Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Other Half

ascii.textfiles.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 333 posts

Re: The Other Half

#281

Post by ashark »

matthewowen wrote: post #271
ashark wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Glancing down the headlines on the front page right now, I'd say ~half would be better if they were written in that style.

By 'here', I specifically meant this article. If you don't want to read that style of writing, then I would suggest not clicking links with this style of title.

Understood, and I concede that this veered off-topic, hence the talking past one another.

And hey, I love "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" as much as the next person.

Re: The Other Half

#282

Post by darkerside »

tgokh wrote: post #276
darkerside wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that very different from a Holter monitor? Those are cumbersome, but seem like they could be a feasibly portable technology at some point. Also, those two tests are necessary for getting a relatively immediate result. Might a) alone provide valuable insights over a longer period of time? I could see your EKG over the course of 48 hours having the potential to provide a comparably accurate test result. Layman, obvi…

A Holter is essentially an EKG that's left on for a longer period of time. If a patient is coming in with chest pain and your want to evaluate for a heart attack, you really just need a single EKG (and ideally, an older EKG to compare to) to look for the characteristic EKG changes, and blood work to look for signs of damage to the heart muscle. It's really an instantaneous yes/no decision since if the answer is yes,…

Thanks for the response. Interesting stuff. Time will come when people look back and have trouble believing we lived without this stuff (like lacking antibiotics, knowledge of hygiene, etc.).

Re: The Other Half

#283

Post by tropo »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #98
ginko wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Guys/gals... If there's any unusual pain in your chest cavity at all, just drop whatever it is you're doing and get it checked out. It might not even seem that bad at the time... it didn't to me and it didn't to Jason Scott... just do it. Yeah, but where do you draw the line? I guess that will sound silly, but I'm always afraid that people think of me as a hypochondriac if I ran to the doctor for every little pain,…

Doctors and cardiologists are used to false alarms. In fact, according to mine, cardiologists provide more diagnoses of pleurisy than pulmunologists. If it could be a heart attack, or similar life threatening thing, you go to emergency.

I've gotten the "pleurisy" diagnosis, twice even, and I don't believe it. Pleurisy seems to be the catch-all default diagnosis for when they can't find anything wrong and just want you to go away. There isn't actual evidence in favor of pleurisy, just the inability to find something else wrong.

In the first case, I'm pretty sure I had a panic attack. At least they served me bacon and eggs, probably hoping for a repeat customer with a real heart attack.

In the second case, I'm pretty sure I pinched a nerve in my back. I got shoulder pain associated with movement. I then got pain in the front -- but remember that a nerve pinched in one spot can cause pain to be felt elsewhere. Other back-related issues in the days afterward lead me to my conclusion.

I'm now way less inclined to go in to the emergency room. I don't want to spend 12 hours with an IV hurting my arm, no privacy, no sleep, and not being able to work on anything. One of the times the doctor even cleared me to go home, but the nurses didn't bother to remove the IV for hours afterward. Being in the emergency room isn't harmless; it is a place where diseases spread.

Re: The Other Half

#284

Post by blackflame7000 »

eon1 wrote: post #219
blackflame7000 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a false assumption to say that because socialized healthcare works in some countries, the entire scheme of capitalism is therefore inferior. There are a number of unique aspects of Human health and insurance that make it very difficult to manage using conventional capitalistic means. (Namely that a human cannot be totalled whereas an object can) However, that is not an indictment on capitalism but is instead a…

>It is a false assumption to say that because socialized healthcare works in some countries, the entire scheme of capitalism is therefore inferior GP didn't say this, though. They said applying the model of American capitalism to healthcare fails to deliver (a reasonable standard of care, I assume). Your assessment seems to largely agree.

"The USA tells us their model of capitalism is the best. They apply their system to healthcare. It utterly fails to deliver versus "socialist" solutions. At what point are you guys going to join the dots on this contradiction?"

Perhaps we interpreted these paragraphs differently because I read it as saying "when are we going to connect the dots and see that capitalism is not the best because it utterly fails in healthcare and thus by extension elsewhere too"

Re: The Other Half

#285

Post by blackflame7000 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #269
blackflame7000 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In practice it can also mean oligopolies, monopolies, rigged systems, and scams" - Pure capitalism has none of those things. What you are referring to is cronyism which increases proportionally to the size of the market. Regulation should in theory be used to keep markets of sufficient size in check but it's a double edged sword. Often times regulation creates even more cronyism since only the approved players can a…

Pure capitalism, the real world system dominant in the industrialized West in the 19th Century for which critics coined the term "capitalism", has all of those things. The unrealistic fantasy later capitalists developed as a propaganda to sell capitalism doesn't have those features, but then it also has nothing to do with anything that is, has, or ever could be, realized in the real world.

The only unrealistic expectation is thinking people will be happy working unequally hard for equal pay. Capitalism funnels that motivation to set oneself apart into a system where many can benefit from the creations of a relative few. Politics came about long before the first political system. It stems from the evolutionary compulsion to compete and reproduce. There will always be in-crowds and out-crowds of any group of sufficient size. This is where cronyism comes from. Not the political systems themselves. Humans play favorites, not free markets

Re: The Other Half

#286

Post by ryan-allen »

brandon272 wrote: post #279
ryan-allen wrote: post #275

My dad dropped dead from an arrhythmia whilst at work. People nearby performed CPR on him immediately, the ambulance was there within 7 minutes and he was rushed to the Alfred hospital in Melbourne. He was literally dead for 20 minutes, but they managed to revive him and a few weeks later, with a newly installed pacemaker, better than new. He had a very, very, very high probability of dying, or requiring specialised…

I'm glad that your dad is OK. Was he experiencing symptoms prior to him falling unconscious at work?

He was having occasional shortness of breath at night. He wasn't particularly good at reporting symptoms, and our GP was a bit of a dingdong (he should have been rushed to a cardiac unit in retrospect after a recent round of testing, rather than be sent home).

Re: The Other Half

#287

Post by tropo »

branchless wrote: post #197
sgustard wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If there's any unusual pain in your chest cavity at all, just drop whatever it is you're doing and get it checked out. My wife did this last year. Out of an abundance of caution they checked in her into the hospital for 8 hours and ran a battery of tests. A full work day and $30k in medical bills later they didn't find anything. By then she felt fine and went home. I'm not faulting the original advice, but medical i…

I just don't understand how people take the USA seriously. One of the most important things, which I doubt is in dispute, is access to healthcare. The USA tells us their model of capitalism is the best. They apply their system to healthcare. It utterly fails to deliver versus "socialist" solutions. At what point are you guys going to join the dots on this contradiction?

There are upsides.

We all die. The more healthcare technology we invent, the more we can spend. If you are willing to spend unlimited money to save a life, then you will... except that every system finds a way to stop you.

Traditional all-out capitalism stops you when you can't pay. (people also don't WANT to pay with their own money, so costs go down) Some government systems will say "no" to some people, but that isn't too popular. Most common is to say "yes" to everybody, but underfunding means you go on a waiting list and might not make it to the other end of the waiting list. These approaches can be mixed: some procedures for pay, some favored people being able to jump ahead on the waiting list, etc.

Underfunding is a given, because full funding for all the care that people want is impossible. The amount of care desired exceeds the GDP.

Re: The Other Half

#288

Post by ptaipale »

komali2 wrote: post #254
ptaipale wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, here at the great socialist Nordics, if I go to the public health care and say I want a check-up, they'll laugh me out. I won't even meet a doctor. And I guess they are right. They say our public health care system is excellent.

What if you went in saying you had chest pain? And what do you do for annual checkups?

If I say I have chest pain, a nurse will assess me and decide if I need to see a doctor. Overall, real, acute emergencies are taken care of quite well.

I don't do annual checkups. They say such checkups are not needed. My employer paid for one at a private doctor when I turned 50. I've heard that if we were more like Canada, that would be illegal.

Re: The Other Half

#289

Post by taberiand »

lancewiggs wrote: post #227
shanusmagnus wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't agree with this more. I'm from MN, we tend to be pretty polite and understated, assume that doctors (and other authorities) know what they're talking about. Had a friend who progressed to a heart attack in a waiting room because he didn't want to make a fuss. Make a fuss.

This was in Australia. A senior cardiologist has no motivation other than saving your life, and the symptoms were very clear. Meanwhile a stent operation is relatively trivial - as was explained later in the piece. If he'd asked for a second opinion it could very well have added enough time to make things a lot worse.

I think it was less about asking a second opinion than making sure the doctors opinion was drawn from all the available facts.

Re: The Other Half

#290

Post by tomcam »

fapjacks wrote: post #278
jrwoodruff wrote: post #34

First job out of high school was working in a department store. One of the sales guys I worked with was Keith. He smoked, liked to drink and go to Disney World. After returning from a Disney World trip, he told me how he spent most of it on the hotel room floor because he 'threw his back out' and had general chest pain. Nothing excruciating, just annoying enough that he wasn't up for hours of walking. His friends tol…

Seneca talks about this a lot. When I first started going to war in my early twenties, I began confronting my own mortality, and found myself slowly being funneled towards the great Stoics.

I thank you for your service. I think the Stoics are criminally underread. Yet I am having some mild discomfort accepting such profundities from someone named, ah, fapjacks. Just sayin'.
Post reply on HN