Dad’s Back With The Milk

What if Pokemon & Animal Crossing had a crossover game? #10
Made in Blender, Wooper design by @omuart on instagram!

Periodic reminder that you should never trust a chiropractor with your body under any circumstances

Chiropracty is a quack medicine in the extreme. It was invented by a guy in the 19th century who said a ghost taught it to him. It claims it can fix cirrhosis by cracking your spine. Chiropractors are one of the biggest groups keeping anti-vaccine fraud alive. Oh, and they can kill you doing a “routine adjustment”

Like I won’t go so far as to say “Ban chiropractors” because doing so would definitely backfire, but you should literally never ever under any circumstances seek their assistance for any health problem at all.

Since this is getting a few notes I may as well attempt to head off one of the inevitable objections that’ll show up if this gets far enough.

“If Chiropractic* doesn’t work, why does insurance cover it?”

Well, it’s very simple you see, insurance hates paying for things, and chiropractors are cheap as fuck.

Let’s say you injure your back scrubbing a toilet or something. You go to a real doctor, a good doctor who doesn’t blow you off. That doctor may tell you to take some Motrin and call them if it doesn’t get better, but they also might prescribe you a stronger anti-inflammatory, or a muscle relaxer. Your insurance has to pay out for the visit and the medicine.

Let’s say they do that and two weeks later your back still hurts. Your doctor orders an MRI. Your insurance now has to pay for an MRI, which can be a couple thousand dollars, well more than the premium you’ve paid this month, which means they’ve lost money on you.

So you’re lucky and the MRI comes back that you’re okay but you need physical therapy. That’s another couple grand that your insurance has to pay out.

But maybe you weren’t lucky. Maybe the MRI comes back and you have a herniated disc. You’re gonna need surgery and physical therapy, and now you’ve not only cost them more than your premiums bring in in a year, you’ve hit your annual maximum which means they have to pay everything from now on. They aren’t happy.

So let’s start back at the beginning. You injure your back, you instead go to a chiropractor. The chiropractor doesn’t have a decade of medical training, they have a certificate from a for-profit college that says they’re a chiropractor. They charge your insurance for an office visit, crack your back a bit, and send you on your merry way.

You might feel better for a while, because the placebo effect is more powerful than you think. But even if you do feel better, there’s still the chance that you’ve got damage. You may still need physical therapy, you may still have a herniated disc.

But if you keep going back to that chiropractor, they’re never gonna tell you that, and even if they do, it’ll be after 2-3 sessions, so 6-8 weeks at a minimum, during which time you’re putting more wear and tear on that injury, and eventually, you have to go to a real doctor.

But here’s where the magic happens. See, you injured your back in December. Now it’s February. Because your insurance put off sending you to a real doctor for two months, some actuary gets a big fat bonus for “reducing costs” in quarter 4. Meanwhile, your real doctor orders an MRI that shows that the damage is, in fact, much worse than it probably was to begin with. And there’s some evidence of injuries after the fact from the chiropractor. Oh, and by the way, there’s a chance you’re gonna be in pain for the rest of your life even with surgery.

But hey, your insurance managed to post a profit in Q4.

* “Chiropractic” is the “official” term for whatever the hell it is chiropractors do. I don’t respect it enough to use it unless I’m mocking someone who’s defending it.

You should also prolly say that uhhhh douchebag palmer was prosecuted under the new medical arts law in Iowa for practicing medicine without a license

Originally posted by tophattted

Periodic reminder that you should never trust a chiropractor with your body under any circumstances

Chiropracty is a quack medicine in the extreme. It was invented by a guy in the 19th century who said a ghost taught it to him. It claims it can fix cirrhosis by cracking your spine. Chiropractors are one of the biggest groups keeping anti-vaccine fraud alive. Oh, and they can kill you doing a “routine adjustment”

Like I won’t go so far as to say “Ban chiropractors” because doing so would definitely backfire, but you should literally never ever under any circumstances seek their assistance for any health problem at all.

Since this is getting a few notes I may as well attempt to head off one of the inevitable objections that’ll show up if this gets far enough.

“If Chiropractic* doesn’t work, why does insurance cover it?”

Well, it’s very simple you see, insurance hates paying for things, and chiropractors are cheap as fuck.

Let’s say you injure your back scrubbing a toilet or something. You go to a real doctor, a good doctor who doesn’t blow you off. That doctor may tell you to take some Motrin and call them if it doesn’t get better, but they also might prescribe you a stronger anti-inflammatory, or a muscle relaxer. Your insurance has to pay out for the visit and the medicine.

Let’s say they do that and two weeks later your back still hurts. Your doctor orders an MRI. Your insurance now has to pay for an MRI, which can be a couple thousand dollars, well more than the premium you’ve paid this month, which means they’ve lost money on you.

So you’re lucky and the MRI comes back that you’re okay but you need physical therapy. That’s another couple grand that your insurance has to pay out.

But maybe you weren’t lucky. Maybe the MRI comes back and you have a herniated disc. You’re gonna need surgery and physical therapy, and now you’ve not only cost them more than your premiums bring in in a year, you’ve hit your annual maximum which means they have to pay everything from now on. They aren’t happy.

So let’s start back at the beginning. You injure your back, you instead go to a chiropractor. The chiropractor doesn’t have a decade of medical training, they have a certificate from a for-profit college that says they’re a chiropractor. They charge your insurance for an office visit, crack your back a bit, and send you on your merry way.

You might feel better for a while, because the placebo effect is more powerful than you think. But even if you do feel better, there’s still the chance that you’ve got damage. You may still need physical therapy, you may still have a herniated disc.

But if you keep going back to that chiropractor, they’re never gonna tell you that, and even if they do, it’ll be after 2-3 sessions, so 6-8 weeks at a minimum, during which time you’re putting more wear and tear on that injury, and eventually, you have to go to a real doctor.

But here’s where the magic happens. See, you injured your back in December. Now it’s February. Because your insurance put off sending you to a real doctor for two months, some actuary gets a big fat bonus for “reducing costs” in quarter 4. Meanwhile, your real doctor orders an MRI that shows that the damage is, in fact, much worse than it probably was to begin with. And there’s some evidence of injuries after the fact from the chiropractor. Oh, and by the way, there’s a chance you’re gonna be in pain for the rest of your life even with surgery.

But hey, your insurance managed to post a profit in Q4.

* “Chiropractic” is the “official” term for whatever the hell it is chiropractors do. I don’t respect it enough to use it unless I’m mocking someone who’s defending it.

art roundup for March

This what not what i was expected from the comments-

something my mum always taught us was to look for the resources we're entitled to, and use them. public land? know your access rights and responsibilities, go there and exercise them. libraries? go there and talk to librarians and read community notice boards, find out what other people are doing around you, ask questions, use the printers. public records offices? go in there, learn what they hold and what you can access, look at old maps, get your full birth certificate copied, check out the census from your neighbourhood a hundred years ago. are you entitled to social support? find out, take it, use it. does the local art college have facilities open to the public? go in, look around, check out their exhibit on ancient looms or whatever, shop in their campus art supply store. it applies online too, there is so much shit in the world that belongs to the public commons that you can access and use if you just take a minute to wonder what might exist!!!

today was my mum's birthday, and I showed her that thousands of people were liking and sharing her advice. she was very moved and pleased, and wanted to add that you shouldn't just feel entitled to be in these spaces. you should feel at home. no matter who you are or what you're going through in any phase of life, public spaces and services belong to you.

GET PRETENDO NETWORK !!!

official 3ds resource post

Hell yeah DIY hrt is a lot safer than most people think and way more accessible than it seems. There's a lot of people who work together to make it as safe and reliable as possible. The following two websites are essential to know:

^for info on what hrt is, different types and info on antiandrogens. It's pretty easy to read and gives a great overview of DIY hrt in general including risks with each method.

^for finding verified sellers of hrt. So far they only have mtf (estrogen, progesterone, t-blockers) as testosterone is illegal in a lot of countries.

To @sleepsucks if you don't want this on your post I'll delete it. Just shoot me a DM :3

Things that work in fiction but not real life

• torture getting reliable information out of people
• knocking someone out to harmlessly incapacitate them for like an hour
• jumping into water from staggering heights and surviving the fall completely intact
• calling the police to deescalate a situation
• rafting your way off a desert island
• correctly profiling total strangers based on vibes
• effectively operating every computer by typing and nothing else
• ripping an IV out of your arm without consequences
• heterosexual cowboy

This post breaching containment has taught me that a lot of people seem to think they can accurately profile complete strangers. For the record, no the fuck you can't.

In 2012 I was OBSESSED with these. I had a fanfic and everything. They still are kinda hot but my infatuation has simmerd down

Detachable junk sounds good in theory, but I can't help but feel that the plug-and-play approach is just asking for trouble. Forget about USB compatibility – I want something mounted on a threaded rod that I have to spend several minutes turning into place, and it makes an obtrusive squeaka-squeaka-squeaka noise the whole time because I'm a dumbass and forgot to lubricate it. I want something that needs to be seated and secured like the parallel data cable from a 1950s computer. I want something where removing it requires disengaging a series of four interlocking mechanical toggles, and I want each of those toggles to go ka-chunk.

I love you robots and artificial intelligence with mental illness. I love you repression being depicted as literally deleting archived data to preserve functionality. I love you anxiety attacks being depicted as a system crashing virus. I love you ptsd being depicted as an annoying pop-up. I love you anxiety disorder being depicted as running thousands of simulations and projected outcomes. I love you artificial beings being shown to be human via their own artificiality.

This ABSOLUTELY works.

I have used this for many years. Definitely b do it.

This article was super long-winded so I screenshat the important part

the fact we’re responsible for getting doctors to “lower their defenses” in order to literally just do their jobs is ✨INFURIATING✨

This literally leaves me shaking in rage

Yeah, while I was actively in the throes of dying, I had to politely hedge my way around asking doctors if they thought it might be XYZ that was causing my totally weird symptoms because so-and-so told me I reminded them of their mum's friend who had a similar problem.

If I tried to be direct or disagreed, I was politely rebuffed with the suggestion that I might benefit from "prolonged psychiatric care," i.e., fuck off, or we'll put you on a psyche hold. And I knew on some level I would not survive that. I just knew my time was running out, and I was still having to be polite to these fucking assholes who looked at me and saw a mad woman who'd somehow escaped her attic.

I remember the exact moment I was sitting in the hematologist's office, politely trying to float the idea of MCAS past him by talking about it in abstracts in the desperate hope it might connect some dots for him and make him think he came up with it by himself.

And he just looked up at me, and I could see that he knew what I was doing. That I was feeding him breadcrumbs. I also saw the moment when he realized I was likely right, and he put his ego aside in favor of helping the patient in front of him. He was frank; he told me he didn't know how to help me, but he had a former colleague who specialized in mast cell disorders, and I should talk to her.

But before that, he wanted to look at my blood more closely because he had a gut feeling and oops, look at that. I was literally hours away from organ failure because the lifelong pernicious anemia I'd been afflicted with had been misdiagnosed as a mood disorder.

I'd been living on borrowed time for so long my body had been shutting down in front of him, and I'd still dragged myself to the clinic, dressed nicely, and put makeup on because failure to do so made me a Bad Patient who didn't take care of myself. And all the while, I was still playing fucking 4d chess with doctor's egos because God forbid a patient know their own body and have thoughts about it.

Anyway, shout out to U of M hematology department for not being filled with egotistical cunts and saving my life ✌

We shouldn't have to jump through these hoops, but this is the hell world we live in.

Robot characters who are given names like SL-308-62 but instead of their human friend going Well let's call you Sally for short, they instead ask the other if they Like their current name.

"Do you like your serial number?" they ask. "Yes, quite. It reminds me of who I am" the robot replies. "I have heard others like me go by different names after some time, and maybe one day I'll choose one for myself, too. But right now that is my full name, yes" they continue.

Because it's not your decision to make whether or not the robot will receive a new name. It should be theirs only. What's the difference? One is more complex and the other is simplified. They were both given by strangers instead of themselves.

"62 will do," they conclude. "It's my model number - there will be no other 62 after me."

Robots who instead start assigning numbers to their human friends

“Not that I mind,” I tell SL-308-62 one afternoon as we enjoy our shared lunch break (I have my packed lunch, and 62 has connected themself to their portable power bank) “but why do your call me ‘four’?”

The LEDs along 62’s appendages twinkle- a tell that they’re mulling over an answer.

“It’s a nickname,” they explain, “you are my fourth acquaintance aboard the station, and I’ve assigned you a serial number. Your full designation is F-001-04.”

“What does the ‘F’ stand for?” I ask, curious and charmed.

“Friend,” SL-308-62 says, their tone fond. “It stands for friend.”