This is entirely unsurprising. Hopefully they can wrangle something functional out of the insurance at some point.

In my family medicine rotation a couple months ago, we got it approved for someone with pre-diabetes, high blood pressure, and stage 2/3 kidney disease (which is not very advanced. A lot of people over the age of 35-40 can technically fall into stage 1/2.

If they have cardiovascular disease or kidney disease, those are getting added as indications for the GLP-1’s so they might be able to resubmit the authorization/claim with those diagnosis codes added to get it covered.

FIP Warriors is who we went through, but it progressed too quickly because the fluid accumulation was in his lungs, not his abdomen.

That medication is quite new to the market and wasn’t available when this happened about 4 years ago, but I will mention this to our current vet so that she knows about it.

Careful with that one. Big pharma killed my cat once.

My cat came down with Feline Infectious Peritonitis which is a coronavirus that is lethal to cats when the virus mutates and becomes FIP. FIP is 100% fatal without treatment, and there is now a treatment (originally developed at UC Davis) that is now owned by a big pharma company. They shut down the feline clinical trials in 2020 because they also make Remdesivir, and there was a concern that if there were any problems with the feline drug trial, the FDA might not approve Remdesivir for COVID. You can buy the drug on the internet from China, but it’s a 12 week course of twice daily injections, and you’re gambling on whether you got a good batch every time you get a shipment.

By the time we found this out, it was too late to save our kitty, so he crossed the rainbow bridge.

Unfortunately, the swing to the right and the rise of shit like “Blue Lives Matter” has changed this in some places. When I was in the western part of Virginia for school, there was a local car dealership called “Pinkerton” and I saw their dealership license plate frames and emblem on a LOT of cars in the area. Many of those cars also had the Gadsden vanity plates and a bunch of blue lives matter, trump, etc. stickers on them.

The Biden SAVE plan actually made a massive change that makes it a lot more viable, especially if you do the PSLF program. It’s set up so that if you’re on an income-driven repayment plan, any interest not covered by your payment does not capitalize. So you might not make any progress on the principal of the loan while you’re in residency, but it won’t spiral out of control and the reduced payments count towards the 120 PSLF payments. I’m planning on doing a 3 year residency at minimum, maybe more, and probably a fellowship as well, so I’ll have 5 years of reduced payments, and then I’ll be working in non-profit community/county hospitals after that so I’ll be able to use PSLF. Running the numbers, I think the government will be eating about $275k-$300k of my loans.

From a medical student: There is a different problem coming up with the production of more physicians. There are more new medical schools opening and existing medical schools are increasing class sizes…but the number of residencies has barely moved in decades. Residencies are funded through Medicare and the number of them is determined by appropriation bills in congress. There are some privately-funded residencies being created, but a lot of those are hideously low quality and being used as a source of indentured servitude by for-profit health groups like HCA. (They won’t even hire their own graduates from their emergency medicine residencies because the quality of the training is so poor.)

And if you don’t complete a residency, you can’t practice independently. You have to have a board certification from an accredited residency to be able to practice medicine, and the only alternatives are working under supervision like a PA/NP…or working for the insurance companies. And you still have a mortgage’s worth of student loans to pay off.

A lot of the doctors working for the insurance companies are ones that couldn’t get into residencies or ones that have not kept up with continuing medical education and likely do not have active board certification anymore.

In fairness to their argument, I have actually seen serious consequences from the mass theft of baby formula. When I worked in a children’s hospital, we had babies coming in with malnutrition problems because they required a special formula that was completely unavailable. The parents couldn’t buy the formula because it was out of stock at every store they were able to get to with the transportation and time available to them.

People stealing massive amounts of formula cause massive problems because the specialty formulas are hard to find to begin with, and these people are clearing out store shelves to sell it overseas.

The wealthy parents that live in nicer neighborhoods with fancier stores and fewer problems with shoplifting don’t run into this issue. It the poor families in food deserts that are most impacted by this kind of mass theft, and they’re the families least able to work around it by just going to another store to buy it.

The company already has a list. They can just look through their denied claims pile… That shouldn’t be too hard.

… Oh wait, that list is millions of people long.

Anterior Pituitary, Spinal Cord, Teeth, Thalamus, Limbs

Normally, I don’t buy Israeli products wherever I can avoid it, but pelting these guys with the jumbo cans of Goya beans would be pretty funny.

There have been a lot of pictures of black cats, and black cats are lovingly referred to as “void cats” or “voids” because they just turn into a blob of black nothing if they close their eyes.

She’s named Nova after the Waframe. All of our cats are named after various Warframes.

I’m not outright trying to be contrarian, but for some older people or people with things like arthritis, foot injuries, hip injuries, etc. walking or running on a treadmill is vastly less painful than walking or running on concrete.

There is absolutely a huge commercialization problem with fitness and health in the western world (and in America in particular), but if going to a climate-controlled gym and getting your steps in on a treadmill or elliptical is what it takes to get you to exercise, I’m all for it.

For the potato chips, that’s really sleazy of the gym, but I do want people to know that even if you don’t/can’t make a bunch of changes to your diet and you don’t lose weight, getting exercise of any kind as often as you are able is still a positive thing for your heart and metabolic health. Please don’t let being fat, or out of shape, or an inability to overhaul your diet prevent you from doing something positive for your health. Losing weight and keeping it off is really only possible through major lifestyle change, and, for a lot of people, the only sustainable way to make the necessary changes is one at a time.

The medical symbol of the staff with the snake is only supposed to have 1 (one) snake on it. A staff with 1 snake is the Rod of Asclepius (the son of Apollo and Greek demigod of medicine), a staff with 2 snakes is a Caduceus which is carried by Hermes as a messenger or herald.

Physicians get 1 snake. Couriers and heralds get 2 snakes. Any medical professional or organization that uses 2 snakes is wrong and needs to go study the humanities and classics for a bit.