101–110 of 311 posts
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Couldn’t the patient just take a bunch of the milk thistle supplements available at most pharmacies?
"derived from the milk thistle plant" likely involves more than just "eat some powered plant"; Wikipedia seems to indicate it involves more purification steps than the supplement form of things.
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A very important fact you need when identifying mushrooms is the consequences of misidentifying them. You don’t have “nice things” when you fail to raise this crucially important point. Every responsible resource will be full of this kind of caution and neglecting it should be criminal. It isn’t covering your ass or putting an obligatory warning label on everything, a primary point of interest in mushroom identificat…
Eh, no, you're inventing a narrative. The guy knew the downside actually or he wouldn't have bothered to use the app to identify it. He knew the downsides, he rolled the dice, he lost. His wife knew the downsides, didn't roll the dice, and he thankfully lived maybe because of that. You also don't know that the app doesn't warn users that it shouldn't be used in life and death situations, but I'll maintain that it sho…
It is more comparable if you built an app to identify cancerous moles, except it produced false negatives significantly more often than an actual doctor, leading to people dying. This isn’t a “roll the dice” thing.
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Curiosity: do you find that you (at 30+ years) are so good at identification in the wild that you don’t find any “bad” specimens once you get them home, or do you still catch some outliers where you needed to look at them more closely? Or does the process involve taking them home for closer examination?
To be honest I don't recall the last time I've ever accidentally picked up a poisonous specimen along with the good ones I was intending to pick. At this point it's such second-nature that telling apart an edible vs. poisonous mushroom is like telling a bottle of milk from a bottle of Drano. And yet I still examine each one at home before putting it in the pot. The other thing is that the truly deadly varieties, such…
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Most plant ID apps have a disclaimer saying that you should never eat anything that you use the app to identify. Seek reminds you every time you open the camera. They're mostly intended as entertainment, but some of them use the data to analyze where species are growing in realtime.
Honestly though there should be limits to the amount that a disclaimer should be able to protect you when your product advises people to do dangerous things you know (or have every responsibility to know) could be lethal. There’s a lot of room between a one in a billion mistake that hurts somebody and a fifty fifty chance a mushroom is poisonous. There are plenty of edible vs deadly mushrooms that only have incredibl…
Since no one has done it yet, I'll ask the obvious question about the FDA: how many people die or need a liver transplant each year because the FDA is being unreasonable here? Here's some quotes from the article: Approximately 40% of people who ingest the deadly Amanita mushrooms die or require a liver transplant, according to Dr. Pierre Gholam, the liver specialist at University Hospitals who treated Hickman. ... Th…
With a 72 hour window it sounds simpler to bundle the patient in a plane to Europe.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Couldn’t the patient just take a bunch of the milk thistle supplements available at most pharmacies?
"derived from the milk thistle plant" likely involves more than just "eat some powered plant"; Wikipedia seems to indicate it involves more purification steps than the supplement form of things.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be honest I don't recall the last time I've ever accidentally picked up a poisonous specimen along with the good ones I was intending to pick. At this point it's such second-nature that telling apart an edible vs. poisonous mushroom is like telling a bottle of milk from a bottle of Drano. And yet I still examine each one at home before putting it in the pot. The other thing is that the truly deadly varieties, such…
I think I read somewhere before about how if a mushroom is white, then stay away from it. How true is this from your experience?
I don't endorse any rules-of-thumb for foraging, but a much better differentiator for beginners is whether the mushroom has pores vs. gills under the cap. There are virtually no deadly varieties that have pores.
Since no one has done it yet, I'll ask the obvious question about the FDA: how many people die or need a liver transplant each year because the FDA is being unreasonable here? Here's some quotes from the article: Approximately 40% of people who ingest the deadly Amanita mushrooms die or require a liver transplant, according to Dr. Pierre Gholam, the liver specialist at University Hospitals who treated Hickman. ... Th…
Maybe this is the only way to reliably make available a drug that is used nationwide on average less than 5 times a year? Most hospitals wouldn’t stock a drug that they’d likely never use. By keeping stock centralized at the FDA they can keep enough on hand and rubber stamp the exception.
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a mushroom identification app that doesn't draw attention to toxic lookalikes sounds pretty close to criminally negligent
And this is why we can't have nice things. This opinion is wild to me. You do not trust a consumer app with life and death decisions, especially over something where the potential upside is getting to eat a mushroom you found and the potential downside is death. Making more criminals is not the answer.
What about an app that tells you how to pump gas while smoking a cigarette? That seems like pretty obvious negligent design. In California at least that opens you up to a lawsuit. [0]
[0] https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/personal-injury/product-liabili...
I've been foraging mushrooms for 30+ years, and I triple-check every single specimen before cooking it. The idea of a novice forager using an app to identify mushrooms is... unconscionable! Like... breathtakingly stupid. I've commented on this before, but it continues to baffle me how poorly-educated our public is about wild plants, berries, and mushrooms. And stories like this just perpetuate the fear (and stigma?)…
Curiosity: do you find that you (at 30+ years) are so good at identification in the wild that you don’t find any “bad” specimens once you get them home, or do you still catch some outliers where you needed to look at them more closely? Or does the process involve taking them home for closer examination?