It takes years for a donor’s remaining liver to grow back, and the recipient is unlikely to grow out more of the donated liver depending on comorbidities and severity of illness.

Yeah, caffeine is a good vasoconstrictor, so it can help with headaches that are not from something like high blood pressure. Paracetamol/acetaminophen is really good for headaches on its own because it gets into the brain better.

Alternating the paracetamol and ibuprofen on a schedule is the best recommendation I can give. Severe pain, especially post-operative pain, is best managed by taking the pain meds before the pain sets in. The ibuprofen is also an NSAID and the swelling and inflammation are big contributors to pain.

The schedule that I always recommend is:

• 0800: 650-1000mg paracetamol (acetaminophen)
• 1200: 600-800mg ibuprofen
• 1600: 650-1000mg paracetamol (acetaminophen)
• 2000: 600-800mg ibuprofen
• (and in the first day or two after surgery, set alarms to wake up and take pain meds at 0000 and 0400 on the same pattern if the pain is really bad.)

This pattern keeps you covered on pain control, and you can shorten the intervals to every 3 hours if this isn’t enough without exceeding daily dose limits on either medication. If you are an American reading this and you’re also taking something like Norco, make sure to account for the acetaminophen/tylenol/paracetamol that’s in those because exceeding the recommended dose on that one is bad news for your liver.

Like some other folks have said, warm saline (salt water) rinses and soft or liquid foods are going to help as well.

Especially after Trump’s antivax BS during COVID.

I’ve heard the neonatologists say that they make the parents repeat back, write down, and sign a consent form that says “I understand that refusing the vitamin K shot significantly increases the chances of bleeding, including brain bleeds that can lead to significant disability or death.”

Not many people seem to want to sign that form for some reason.

I’m currently a medical student in my clinical rotations…

Me: “So it looks like we’re due for our (blank) month/year vaccinations. Have those been done already or do we need them today?”

Parent: “Oh, we’re not vaccinating.”

Me: screaming internally

Unfortunately, most health insurance plans have a separate sub-company manage the pharmacy benefits and we have absolutely zero way of accessing their systems. It would be lovely if we could see what your insurance would cover immediately as we prescribe it, but that also runs into the problem of us not having any control over the actual pharmacy and their billing and pricing.

Yes. This exactly.

I’m in my third year of medical school, so I’ve just started my clinical rotations, but one of the things that shows up on almost every reference table for physicians regarding treatment options is information on the price for the patient. I’m rotating in a family medicine clinic right now, and we pretty frequently prescribe the best possible treatment, and then when the pharmacy runs it through the patient’s insurance and finds out how much it’s going to cost, we then start working down the list of next-best alternatives until we can find something the patient can afford. Because there are so many different insurance plans out there, we have no idea how much something is going to cost until the insurance tells us.

Medical field here: The vast majority of us are not in it for the money. Physicians have to spend 3 to 9 years after medical school working for a wage that works out to about $5/hour to gain certification and a medical license in their specialty. And that’s after 8 to 12 years of undergraduate/graduate/doctorate education that basically has to be paid for with loans unless they’re in the military or come from a rich family. So, yes, physicians do make high salaries once they’re established, but there was a lot of work and sacrifice to get to that point, and very few people are masochistic enough to put themselves through that just for the money.

Also, the most expensive parts of a medical appointment/surgery/ER visit etc is the administrative overhead, inflated prices of drugs and supplies, and insurance company bullshit. Very little money from that price tag actually makes it to the healthcare workers. Your average EMT on an ambulance makes between $13-20/hour depending on the state minimum wage.

If you have a problem with your healthcare costs, that’s something to take up with your representatives in government, not the EMTs, CNAs, nurses, and physicians providing your care.

That’s the idea.

What I mean by that is there is a lot of training for heart attacks/cardiac arrest and significant trauma, but not a whole lot for general illnesses or more minor health problems.

What I mean by that is there is a lot of training for heart attacks/cardiac arrest and significant trauma, but not a whole lot for general illnesses or more minor health problems.

I have an EMT license in America and am currently in medical school. EMT training is entirely centered around “stabilize the patient and get them in front of a physician”. They have a limited range of capabilities, but the training they do have is focused on the things that will kill you quickly, and a brief overview of other things.

See, I’m planning on trying to steal your business by going into emergency medicine to be a necromancer. (I have done CPR on people that have actually woken up to complain about it…you cannot convince me that CPR/resuscitation is not necromancy.)

4 years of medical school and a few years of residency (and maybe fellowship) in pathology. So you’re talking 12 to 16 years of post-high school education because it’s becoming more and more common to have to have a post-bacc or a master’s to get into medical school in the first place.

Then you and the people that agree with you on what constitutes the beginning of human life need to be fighting tooth and nail for social services and social welfare programs to support people before, during, and after pregnancy/birth. “Life begins at conception” and “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” are fundamentally opposing ideals unless they are only backed by cruelty, cognitive dissonance, and hate.

If you truly believe that all life is sacred, and that life begins with conception, you need to be turning around and fighting the people beside you on the importance of supporting the humans that are outside the womb.

Adoption is not the silver bullet people seem to think it is. If the baby isn’t white, or has health problems, there’s a much higher chance they’ll end up in the foster care system.

Separately, carrying a pregnancy and giving birth are extremely dangerous. Depending on which state you look at, American women face the highest maternal death rate in the developed world. Also, the leading cause of death of pregnant women in America is intimate partner homicide, and intimate partner violence frequently escalates during pregnancy. How does adoption fix those problems?

What the above commenter said is generally good advice, but I would add on limiting your social media intake. Finding an online community to interact with (with voice or video chat kinds of things involved) is a better use of online time. For the coding, you could try moving that to the morning, and socialize in the afternoon/evening, and that will help you get on a more normalized schedule. If your leisure time is spent mostly with other people, it’s a lot easier to sign off and go to bed when everyone else does as well.

Edit: Also throw in a multivitamin and 2000-5000IU of Vitamin D3 because nutritional deficiencies can cause psych problems as well as exacerbate or prolong said psych problems.

Sometimes, there are no good options.