• 3 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 13th, 2024

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  • 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.





  • The last time I saw this in the ER as a medical student I had to teach the fireman how to cut with the diamond dremel correctly. I never really expected my metalworking and blacksmithing hobby to be particularly useful in emergency medicine.

    It did take 3 hours to get the damn thing off because we had to make 2 cuts to get it open.






  • If you’re not ready to take the step to a skilled nursing facility or memory care, there are adult day care programs that can care for them during the day while you are at work and you can get home nursing services a couple times a week for medication checks and things like wound care.

    Physical therapy and occupational therapy are also good ideas to look into for the balance and instability issues as old age and de-conditioning can contribute to that a lot.

    As someone else suggested, a medication list review to minimize the pill burden and eliminate drug interactions and side effects can be very helpful. All of this can be started with a visit to his primary care physician for referrals for PT/OT, home nursing, medication review, and caregiver respite things like the adult daycare. Just make sure to schedule a 30 to 60 minute appointment to make sure there’s enough time to go over everything.

    Note: for the medication review, don’t be alarmed if the physician takes him off of things like blood pressure or cholesterol medications because those are more aimed at preventing complications, so if someone is approaching the end of their life anyways, there really isn’t anything to “prevent” per se.