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Doctors who use Google Translate to talk to patients want a better option

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Re: Doctors who use Google Translate to talk to patients want a better option

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll agree I wouldn’t describe that as extremely small. The misuse stat is pretty bad. The addiction though…essentially for every 10 people who are treated for chronic pain, 1 of them gets addicted? With 9/10 of those people getting to live a more pleasant life…Chronic pain is awful, and the good done by alleviating it might be worth that cost.

And let's not forget the 1/10 very likely would be in extreme pain bordering on torture instead of addiction. It's lose lose for them.

I’m not sure how you figure that this hypothesis is “very likely” true. It’s actually very likely not. The papers don’t mention this at all.

Re: Doctors who use Google Translate to talk to patients want a better option

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A meta study of 38 studies from 7 years ago on patients using opioids for chronic pain found that 21-29% of the patients misuse the drugs and 8-12% of the patients are addicted to them. That doesn't seem "extremely small" like you said, though maybe it's better now. I think there are reasons why opioids are no longer recommended for the treatment of most patients with chronic pain that you aren't fairly acknowledging…

I’ll agree I wouldn’t describe that as extremely small. The misuse stat is pretty bad. The addiction though…essentially for every 10 people who are treated for chronic pain, 1 of them gets addicted? With 9/10 of those people getting to live a more pleasant life…Chronic pain is awful, and the good done by alleviating it might be worth that cost.

Just to be clear - the cohort in his paper is not all opioid users. It is the subset most likely to become addicts, for the following reasons:

1. The meta-analysis occurred during the period of time that pill mills and other unscrupulous prescribing was rampant. See that there was no note regarding patients' (legal) polydrug use or by morphine equivalent dosing, nor was there any modification to the analysis of the data to see how this period in the legal drug market impacted patient outcomes.

2. This analysis selects for chronic pain patients, which tends to mean the long term users of opioids while excluding the acute patients who, particularly among the in-patient subset, pretty much never become addicts during their course of use - which is what we'd expect if these compounds were as addictive as claimed.

3. These cohort selections often do not include some or all palliative care patients. I won't accuse them of doing this to sensationalize their numbers but it does have a significant impact on results, as again palliative care patients very rarely cease their use and carry forward afterwards an opioid misuse disorder.

4. They do not control for or look at the specific impact of the main problematic legal opioid - Purdue Pharma's original OxyContin formula. Because this drug did not have the pharmacodynamic profile claimed by the firm and represented in the safety studies, it was considerably more likely to cause opioid use disorder, as patients would be much more likely to take extra doses to cover the shortfall in the dosing window. This would lead to patients who otherwise would exist on a steady dose asking for increasing doses - or, worse, turning to the street to acquire diverted doses.

Re: Doctors who use Google Translate to talk to patients want a better option

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

You can not buy legitimate painkillers more powerful than Tramadol on the darknet. all legitimate pills have been bought, sold, and removed from the open market, monthes in advanced, years ago.. the safest thing you can buy to treat pain on the internet is tramadol, or, believe it or not, is... black tar heroin. everything else is Fent.

I would not encourage anyone to acquire any opioid medication not prescribed, for a number of reasons. That said, Tapentadol - a cousin of tramadol but much stronger - can be easily bought from Indian and other Asian pharmacies on the clearnet and at affordable prices. One might have a package here and there get seized but all that results in is a snide letter from customs.

Re: Doctors who use Google Translate to talk to patients want a better option

#145
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, absolutely. My doctor of 10+ years recently retired, leaving me in search of a new doc. I've been managing my pain for 15+ years just fine with 10mg Hydrocodone. In 15 years I only once asked to increase the dose, and it was only from two pills per day to three to help me get through the afternoon/evening better. A minuscule dose. After doing "new patient" appointments (which by the way were like $200 to $300 ea…

Sorry if i sound blatantly stupid with my question, maybe In your case this could not be a sufficient solution for pain but did you ever tried with something like Marijuana and if it's illegal in you state considered migrating where it's legal? Or even considered to relocate to somewhere where you can get access to proper medication ?

Anecdotally, with N being roughly 5 people, THC/CBD do nothing for several types of chronic pain, short of getting high enough that you stop caring about the fact that you are in pain.

Worth a shot, but I wouldn't recommend anyone getting their hopes up trying it.

Tiger balm, on the other hand, is nothing short of magic.

Re: Doctors who use Google Translate to talk to patients want a better option

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has become an absolute joke. I have had 6 surgeries for Crohns, a back surgery due to wear and tear from high level athletics, and am a long term sufferer of an aggressive leukaemia. Despite using opioids responsibly for over a decade, I am regarded as nothing more than a drug seeking pest the very few times I have actively sought pain relief during in-patient hospital stays. Prior to being dropped entirely from m…

Yep, absolutely. My doctor of 10+ years recently retired, leaving me in search of a new doc. I've been managing my pain for 15+ years just fine with 10mg Hydrocodone. In 15 years I only once asked to increase the dose, and it was only from two pills per day to three to help me get through the afternoon/evening better. A minuscule dose. After doing "new patient" appointments (which by the way were like $200 to $300 ea…

Thank you for another reason when people ask why I don't go to doctors.

Re: Doctors who use Google Translate to talk to patients want a better option

#147

Although Taiwanese Mandarin and Mainland Mandarin are almost perfectly intelligible to each other, they have diverged from each other when it comes to modern nouns, especially in the fields of technology and medical science, etc. To make the problem even worse, Google Translate only provides "Chinese (Simplified)" and "Chinese (Traditional)" instead of "Taiwanese Mandarin" or "Mainland Mandarin". While these two char…

The article is not explicit about it - just saying "Taiwanese", which may or may not refer to Taiwanese Mandarin - but maybe the patients native tongue was not Mandarin but Taigi/Hokkien (which is what IME people most often mean when they say just "Taiwanese" without qualifier) or even Hakka.

While Taiwanese people not speaking Mandarin natively are somewhat rare abroad, it would explain the difficulties in interpretation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_Hokkien

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Taiwan

Re: Doctors who use Google Translate to talk to patients want a better option

#148

I can't imagine being a patient in pain trying to communicate that to a doctor who didn't speak the same language, especially when the pain was due to a different issue (as the article describes). The pendulum has fully swung from "pain is a vital sign" to "suck it up" and "anyone who complains about pain is a liar or a drug seeker unless they're older than 65 or have a visible external wound."[1] It's difficult even…

It has become an absolute joke. I have had 6 surgeries for Crohns, a back surgery due to wear and tear from high level athletics, and am a long term sufferer of an aggressive leukaemia. Despite using opioids responsibly for over a decade, I am regarded as nothing more than a drug seeking pest the very few times I have actively sought pain relief during in-patient hospital stays. Prior to being dropped entirely from m…

I’m curious what the situation is outside the US. My personal experience has always been that I’ve been able to access whatever drugs I’ve needed in the UK, but I also am white and don’t look like a “Drug user™”. I’ve never heard the words opioid crisis in a European context (but have of course heard it in a US context).

Re: Doctors who use Google Translate to talk to patients want a better option

#149

a human?

Shocking right?

I mean services have existed for on-demand language translation by phone for a long time. You call them up, tell them what language and they connect with a translator.

Hell, they probably have cool apps and stuff now.

No doubt not cheap, but hey let's keep using Google Translate for life-and-death issues.

Re: Doctors who use Google Translate to talk to patients want a better option

#150
here is my side project: a catalog of duckduckgo !bang operators; a script is using google translate to autotranslate the UI strings and site descriptions into several languages; it is better than nothing, but it is not an ideal solution.

You can see the results here: https://github.com/MoserMichael/duckduckbang/blob/master/REA...

I didn't manage to automate the use of DeepL in python; The translators pypi package (https://pypi.org/project/translators/) tries to automate the REST api of DeepL, but it doesn't seem to work. Are there any alternative solutions for automating DeepL? (Well, i could probably give it a try with selenium)

On the other hand: when you take short descriptions - like labels that appear in a UI, then that's a very hard thing to translate, it is very easy to pick up the wrong synonym, to begin with... It would probably have an easier job with the site descriptions, these tend to be longer texts.

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