I think in this case it is more apt to realize that the artist painted this on the wall of his dining room in his house where he never had any visitors. The definition of “happiness” in this context would have to be a tad…malleable though.

Although he initially decorated the rooms of the house with more inspiring images, in time he painted over them all with the intensely haunting pictures known today as the Black Paintings. Created without commission for private display, these paintings may reflect the artist’s state of mind late in a life that witnessed the violence of war and terror stoked by the Spanish Inquisition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_Devouring_His_Son

Bitcoin is evil in the sense that Bitcoin mining has likely done irreparable harm to the environment through energy usage and it’s associated pollution. I also find it to be a very predatory market that relies on small investors to bolster the overall value, but usually gives little to no benefit in return for that investment. All of the hype and media around cryptocurrency encourages people in precarious positions to buy in with the hopes of making it big. It’s just gambling.

In my experience, people who use and trade cryptocurrency in significant quantities are likely either gambling on it, or using it as money laundering for nefarious things.

Before you jump into your tirade about how you have all this education and how you’re so much smarter than everyone else, I’ll head you off at the pass to say that you probably know a lot more about computer and software engineering than I do. However, I have a fairly extensive education in the humanities and biological sciences. So if we’re going to be all stupid about it, I guarantee that I’ll be more useful and more employable in any kind of post-crash society than you would be, so I’d encourage you to take other kinds of intelligence into consideration before you get all sanctimonious about stuff like this; especially in subjects that don’t really matter that much in the grand scheme of things.

Another option to consider would be the Depo Provera shot. Without insurance, it would be about $60-70 every 3 months, but I don’t think there’s an insurance plan that doesn’t cover it. It doesn’t contain estrogen and is a common treatment for dysmenorrhea and endometriosis.

I’m in DO school, and in my first year, the neuroanatomy course was my highest grade for some reason. As in, the only in-class exam I got an ‘A’ on was the one that covered all the basics that one would need to know for neurosurgery. I’m still a little confused about that one.

For the overly sheltered K-MD kids, my belief is that working for a year as an EMT/CNA/RA/etc. should be a pre-requisite to application. The fact that people are allowed to apply to medical school without a history of hands-on professional patient care experience is actually quite galling. You can always tell which doctors have never had to clean up human poop (not counting infants).

You are correct. This problem is caused by administrators and managers. If you got rid of all the unnecessary middle management and paid the executives reasonable wages instead of the grossly inflated pay they have now, healthcare would be a heck of a lot cheaper. The health insurance companies and the medical supply companies/pharmaceutical companies aren’t helping either. There are literally life-saving drugs that can cost up to $100k for one dose.

Maybe edit the meme to be about hospital administrators and health insurance companies. They’re the real problem.

I was on a different side of that equation when I was a clinic assistant in a surgery practice. A decent chunk of my job was fighting with insurance companies to get them to cover medically necessary procedures. It was a plastic surgery practice that was part of an oncology group, so one of the surgeons mostly did melanoma surgery and the other mostly did breast reconstruction after mastectomy, and they both did some cosmetic and general plastic surgeries here and there. The insurance companies would do idiotic things like not need a formal prior authorization for a melanoma excision, but because the skin graft needed to repair the excision site technically counted as a “plastic surgery” by its CPT code, they would require a prior authorization for that.

One of my favorite things is when I got the insurance companies to cough up for medically necessary panniculectomies following drastic weight loss which heavily subsidized the “upgrade” to a tummy tuck/full abdominoplasty. The patient basically just had to pay the difference instead of paying for the whole thing. Our surgeons were really good at planning and coding procedures like that to help patients as much as possible.

I’m hoping to do my residency in a pretty urban area and move out towards the rural part of the state further down the road. When I was working as an ER tech before starting medical school, I was on straight nights and picking up a ton of overtime. I was averaging about 50 to 60 hours a week, and doing that as 12’s and 16’s actually worked out pretty well for me. I’m more susceptible to burn out on a normal M-F 8-5 schedule, honestly.

It’s actually one of the only specialties without on-call time unless you’re on-call to cover another physician calling in sick. As for the schedule, I’m naturally nocturnal, so straight nights would be awesome.

When I was a clinic assistant at a surgery practice, a solid half of my job was obtaining prior authorizations for every procedure our surgeons performed. That experience is one of many reasons I want to go into Emergency Medicine. I hate appointment schedules, I hate prior authorizations, and I hate being told how to do my job. I know that I’ll have to play the game and do the stupid metrics for all my lower acuity patients, but at least for the codes and stuff they won’t really be able to give me a hard time about it.

Speaking as a former ER Tech and medical student, doctors are the most likely to just “forget” to bill for the random bullshit that admin wants tracked to an obscene degree. There are some ERs (mostly HCA run ones) that have to scan your patient barcode and the cabinet to track giving you an ice pack. I’ve really only worked in community hospitals and intend to keep it that way, and doctors are the most likely member of a care team to just do whatever is necessary and fail to document it. I’ve also seen doctors down-code visits and procedures to make it easier to get insurance to pay for things.

PS: I’m intending to go into emergency medicine and/or critical care at community safety net hospitals or critical access hospitals and I will raise hell to increase the number of social workers in the department to help patients get the resources they need.

It depends on why they don’t pay attention to politics. Personally, I kind of have to go ostrich-mode and bury my head in the sand when school gets stressful because I just don’t have the mental bandwidth to deal with both. I’m not going to judge someone too harshly for protecting their mental health from the absolute shitshow that is the American political landscape.

PS: This is not to say that any degree of modern conservatism is okay. Bigots can go fuck themselves and I’d be out punching Nazis and being a medic at protests if it didn’t jeopardize my future so significantly. (Felony convictions make it really hard to get a medical license and I have to pay off my student loans somehow. Besides, I’ll be in a much better position to make a meaningful difference as a physician than as a heavily indebted student or EMT.)

With a lovely red wine reduction glaze made from the obscenely expensive wine they probably have stashed on their yachts and a side of lobbyist paté on toast.

I highly recommend the six part mini series Robert Evans did called “Behind the Police” as a subset of his “Behind the Bastards” podcast.