The current recommendation for colon cancer screening in those with a family history is to start routine colonoscopies at the age 10 years younger than the family member who was diagnosed. So if your Dad was 55 when he was diagnosed, you should start getting regular colonoscopies and screening at 45 (which is around the recommended age these days anyways).

The problem with AI and poorly educated professionals is not the ability to diagnose and treat based on evidence-based medicine. The problem is that you have to know enough about medicine, and enough about real human people to know what kinds of questions to ask in the first place. If nothing else, there is a massive amount of information gained from a patient’s body language, mannerisms, behavior, and the physical exam itself that would be extremely hard to quantify in a meaningful way for someone without the background education and experience to come to any useful conclusions.

Were I in any other field, I might agree with you, but given that I am in the medical field, stupidity and incompetence cost real human lives and I cannot tolerate that if it can be at all avoided.

It’s not quite a catchphrase yet, but when discussing cases or whatever, I frequently use the sentence: “I’m not sure, lemme go look that up.”

I worked professionally in medicine for a few years before starting medical school, and thus far my approach has been to entirely disregard anything they said on the subject and continue as normal unless the nonsense they’re spouting has the potential to cause serious harm. Our patient care professor is training us to listen attentively, then dismantle the nonsense as politely as possible while guiding the patient’s viewpoint back to something approaching reality.

There’s some things you look for that are difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t seen it before. That’s part of why experience is so valuable in Emergency Medicine, and it’s not uncommon to put your best nurses out in triage. People will do this kinda twitchy/wilting/loss of focus/change in pallor/change in posture right before they go down. I don’t have a good way to describe it, and it might be easier to draw even, because it really is a body language thing and the general appearance of the patient that can inform your decision making.

I have thought about trying to plan out a learning algorithm that could spit out suggestions for triage level and preliminary tests based on input data like vital signs, symptoms, and complaints… but I would never implement something like that as anything beyond a tool for the nurses at triage to use. There would have to always be an option to override the algorithm because there’s some aspects of patient presentation that are not easily quantifiable. I’d never be able to explain it in a way that one could input it into a computer, but even with my limited experience, I can tell which patients are going to crump on me.

NPs working under a physician with actual oversight is fine. The ones I have problems with are the ones that have a physician sign the hundreds of notes a month while maybe reviewing a handful, and worse, the ones pushing for independent practice without even that sham of oversight involved.

At least I can rest assured of the fact that AI will be next to useless in my intended field. Emergency medicine is an environment where you get a random constellation of symptoms and complaints with very little direction on which are related to the current illness, and which ones are not currently relevant. Also, in the time it would take to get all the info into the AI for a trauma/cardiac/code situation, the patient might be dead or rapidly heading in that direction.

I try to remind myself that I’ve only gotten as far as I have because of hard work. I don’t have any special talent, I’m not some kind of genius, I just know how to work hard for the things that matter.

Makeship is having a sale on their new Glow in the Dark plushies. It’s not a huge discount, but the proceeds go towards supporting independent artists which is always a good thing.

https://www.makeship.com/shop/gitd-2023

I’ve had it for years and one of the biggest features that I find worthwhile is being able to easily download videos to watch on the plane or play like podcasts when I’m driving. When I first got it, I had a really long commute, so being able to download stuff and play it with my phone screen off is helpful.

I’m grateful that none of our cadavers were unclaimed remains. All of them had info sheets with demographics, profession, and a brief health history. Our school also holds a Donor Memorial ceremony every year, but I don’t know if that’s common or ubiquitous among medical schools.

Given that there is the workaround of using the other screen and the Surface Duo 2 is probably not a very common device, I’d say that if there isn’t a straightforward solution to not worry about it.

The “more options” does not work on posts on the right screen, it does work on the left screen.

I don’t think I did. When they do work on the left screen I think they’re different than I remember.

I’m not really sure. It’s been doing this for about 2 weeks now, but I don’t recall if there was an associated update as I don’t remember exactly when it started. That’s why I was hoping to find someone else having the same problem to look for correlations.

Version 0.0.49, Android Version 12, Surface Duo 2

To be fair, it is a service/website that sows discord in American society.

If I was going to be selfish, yes, I would move to a country that has more progressive policies and government. I refuse to be selfish though. I’m in medical school and hoping to become an ER physician in the safety net county hospitals for the express purpose of doing everything I can to help the people that have no way of escaping. I probably would have a pretty easy time taking my medical degree and moving almost anywhere because doctors are in demand pretty much everywhere, but it would be against everything I stand for and would be in complete opposition to my goals. I know that I won’t be able to move the needle very much, and as an ER physician I’d be making a difference just to my patients and perhaps my community, but I still have to try. I want everyone to be able to access food, housing, education, and healthcare equally and I can’t work towards that reality if I just run away from the worst of it.