"Tachycardia" is a sign. "Palpitations" or "heart racing" are symptoms. Signs are the objective things that can be measured and recorded as hard data. Symptoms are what the patient reports feeling that are not measurable. In taking a history and physical, the symptoms tell the physician what signs to look for.

I've worked in ERs before and dealt with a lot of mental health patients in crisis. I've met some schizophrenics that have been off their meds and on street drugs for months in the middle of a complete psychotic break that still have a better grasp on reality than some of these folks.

(To be clear, they were in that situation because they lost their job, home, and health insurance, so they had no way to access the medication that had kept them stable previously, and the street drugs were an attempt at self-medication.)

Is there anything else in that head of yours? Do you have space in your mind alongside this vitriol for anything that makes life worth living? Family? Friends? Hobbies? What things do you find to be positive or wholesome in your perspective? I'd genuinely like to hear what your ideas and beliefs are beyond the topic of Gaza.

I've got a little while until I do my psychiatry clinical rotation in school, but I feel like interviewing you to hear about your theories and perceptions would make for a fascinating case report.

Especially after Trump's antivax BS during COVID.

I've heard the neonatologists say that they make the parents repeat back, write down, and sign a consent form that says "I understand that refusing the vitamin K shot significantly increases the chances of bleeding, including brain bleeds that can lead to significant disability or death."

Not many people seem to want to sign that form for some reason.

I'm currently a medical student in my clinical rotations....

Me: "So it looks like we're due for our (blank) month/year vaccinations. Have those been done already or do we need them today?"

Parent: "Oh, we're not vaccinating."

Me: screaming internally

This is insulting to 10 year olds.

I think considering Donald Trump to have any significant degree of intelligence or political acumen is an overestimation. The Cult of the GOP is a concern and I am worried about how many people have cast aside all sense of empathy and humanity in favor of supporting Trump, but the man himself is little more than a demagogue with a recognizable name.

If "all" his marbles is about half a normal set, sure, I guess he has all the marbles he started with....

It's variable, but some people have one where the upper lip connects to the gums and another one for the bottom lip. So an AMAB can have up to 4 of them.

As a medical student with an absurd amount of student loans, this stuff is very important to me.

No, that was applicable to anyone enrolled in the SAVE plan. If you made more money than that, you would have a small payment which was limited to 5% of your discretionary income (a number that excludes a portion of your income as non-discretionary for living expenses, etc). So if you made 75k/year, your payment would be 5% of the amount not designated as necessary living expenses. I'm not positive on the exact numbers, but I think they exclude about 60k before they start calculating your payment amount.

That's basically what the SAVE plan did. If you enrolled in it and made qualifying income-based payments that didn't cover the interest on the loan, the interest wouldn't capitalize and it would still count as a qualifying payment for PSLF. It wasn't loan forgiveness, but it ensured that payers wouldn't have their loan balances skyrocket while making income-driven repayments.

Unfortunately, most health insurance plans have a separate sub-company manage the pharmacy benefits and we have absolutely zero way of accessing their systems. It would be lovely if we could see what your insurance would cover immediately as we prescribe it, but that also runs into the problem of us not having any control over the actual pharmacy and their billing and pricing.

And as long as CPR machines are obscenely expensive and difficult to obtain and maintain for a lot of smaller hospitals and EMS systems.

Here's the problem with that: it relies on things like the LUCAS CPR assist machine which doesn't fit on a lot of people. I've done CPR on a lot of people, and only a handful of them would have even fit in a LUCAS in the first place.

In this case, it's the medical ethics standards that have been discussed, litigated, and debated to hell and back before landing on the accepted standard. So it's the physicians, lawyers, ethics experts, legislators, and judicial system that agreed on what is best.

The issue is that we do provide education and try to have these conversations, but the information is also available in layman's terms from reputable organizations like the CDC. It all falls on deaf ears though. There is no evidence that shows any benefit for a delayed vaccination schedule with just a tiny number of exceptions for rare immune disorders. The other part of it is that it can become a burden on the clinic to deal with a bunch of extra appointments and having to fill out all the paperwork for the school/daycare explaining why the under/un-immunized child should be allowed in school anyways...and when you see 20 patients a day in the office and have another couple dozen phone calls, messages, and consults to deal with every day as well, spending the time to convince someone to accept scientific consensus in the place of the facebook posts they read is a tall order.

Yes. This exactly.