Quote of the day: I think religion is presumptuous and I think it is silly, because it makes you believe that you are less than what you can be. As long as you can blame everything on some unseen deity, you don’t ever have to be responsible for your own behavior. —Harlan Ellison In a recent … Continue reading Dark Mode
Medical
What’s the Matter with CVS?
Quote of the day: It's hard for me to get used to these changing times. I can remember when the air was clean and sex was dirty.—George Burns The CEO of Rite Aid is an idiot and has mismanaged the company to the point that they closed a whole bunch of their stores last year. … Continue reading What’s the Matter with CVS?
Medical Science and Religion
Quote of the day: Religion is based...mainly upon fear...fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born … Continue reading Medical Science and Religion
The Eyeglasses
Shortly after I got home from the cardiologist, I received a text from Penn Medicine asking me to participate in a survey about my experience. It was a mixture of numbers 1-5 to rate my experience plus I could add any comments that I wanted. Most of my numbers were 5’s because overall the experience … Continue reading The Eyeglasses
The Visit
My appointment with my cardiologist was in the Farm Journal Building, as usual. There’s probably a history to that building and a reason for that name, and one of these days I’ll look it up. I remembered why I made the appointment for 8:00 AM, which is 7:00 AM my time as I’m still on … Continue reading The Visit
The Echo
During last year’s visit to my cardiologist we scheduled an echocardiogram for a couple weeks before my next followup appointment this May. That way he’d have the results of the echo (health workers almost always shorten it to “echo”) to discuss with me. We’ve been on this every other year an echo for several years … Continue reading The Echo
Potato Chips
A few weeks ago I bought a bag of potato chips. It was the first time I had eaten potato chips in probably 20 years. I really can’t recall when I had them previously. But it’s true what they say. You can’t eat just one. Just one bag, that is. I found myself munching … Continue reading Potato Chips
The Eye Doctor
Tuesday I went to see the oph-, the ophtha-, the eye doctor. I don’t particularly like going to any doctor these days as it always throws off my schedule for the day, but the eye doctor is about the worst, even though he is a very pleasant man himself, because he puts those drops in … Continue reading The Eye Doctor
Two Podcasts
First up is the latest TWiV: TWiV 1156: Clinical update with Dr. Daniel Griffin. Seemingly every week Daniel has another horror story of a patient who ends up in ICU (or worse) because a doctor didn’t prescribe Paxlovid: I've got a woman in her 80s, she’s in the ICU, and the story was, she goes … Continue reading Two Podcasts
Checking in on Covid
In the episode of This Week in Virology TWiV 1151: Hotel California for Phage, there is an interesting discussion of when SARS-COV2 might become a more routine common cold-like virus. That discussion begins at one hour and 21 minutes into the episode (1:21:18), but I took the auto-generated sub-titles that YouTube creates, and cleaned them … Continue reading Checking in on Covid