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brady8

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Interests: Healthcare, DevOps, Entrepreneurship, Programming, Research, Technology, UI/UX Design

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Much of being a physician is pattern recognition - the vast majority of Bell's Palsy is idiopathic (generally viral), and thus that's how we usually treat it. If we tested everybody for everything everytime the health system(s) would collapse.

It definitely helps as a patient to advocate, and add anything that a physician like myself maybe wouldn't always ask, like if you've been a tick-infested area and/or discovered a tick attached to yourself recently.

I'm a physician. Agree with your comment... in a statistical sense this relates to screening test characteristics. As the sensitivity of a test increases, the specificity decreases.

A good example is screening for atrial fibrillation, an abnormal heart rhythm that is not uncommon especially as you age. All our guidelines right now on treatment and stroke prevention (a potential consequence of AF) is based on the population who is currently most often diagnosed - symptomatic patients with palpitations, or lightheadedness, or chest pain, which provokes them to see a physician.

If everyone is now wearing an Apple watch and suddenly we have 2x or 10x the number of people diagnosed with AF, our current evidence about the benefits of treatment suddenly do not apply, because these newly found patients would never have been included in the original studies.

So what do we do with these (presumably lower risk) patients? No one yet knows.

Interesting to see Dr. Anand Swaminathan quoted - he is a prominent, highly regarded figure in CME/CPD (ongoing education) for ER docs nationally and internationally, with a large Twitter following.

I am a physician, and there has been a "state of emergency" declared in my province due to a fentanyl overdose "epidemic". Although I use this drug routinely, it is incredibly unsafe outside of a clinical setting. Unfortunately, these are not your stereotypical "bad" people that are dying from overdoses, but your average young people who just happen to experiment. It's utterly awful, and I feel for you. I hope this trend (if you can call it that) ends soon.

I'm a physician. Unfortunately, most of our overdoses in North America are from prescribed opiates. They are very addictive, and despite best efforts to control and monitor dosing and schedules, these opiates are often either purposefully overdosed (suicide attempts), diverted, or accidentally ingested. My worst memory in pediatrics was a 7 year old who was brain-dead after ingesting only one (!!!) tablet of her grandfather's high-strength Oxy prescription that she thought was Tylenol.

Opiates are bad news, and physicians unfortunately were duped into prescribing way too much for the last ~15 years.

I'm a Canadian citizen who just finished the process of sponsoring my Australian wife for permanent residency in Canada.

What you've written isn't true unless there's some extenuating circumstances you're not disclosing. My wife was automatically eligible for PR, and in fact it was much easier than the reciprocal process (me applying for PR in Australia). It took about $2000 all up, and took about 8 months in total. Easy!

I met my wife on eHarmony, and every date I went on before that through the site was great, with interesting, intelligent women (although the chemistry wasn't there until I met my wife). I don't know if eHarmony has the problem solved in its entirety, but the quality of my matches leads me to believe that they're doing something well, and something well worth the money.

I'll throw my support behind this point as well. I'm just finishing up a medical degree after working as a software developer for years, and I still have contact with a company I founded in Alberta years ago. We've been trying to find developer talent (Ruby) for literally years, and there is consistently no one available - we've taken to grabbing folks out of uni and training them up instead.

One of many reasons I'm not seriously considering coming back to Alberta (even though I loved living there) - in my experience, even most of Australia, where I'm living currently, has a much deeper talent pool and access to gov't VC funding.