• 2 Posts
  • 26 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Doctor here in general practice.

    This works well in principle. One of many problems here is healthcare need is not spread around uniformly. In your example you just consider number of people and number of providers. This is ok of you are just thinking of primary care (it works like this in many places). It breaks down when there are surges. What happens during flu season? What happens if there is a fire and 30 people need treatment for smoke inhalation. What happens when the doctor needs to take a vacation or gets COVID during flu season? There is redundancy built into a larger healthcare system which makes access more robust over a wider range of conditions.

    Also, doctor’s don’t always want to work in all places.it can be harder to recruit doctors to some areas.

    There are a whole host of issues here. I agree though that having a middlman take a large cut of money to “grease the system” does contribute to it’s inefficiency. The healthcare system is broken on so many levels that any one change like this would be set up to fail. We need a major overhaul.


  • Well, the context matters greatly here. If dehydration is severe enough to lower blood pressure (a.k.a. hypovolemic shock) it can cause long term brain, liver, kidney, and heart damage. That is assuming you survived. It could also cause local ischemia ( loss of blood flow) requiring limb amputation.

    If it is not bad enough to cause shock, the most probable long term sequelae would be kidney damage. Dehydration can precipitate ATN (acute tubular necrosis). In a kid this may appear to be transient. It would kill a certain percentage of your available nephrons. As a kid, you only need ~20% of your nephrons to assume full kidney function. This would mean that you would appear to recover but would likely go into kidney failure at an early age.

    There are also psychological effects depending on severity and duration.









  • If you smell your breath first thing in the morning it stinks. This is a sign of bacterial overgrowth. During the day, the biggest barrier to this is natural saliva production and agitation through movement of the mouth. These things are drastically reduced while you sleep and thus leads to a build up of bacteria. This is why it is advised that you brush your teeth after waking.

    Technically, it is also advised that you brush your teeth after each meal but that is not practical for most.