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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 20th, 2023

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  • Thank you for clarifying those misconceptions about what recessive and dominant are getting at. A gene isn’t really dominant or recessive. A phenotype (some trait in the organism like blue eyes or a certain disease) can be dominant or recessive though and results from changes in a gene. The same gene could have many different possible mutations, some with dominant effects, some with recessive effects, or some with no effects, depending on the change in the gene and the phenotype.

    To go further on that, many recessive diseases are because just one functional copy of many genes are fine from your body’s perspective. Many recessive diseases are due to loss of function of a gene or its protein product, a gene that for a variety of potential reasons no longer leads to a functional protein. Often your body can get by with just one working gene making protein, though both gene copies are generally always being transcribed and trying to be turned into functional protein.

    One big exception to this is the x chromosome. Males only have one x and have a y instead of a second x. The y is very tiny and has very few genes compared to the x, quite different from other chromosome pairs which generally just have copies of all the same genes on each other. Early in embryo development for xx individuals, one of the x chromosomes is generally inactivated and not expressed very much, otherwise xx individuals would have double the gene products of all those different genes compared to males, which the body is not expecting for x genes like it does for all the other genes that have a second copy.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-inactivation

    If you go even further you also get into the idea of penetrance. A gene codes for a protein, but that protein doesn’t exist in isolation, it interacts with lots of other proteins coded by other genes in the body, plus the environment. So for some genetic changes it might be a 100% chance at leading to a certain phenotype (like a disease or a specific trait), or it could be less, like only 70% or 30% chance or something of someone with that change getting that trait, even if it’s still “dominant” (meaning only one gene copy with that change is needed to express the trait).









  • https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/01.str.32.5.1054

    Thank your pointing this out. It’s not just any stroke too, it’s primarily vertebral/basilar artery distribution strokes. Those supply the brain stem which includes such necessary functions as control of breathing and consciousness. You don’t want a stroke anywhere, but particularly not there.

    Some chiropractors might swing back that, you’ve only showed correlation not causation. Well, when we have no clear evidence of chiropractic neck manipulation being helpful for anything, and we have a likely very dangerous correlation, the clinical parsimony is just not there. So no one is going to run that study (give a large amount of people neck manipulation, a large amount of people no neck manipulation, and compare rates of stroke that occur afterwards), it would be very unethical, no institutional review board would ever approve that study as ethical to perform.

    And it makes a lot of sense too, the vertebral artery is encased in the neck vertebrae, so violent movements of the neck vertebrae can stretch and tear those arteries. Those tears, called a dissection, can sometimes obstruct blood flow all on their own, but more often create a spot for blood clots to form that then move onward into the brain and basilar artery (since there’s turbulent blood flow and a defect in the smooth artery wall that normally prevents your blood from clotting). So please, no violent neck movements for any reason, chiropractor or otherwise.


  • There’s a lot of problems with this. Just some include that it’s a blog and doesn’t link to the actual study so it’s impossible to see what’s going on with the this report. They also never explain what this “reliability score” even means or what’s included in that. Then they start doing things like using a percent to compare the scores saying this is percent more reliable. But we still don’t even know what this score is, and comparing as a percent may not make any sense to say depending on what the scores are and how they’re calculated. Unfortunately you can’t really draw any conclusions from what’s in this article.




  • It’s a tough call. Many forums have a rule against changing the title at all. People posting are often used to this and post the title as is from the article. The idea being to help prevent editorializing and clickbait on the part of the poster. Every headline these days though seems to be some variation of blatant clickbait or so and so “slams” this or “destroys” that. At this point I probably trust randos on the internet to make headlines more than publishers.


  • It is covering it, for workers on average. Your employer is stiffing you compared to the rest of the economy then if you didn’t also get 20% of a raise compared to your salary in 2019.

    Real wages in October 2019 (normalized to 1982-1984 dollars) were $10.95/hr on average in October 2019. In October 2023 (again normalized to 1982-1984 dollars) they were $11.05/hr (which is $34/hr in current dollars). So as we stand in October the inflation from 2019 to now has been fully compensated for in wages with a little bit of an increase in real dollars. Wages have been growing faster than inflation since January 2023. Hopefully that will continue as labor remains in high demand and unions continue to make gains. Union gains even help non unionized individuals in their industries whose employers also will have to give pay raises to remain competitive with union jobs.

    Not saying even more couldn’t be done to combat things like income inequality and poverty and many other issues, things weren’t exactly perfect in 2019 either. Just frustrated by the current media narratives casting hyperbolic doom and gloom in the economy and the potential of that narrative to send trump back into the white house.

    Sources: 2019 BLS report

    2023 BLS report

    Wage growth vs inflation 2020-2023



  • First I’m very sorry about your dog.

    I don’t know as much of the veterinary world. And there’s a ton of information your vet and surgeon has on your specific case that no one online will have, so no one here is going to give you very specific answers to your case. So take everything that follows with a grain of salt, and talk more with your surgeon, not internet strangers. And it sounds like your dog was in a very dangerous situation, keep in mind a bad outcome doesn’t necessarily mean anyone did anything wrong, you and your surgeon included. I can tell you some general things about how repurfusion can be dangerous in humans though.

    I was confused why both your explanations are hung up on free radicals. Not that there aren’t, I’m guessing there’d be more than usual. It’s just a bizarre explanation of repurfusion injury. There’s many dangers, but basically if you have dead or poorly perfused tissue (sounds like there was a lot of this from your description), and there’s a turniket or a hernia acting as a turniket in this case squeezing the blood supply so nothing is getting in or out, or very little is getting in or out, all of the harmful dead stuff from the process of that tissue dying is somewhat stuck there. But once this narrowing is resolved (taking off a turniket or getting the tissue out of the henria in this case) now there’s blood flow and all the material form this dying or dead tissue has a clear route back to the rest of the body. It also sound like in this case there was a really horrific large hernia with probably multiple sections of multiple organs that had already infarcted (died from lack of oxygen/blood flow) based on what you wrote. Sometimes in humans you can resect small portions of dead intestine and reconnect remaining pieces, but you can’t just take out their whole liver, they need that.

    But free radicals is a weird red herring thing to talk about. Potassium is the main killer for repurfusion injury. There’s very little potassium outside cells (like in your blood and fluids), but tons inside cells. Well we have a whole mass of tissue from multiple organs that just died and that’s all getting released at once. The heart does not like this, and can go into arrhythmias and stop beating. Potassium is actually the final drug used in a lethal injection in capital punishment for instance. There’s tons of other harmful things going on too. But if large sections of multiple orgams had already died or been severely injured by the hernia, there may not have been any possible way to save them. And if you leave them that way the harmful stuff will find it’s way out eventually anyways, and the dead gi organs will cause massive septic shock as all the bacteria spill out from the inner gut through all the dead tissue into the rest of the body. Long story short, ischemia or infarction of bowels and other gi organs from a hernia or any other cause is an extremely dangerous situation requiring emergency surgery and can be fatal in humans, and even with that it may be impossible to save them. I’m guessing it’s similar for dogs.

    Again take everything I said with a grain of salt, your surgeon has the best information on what actually happened. I just wouldn’t get too hung up on “free radicals.” Ischemic or infarcted orgams is an extremely dangerous situation for tons of reasons.




  • I’ll spoil this for you, much of the time they didn’t even read the medical documentation sent to them, just denied whatever was asked for. And then hoped the patient would drop it and never even let their doctor know it was denied. Or if that fails and the doctor finds out it was denied they hope the busy doctor wouldn’t be able to figure out how to contact the company and the right number to do so, navigate phone trees and find archaic long series of ID numbers and case numbers and other information specific to that one company, then schedule a time range of hours, often in the evening at home, to be ready to answer a call at any moment from some “peer” (who’s not actually a peer, a doctor, or even in the same specialty) who also never read the medical documentation sent. The doctor points out to the company the rationale meeting all their criteria is clearly met in the medical documentation. But the “peer” states their company has a new additional rule about that treatment and that wasn’t included in the initial documentation sent. The doctor points out it was, the “peer” claims they don’t have it though. This is followed by another denial. That additional documentation is sent in again, no response for weeks (please allow up to 4 weeks for response). After finally getting a hold of someone, they state that they can’t accept this since there was already a denial and now must go through an official appeal hoping the doctor won’t know how to find out about their seperate and distinct appeal process. If the doctor figures out how to do that then they hand write a letter again explaining the medical rationale for the treatment being denied including citing sources from the literature. But oh wait that appeal was denied, because this was a Medicare advantage plan or some crap and the appeals process used is not applicable to this plan type. But you may file an appeal with the state insurance authority. And it goes on.

    Anyways, three months and much unpaid labor later, treatment finally approved. Which, if they had just read the original note sent, should have been approved in the first place. Not speaking from experience here or anything, lol.