Looks like this drug has multiple on going trials. Here is a phase II/III trial ongoing that’s probably the direct successor to the trial in the article. It’s currently recruiting, they expect to be done some time in 2025.
As the article points out prion diseases are still extremely rare. There’s also no proof yet that the deer prion can make a jump and cause disease in humans. I rationally know this, and yet having seen prion disease before in person, I irrationally (rationally?) avoid venison now just in case.
Subsequent encounter means you’re seeing the doctor again for the same problem. So if you got sucked into a jet engine and lived somehow you’d probably be seeing the doctor a bunch of times, and the second doctor visit and all later visits would be encoded as “subsequent encounter”
I love weird icd 10 codes, my favorite is V91.07, burn due to water-skis on fire. Like has that ever actually happened? If so please post link, I must know.
She literally called me at the time of the appointment to tell me she can't see me. She was so apologetic, but was like "I absolutely can treat you, but I'm not allowed by your insurance". Fuck this country....
This is mildly infuriating, I can give you a little more context though if you’re interested. I don’t know exactly about contracts between insurance companies and CVS so I can’t speak to that definitely. Probably something related to how much insurance is willing to pay minute clinic for such a short visit, and what things are feasible to address in such a short visit (hence CVS only allowing certain complaints).
I think this is something to do with the concept of “uncomplicated” vs “complicated” uti. Complicated utis are when there’s an increased danger of serious complications from a uti or increased likelihood of failing a typical antibiotic therapy. Utis in men are much much rarer than women, and are considered to be an automatic “complicated” uti by many. The greater length of the urethra in men helps prevent bacteria from being able to travel up to the bladder, whereas in women the short distance allows for this to happen much more frequently. So when a male has a UTI there is a much greater chance there will be complicating factors like prostate issues, structural problems, kidney stones, kidney infection, catheter use, atypical bacteria, etc. If you look more into their info on utis, they also state if they suspect any of those things, even in women, they won’t treat it and will just refer you to someone else, probably the Ed or a real urgent care clinic. Since the odds of that are much greater in men, they probably aren’t allowed to have longer appointments in minute clinic based on what insurance will pay for what they’re providing, they just decided to not see that at all in minute clinic. Looks like they do see men for sexually transmitted infections though, which are actually the most common cause of utis in young men, so if that’s a concern looks like they would be able to see people for that.
But I totally agree with you, fuck insurance companies in general.
Please don’t do this, it is dangerous and could potentially make the whole situation much worse, costing you more money in the end. This is a CVS minute clinic/insurance interaction thing, CVS wants just really simple complaints that they can address in a very brief amount of time. Insurance companies don’t consider a male UTI a simple complaint for some reasons I address in a comment above. A real urgent care will have no issues billing insurance for this issue.
I’ve never heard of urgent care requiring referral from a pcp, that wouldn’t make any sense as the whole point of urgent care is being seen more urgently than your primary physician can accommodate. And seeing people who don’t have a primary physician and keeping them out of the ed if not necessary. I would ask your insurance for that policy in writing, that can’t be right. And if it is it should be reported to that state insurance commission because that’s totally asinine. I mean never underestimate the dumbness of insurance companies but I think something might be being lost in translation here.
My donations lately have been focused a lot on the LGBT community. Things like lambda legal, local LGBT advocacy groups, and community health efforts. While discrimination from society as a whole and the health system in particular have been leading to worse health outcomes for, well since forever basically, this recent backsliding, especially rampant hate towards Trans individuals and laws preventing them from getting health care has been especially worrying for me.
I agree with this. The area of medicine I’m most involved in has had a crazy rate of new medications approved and innovations with a giant pipeline of possibilities on the way. The article focuses on crispr a lot, which is cool and always get the headlines, but I think in the nearer term oligonucleotide therapies or even viral vector gene therapies are already here. Oligonucleotide therapies use rna to affect gene expression, usually decreasing it. Theoretically it can be used in any toxic gain of function mutation, which covers a lot of genetic diseases. It’s not really a question of do we have the ability to treat genetic diseases anymore, it’s more getting all the time, money, expertise, and prerequisite natural history work done on the sheer number of them so these tolls can be tested in all these diseases and brought to patients.
The importance of high quality natural history studies and biomarker development cannot be overstated too. When you design a clinical trial you need to know how many patients need to be in it and how long it needs to run, or else you might accidentally throw out a treatment that works by designing the trial incorrectly. Natural history studies are where you get that information. Biomarkers can help provide more sensitive measures of change so you can more quickly figure out if a treatment has potential or not (ideally followed up by proving efficacy with clinical measures too).
The availablity of the these tools for making new treatments but limited resources for testing them is also leading to ethical issues and inequality. For instance there have been a number of “N of 1” trials where treatments were made specifically for a particular patient. I hope that benefit would then flow to other patients eventually too, but it does raise a lot of questions.
Yet another disastrous effect of restricting abortion access. The many harms from restricting reproductive care need to keep being hammered on in the media. Thanks for posting this.
A fascinating condition. You can walk away, come back ten minutes later and have the exact conversation in the exact same way even down to the person’s vocal intonations. It is uncanny. Truly gives you existential “oh my god I’m a meat computer” thoughts if you ever see it for yourself....
Yes there is. Scroll to the bottom of mander.xyz and you’ll see a link for “instances.” This will show you both who we’re federated with and if any instances have been blocked. I don’t think any are blocked at the moment. If mander were to defederate from an instance you would not be able to make posts there with your mander account. You’d have to make an account with that instance or a different instance that does federate with them. So I can post to beehaw from this account, but not if I had an account on the lemmy.world instance since beehaw defederated them. I personally hope that an export or sync subscriptions feature will eventually be made to make it easy to get new accounts up to speed in case there’s a defederation event.
Edit: oh and one stipulation, if a instance defederated us, but we didn’t defederate them, you could still make posts to it (and it wouldn’t show up in our block list), but this wouldn’t get sent to the “real” thread and would only be visible to other people on mander. We also would no longer get new posts or comments on those. So like right after beehaw defederated from lemmy.world there was for a brief time some ghost comments that only people from lemmy.world could see.
Also if we did defederate from an instance, and a person from that instance posted to a different instance that we did federate with, you still wouldn’t be able to see their comments from your mander account. Basically defederation is hitting block for everyone on this instance to everyone and every post on that instance. If I’m wrong in any of this please correct me, I’m new on this too. But basically defederation is messy so probably best reserved for extraordinary circumstances.
Rip my heart out, geeze. Alright, I'll go with metroid 6 just since the development of metroid prime 4 has been so rocky. I do appreciate that when Nintendo sees a game isn't working they'll scrap it and go back to square one and try and make it good though, rather then just releasing something subpar. While usually at least. On the other hand who knows when metroid 6 will come out? Anywhere from 2-15 years is the range apparently.
I’ve never had a book that I so immediately wanted to dive right back into. If you haven’t heard of it, but like a good mystery (closer to a self-contained ARG than Agatha Christie) or a good 500 page movie review, I could not recommend it more! This weekend I'm planning to do another read-through to catch things I might...
Really cool unique book. Certainly is going to depend on your tastes a little bit but I loved it. Also before reading I had someone kind enough to urge me, do not get the ebook! This is one book that just has to be the physical edition.
Yeah, sometimes you're just innocently watching an anime and you're like, oh no, this just went all facist imperialist Japan didn't it. Lookin at you attack on titan.
Totally, like if you were an alien trying to study a computer, you can look at an individual transistor all you want but at some point you need to look at how all the different complex network systems work together to make a software program.
The language of computer programming has worked it's way more and more even into clinical neurology. I talk about motor programs for instance when trying to explain dystonias, where the brain activates a set of movement patterns that's not at all what the person was trying to do. You might find functional neurologic disorders interesting. Super common problem that needs a lot more research. Many patients have trouble grasping the idea of a "software" problem in the brain so don't talk about it and don't realize just how common it is. Fmri has started to help uncover the abberant patterns that lead to these disorders.
Appreciate the funny post, but for anyone reading too much into this it's misleading at best (also just barely passing at 60% only correct). It's referencing a portion of the test with multiple choice questions. So that's relatively easy for a language model, since it can predict an answer from a focused question. Please don't ask chat gpt individualized questions about your health. It does decent for giving out some general information about medical topics, but you'd be better off at going to a reputable site like mayo clinic, Cleveland clinic, or all the resources at national library of medicine who maintain free very nice medical knowledge databases on tons of topics. It's where chat gpt is probably scraping it's answers from anyways, and you won't have to worry about it making up nonsense that looks real and inserting it into the answer.
And if chat gpt comes up with sources in an answer, look them up yourself no matter how convincing they seem on their face. I've seen it invent doi numbers that don't exist and all sorts of weird stuff.
Yeah, basically if you work for a paycheck you're probably not the 1%. The venture capital firms buying up all the medical practices and hospital? Those guys are the 1%
“As children, we fear the dark. Anything might be out there. The unknown troubles us. There are those who say we should not inquire too closely into who else might be living in that darkness.”...
The material is also a little rough in terms of how easy it would be to adapt into a show I think. It's not like the expanse or something very plot heavy and tight where you can pretty much just turn the novels into a script and it'll go at least decently well. So I'm skeptical because it's going to need a lot of skilled work to make the story function well as a TV show. D&d have not shown that the adaptation part is their strong suit though. Definitely a wait and see for me before watching.
A Cancer Trial’s Unexpected Result: Remission in Every Patient (Published 2022) (www.nytimes.com)
The study was small, and experts say it needs to be replicated. But for 18 people with rectal cancer, the outcome led to “happy tears.”
Will the growing deer prion epidemic spread to humans? Why not? (eukaryotewritesblog.com)
Prions are literally nightmare fuel.
Texas airport worker dies after being sucked into Delta jet engine (www.theguardian.com)
A worker at San Antonio’s international airport died after being sucked into a jet’s engine late on Friday, officials said.
When doctors sugarcoat the truth, patients get shortchanged (www.washingtonpost.com)
Archive link: archive.ph/rYlvQ...
[Final Update] My insurance won't cover UTIs for males. Yes, I'm in the US. (lemmy.world)
She literally called me at the time of the appointment to tell me she can't see me. She was so apologetic, but was like "I absolutely can treat you, but I'm not allowed by your insurance". Fuck this country....
What medicine-related charities/research do you donate to or keep a close eye on?
I am curious what everyone else is focusing on or supporting in research and why....
Suddenly, It Looks Like We’re in a Golden Age for Medicine (www.nytimes.com)
In post-Roe US, clinical trials may be too risky for people who can get pregnant (arstechnica.com)
doi for the original Science piece: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adh3104
Repetitive Questioning and Writing in a Patient with Transient Global Amnesia (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
A fascinating condition. You can walk away, come back ten minutes later and have the exact conversation in the exact same way even down to the person’s vocal intonations. It is uncanny. Truly gives you existential “oh my god I’m a meat computer” thoughts if you ever see it for yourself....
What issues are you currently facing on lemmy/mander?
Apologies if this isn’t the right place to post this, please do advise...
Metroid Prime 4 or Metroid 6? (lemm.ee)
If you choose to play one, you will never be able to play the other. If you don't choose you'll never play a Metroid game again. What is you answer?
Kill reddit, kill it now. (feddit.de)
Recently discovered House of Leaves and it is fantastic
I’ve never had a book that I so immediately wanted to dive right back into. If you haven’t heard of it, but like a good mystery (closer to a self-contained ARG than Agatha Christie) or a good 500 page movie review, I could not recommend it more! This weekend I'm planning to do another read-through to catch things I might...
First-of-its-kind noninvasive CRISPR method knocks out anxiety gene (newatlas.com)
Physics rule (files.catbox.moe)
rule (lemm.ee)
Scientists discover spiral-shaped signals that organize brain activity: Discovery could advance both computing and understanding of the brain (www.sciencedaily.com)
What the h... (lemmy.world)
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‘3 Body Problem’: Sci-Fi Drama Series From ‘Game Of Thrones’ Creators & Alexander Woo Gets Netflix Premiere Date, First Look Teaser (www.yahoo.com)
“As children, we fear the dark. Anything might be out there. The unknown troubles us. There are those who say we should not inquire too closely into who else might be living in that darkness.”...