I can see it being a safety issue in this case. If a woman is in an abusive relationship, having the charge show up as “Door Dash” on their credit card statement could be a lot safer than a charge from a pharmacy.

I’ve also used Door Dash to buy things for my friends who live several states away. Or using Door dash to get things when you’re sick and don’t want to leave the house and get other people sick is reasonable. There are quite a few non-lazy reasons for using Door Dash (but it is a certain amount of laziness most of the time).

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.

That “clinical experience” can usually be fulfilled by shadowing and supervised practice like medical students and medical residents have to do isn’t actually required for NPs. Also, in most places, those 4 years of clinical practice can be as an MA or CNA, not necessarily an RN. The education and certification requirements for NPs are wildly inconsistent which I think is actually more dangerous than a standardized lower level of education.

A huge piece of a physician’s medical training is knowing what questions to ask (as well as how and when to ask) to uncover the sneaky things that aren’t apparent on the surface. For example, as a 4th year medical student, I had a patient in the ER that came in with shortness of breath, fatigue, and chest discomfort. There were a couple hints of red flags, so I asked more questions that didn’t seem like they were related at all. Was he having unintended weight changes, night sweats, or changes to his bowel movements? The answer to all three was “yes”, but he had no idea why I was asking about that when he was there for breathing problems. I had a suspicion that he was having complications from metastatic cancer, and I was right. The resident I was working with hadn’t even thought to dig into those other niggling suspicions and was more focused on cardiac and pulmonary causes of chest pain and breathing problems.

I can almost guarantee that a nurse practitioner wouldn’t have asked those questions either. I keyed into some very subtle signs on his exam which prompted me to dig deeper, but NP’s aren’t even really trained on how to get a deeper history, let alone when to do so.

As a patient, you do have the right to refuse to be treated by anyone. You may have to wait for a physician to be available, but no one can treat you without your consent and you can always ask for a provider’s title and licensure.

The AI alleviates the process of critical thinking though. I make my own review notebooks for my boards and for clinical rotations by taking the time to figure out what’s important and what I don’t know to put those things in my notebooks. I write these out by hand on paper, so I have to be judicious about what is going to actually be important, and just the process of making those priorities helps me to have a better understanding of my own deficiencies.

Making a good study guide requires critical thinking skills, and if that gets outsourced to AI, that means the critical thinking isn’t being done by the human that needs to learn that skill.

Nope. They can (and these days often do) go straight from their nursing degree to an NP program with no real work experience.

The problem is that most people don’t double check or they check a couple things then think “good enough”, and turn off the critical thinking part of their brain. That’s how lawyers ended up submitting a case brief with fake case citations. The “citations” look real enough, but to verify it, you have to go read the source yourself.

This goes for people citing studies without reading them first. There are a lot of studies that squidge the numbers around to make things look better and you have to look for things like how they parsed the data for the results and conclusions. I’ve personally made pharma reps very uncomfortable by digging into things like how they did or did not parse complications by sex (ie one complication was parsed by sex, but the other was combined)

Part of my concern is that APPs like nurse practitioners that have no supervised practice as part of their training are going to become even more poorly educated. Their curriculum is already algorithm-based, and because of the Nursing lobby pushing for more and more independence for NP’s, they have dwindling physician oversight requirements (in some places a physician only needs to audit 10% of their notes and never actually lay eyes on the patient themselves.)

Our board exams can only cover so much, so there are little things that can slip under the radar. Like I said in another comment, one of my classmates in medical school used Chat GPT to summarize the reading and it swapped the warning signs for 2 different neurological conditions, one of which is transient and can be fixed with medications, the other is one that can be lethal if not recognized quickly.

Residency training will weed some of them out, but if they never see/recognize those zebras until they show up on the autopsy, that patient still suffered for their laziness and cavalier attitude towards their education.

Medical student here. Some of my classmates did the same thing with summaries and study guides and it scrambled a couple of fine but extremely important details. The mistake meant that my classmate mixed up two presentations of neurological problems, one of which is transient and fixable with medications and the other is something that can rapidly become lethal if not recognized fast enough.

RT’s are precious resources for physicians, but the stakes for us fucking up are profoundly higher. (And if the RT does something wrong and the patient suffers harm, it’s still likely to land on the physician to some extent in terms of liability.)

I’m absolutely not advocating for removing that option. However, increasing the options for male birth control is necessary for a wide variety of reasons, including allowing male partners to take the burden off of their female partner if she isn’t able to tolerate the side effects or can’t find a birth control method that actually works well for her. It is, in effect, another birth control option for women to be able to defer some responsibility to a male partner in a committed relationship.

It’s not a great option for more casual encounters or early in relationships, but for established couples that already have children and don’t want more or are in a committed, trusting relationship, male birth control opens the possibility for the male partner to ease the burden of birth control effort and side effects.

Vasectomies are a great option, but there are a lot of folks who don’t want a permanent birth control so they won’t get a vasectomy.

Women and girls end up with suicidal ideation all the time when going through the trial and error process of finding the right hormone combination. There’s dozens of different formulations of hormonal contraceptive pills and it can be extremely difficult to find the one that will work for you with the least amount of side effects.

The suicidal ideation is so common that it just gets lumped into the fast-forward list of side effects alongside the potential for life-threatening blood clots and other things.

I think men should consider the potential harms to their partner in their calculus. If a man participates in causing a pregnancy that results in serious complications or death, I would sincerely hope that he would be as devastated by the loss of his partner as he would by suffering the harm himself. If men can’t empathize with their partner enough to consider the risks to her, then he shouldn’t be having sex in the first place.

Non-surgical birth control options for women tend to come with a lot of side effects and a number of risks that don’t always outweigh the benefit. Hormonal birth control can cause tons of problems for the women taking them and some of them are associated with life-threatening side effects like increased risk of clotting leading to DVTs, PEs, and strokes.

They’ve tried, but they can’t get FDA approval because the men in the clinical trials aren’t able to tolerate the side effects that pale in comparison to common side effects of hormonal birth control for women.

Then the just and equitable thing to do would be to shift some of that burden to men to make things easier for the women that aren’t able to “tank” the side effects that can include some life-threatening complications.

I would also like to point out that the leading cause of death of pregnant people in America is intimate partner homicide, so the dangers of pregnancy can also be directly caused by the male partners. Y’all need to toughen the fuck up and get your shit together to do your damn part of preventing unwanted pregnancy and calling out the bad behavior of your peers that eventually escalates to things like rape or intimate partner homicide.