getting a tattoo of Pascal because of that story thread.

And those same men are the ones that are so offended by women choosing the bear.

This does seem to be the most consistent explanation.

As a cis-woman that plays Arma, I find it very amusing/interesting that the trans-women in my Arma unit outnumber the cis-women 3 to 1.

If you’re not ready to take the step to a skilled nursing facility or memory care, there are adult day care programs that can care for them during the day while you are at work and you can get home nursing services a couple times a week for medication checks and things like wound care.

Physical therapy and occupational therapy are also good ideas to look into for the balance and instability issues as old age and de-conditioning can contribute to that a lot.

As someone else suggested, a medication list review to minimize the pill burden and eliminate drug interactions and side effects can be very helpful. All of this can be started with a visit to his primary care physician for referrals for PT/OT, home nursing, medication review, and caregiver respite things like the adult daycare. Just make sure to schedule a 30 to 60 minute appointment to make sure there’s enough time to go over everything.

Note: for the medication review, don’t be alarmed if the physician takes him off of things like blood pressure or cholesterol medications because those are more aimed at preventing complications, so if someone is approaching the end of their life anyways, there really isn’t anything to “prevent” per se.

Oh, I forgot for OB/Gyn: GOOP and “Natural Birth Midwives”

If the options in November 2028 come down to Newsom vs Trump (or whoever is his puppet), I’m still voting for Newsom. I won’t be happy about it, but if we can’t get a real progressive through the primaries, I’m still voting against the GOP and for the non-GOP candidate with the best chance of winning.

• Emergency Medicine: Alcohol and/or fireworks
• Family Medicine: Wellness influencers
• Surgery: Pre-op NSAIDs (eg ibuprofen)
• Pediatrics: RFK Jr

Most of the drug research that actually produces new, useful treatments is done by universities and government research institutions, (or at least it was before the budget cuts). That research produced with state funding is then bought for pennies on the dollar by big pharma who does the last couple steps and reaps all of the financial rewards.

The NIH and CDC would be fully funded in perpetuity (along with many research institutions and universities) if they got paid even a fraction of the profits for their foundational research.

It’s 7 to 10 hours a day and they won’t be telling you when they’ll be getting home for you to be able to leave.

I have the KPDH soundtrack going on repeat. (My life is extremely stressful at the moment and I need my dopamine from somewhere)

I just don’t see a world in which it becomes the gold standard prior to getting so horribly enshittified that no medical institution can justify the cost of the accursed thing.

Some of my classmates used chatGPT to summarize reading assignments and it garbled the information so badly that they got things wrong on in-class assessments. Aside from the hallucinations and jumbled garbage output, I refuse to use AI unless there is absolutely no alternative on an ethical basis due to the environmental and societal impacts.

As far as I’m concerned, the only role for LLMs in medicine is to function as a scribe to reduce the burden of documentation and that’s only because everything the idiot machines vomit up has to be checked before being committed to the medical record anyways. Generative AI is a scourge on society and an absolute menace in medicine.

This is stupid. Fully reading and analyzing the source for accuracy and relevancy can be extremely time consuming. That’s why physicians have databases like UpToDate and Dynamed that have expert (ie physician and PhD) analyses and summaries of the studies in the relevant articles.

I’m a 4th year medical student and I have literally never used an LLM. If I don’t know something, I look it up in a reliable resource and a huge part of my education is knowing what I need to look up. An LLM can’t do that for me.