I had been meaning to do this for a long time and finally got around to it. It’s not free for people in my age group but it turns out my insurance from work covered the cost and I just paid an injection fee.
I had been meaning to do this for a long time and finally got around to it. It’s not free for people in my age group but it turns out my insurance from work covered the cost and I just paid an injection fee.
I come back time and again to the difference between reasonable and recommended. A recommendation in medicine is something you would be unwise to ignore as a doctor. Reasonable is something that you as a patient should do. A doctor is going to tell you all the recommended things because the way medicine works is all around what is shown to a reasonable statistical level to be a good idea, or at least seems that way. They will still recommend some things that are nonsense and they will still make mistakes, but they won’t be sued.
If you try something and that works for you then you have a sample of one. It may have done nothing and the problem resolved itself, it may have solved the problem, it may even have slowed your recovery, but if you have the same problem again it is fairly reasonable to do the same thing that seemed to work last time. It isn’t proof, but it is reasonable to try again.
Does having a kebab on the way home from a night of drinking actually prevent hangovers? Well, maybe, it does have salt and that is depleted during drinking, but is a doctor ever going to recommend that? No, never.
They should recommend it, those things are magic.
True, kebabs are life, I would happily have one right now.
Hmmh. I mean the general thing with statistics is… You never know if you’re in the 95% of people or the 5% exception. Could very well be the opposite for you. But it’s fairly straightforward if you’re the doctor and see 100 people a day. You’d just say what makes sense 95% of the times.
Btw, I had some interesting doctors. One knew every product test and the numbers on all homespun remedies. And we got to talk a bit on what to do, which specific supermarket to go to, to buy multivitamin juice. He also had some recommendations on what to eat with my fever and tonsillitis. I think he gave a short lecture on spices as well, I forgot, it’s been a long time. I bet that dude has an opinion on Döner Kebab, though.
Yeah, I agree with your thoughts on the 95% thing. Its like with pain management. I am completely non responsive to morphine. Most people respond well, it just feels cold in my arm and that’s it. When I flayed my wrist they gave me tonnes of morphine, the maximum dose I could have, and I had almost no effect at all. I got more from the paracetamol they gave me after that which was good because they had to remove my temporary dressing from a very large open wound and any relief was helpful. Now I just ask for aspirin and paracetamol, though after a wonderfully fun heart infection I can’t use aspirin for pain relief without considerable bleed risk. Oh well, paracetamol it is.
But yes, if I go in for emergency care and tell them “no morphine, paracetamol only” they will probably not take it seriously without a doctor supporting it. Good thing I have a fairly high pain threshold.
Hehe, first person I get to talk to who doesn’t respond to a good amount of morphine. (Unless they do drugs on a regular basis.) But yeah my story ended kinda the same way. Got my tonsils removed. And got Novamin / metamizole(?) as a painkiller. It’s popular here. Took the max dose for a day and most I got was a headache, and still a good amount of pain. Talked to the doctor and switched to Ibuprofen and Paracetamol. That did the job. Now I just tell them about my prior experiences. And luckily I don’t have a lot of pain or maladies anyway, so I’m generally fine without pain meds. Unless there’s some other reason to take them, like fever. And I got some opioid once after the surgery. That felt funny and did away with the pain immediately. But I didn’t really enjoy it. I kinda dislike dizziness and my brain feeling off.
There was a study on the efficacy of paracetamol with ibuprofen compared to morphine and it was a very close thing, within the margin of error. The combination of paracetamol and ibuprofen works on pain in two different ways at the same time, whereas opiates only work in one major way. It seems overall more effective in many cases.
That said, some people report that morphine doesn’t remove their pain as much as it removes their caring about it. It reduces the salience and therefore makes them respond less. I don’t know from experience given the lack of response, but maybe that is part of why it is so addictive, you don’t have to care any more about pain or other issues.
Thanks! I didn’t know.
Regarding morphine addiction, I think that’s more the mechanism how to get addicted. After a while there’s all these other addiction dynamics as well, it messes with the brain chemistry and the dopamine system. There’s real nasty withdrawal symptoms… And the substance addiction becomes a thing in its own. I mean I also see with nicotine how psychological and physical effects go hand in hand… And smoking has literally no benefits, other than the mild fuzzy feeling for a minute. Which you don’t even get a lot if you smoke many cigarettes a day. Yet, it’s super hard to stop, for most people.