They need to lower the screening to 40. I just had mine at 40, turned out fine luckily. Did it without sedation which my doctor said was rare in US, but common outside of US. I found surprising, wasn't that big of a deal. Pain was probably at a 7/10 during the turns (like 3 times) but ok the rest of the time. A little uncomfortable. Some new sensations, some familiar (feeling like you are crapping your pants).
I walked in and walked out no issue and went on about my day. Prep was fine but would be hard if I didn't work at home.
With old school sedation I think it might be worth avoiding it. But with propofol you are out like a light, and then wake back up just as fast when they turn it off -- and it feels like you just had a nice nap. Aside from feeling a bit groggy for a few minutes, you just get up and walk out the door and go about your day. Personally, I do not think I'd volunteer for 7/10 pain just to avoid that.
My first colonoscopy was without anesthesia, and it was as described above. A little uncomfortable on the one bend, but I don't even think I would put it at 7/10 (perhaps a 4 or 5—but not a sharp pain, mind you).
Definitely enjoyed the following times with anesthesia because, of course 0/10 as far as I know. Also, anesthesia just trips my mind—how seemingly time travel (going forward in time) seems to be involved.
Sounds a bit like the transnasal esophagoscopy I opted for recently in lieu of an upper endoscopy. Thin tube through nose, then down into the esophagus. Uncomfortable while threading it through (chest pain, like swallowing a sharp tortilla chip), but ultimately not a big deal, and done in-office in about 15 minutes.
I may be getting one of those in the next few months. Just had a regular upper endoscopy for dysphagia, and they were unable to solve it or even conclusively identify a cause. They warned me that this transnasal procedure would be next. Sounds like fun...
Which state did you have it done in if I may ask? I'm in Oregon and haven't been able to find a doc that does it without sedation. I can't be put under sedation for medical reasons, but I definitely need this procedure done sooner than later due to new GI problems.
I had a colonoscopy and esophagogastroduodenoscopy (thankfully not in that order) without sedation. Had it done in D.C.
My doc looked at me like I was crazy when I asked if it could be done without sedation, and reminded me that it would be uncomfortable, but otherwise didn't have any problem with it. I've endured 50k runs, brutal workouts, and traumatizing childhood neglect - I really can't see what the fuss is with mild discomfort that, by comparison, barely registers, and for such a short amount of time at that.
I too had esophagogastroduodenoscopy and the "sedation" I received as a barely noticeable dose of fentanyl. It was unpleasant to feel like I was drowning in saliva but it was quite bearable.
If I ever receive that procedure again, I will ask to skip the fentanyl microdose. The anesthesia and the buzz were not only underwhelming but for some reasons I started to feel the typical opioid warmth when the procedure was almost completed. Had they waited a few minutes after the IM injection I might have had another opinion on the usefulness on fentanyl during endoscopie because the last 30s were almost pleasant!
I don't really mind the pain itself, but I could see myself thinking the worst in that situation and imagining the strong pain meant the probe had punctured my colon.
I assume that's not actually a realistic risk, right?
North Carolina. And I wasn't actually aware that some doctors wouldn't do until after I had it done (reading about it online). I just called before my appointment to say I didn't need sedation. They said ok and wrote it down. They weren't really pushy during the appointment other than asking me why I didn't want sedation.
I thought it was going to be awkward but wasn't at all. We just chatted. It was him and an assistant. I was able to watch the TV of my colon while he was doing it.
For people who might be interested in following your advice, the conventional wisdom is that you should definitely look around when choosing the doctor. I.e. do not use a regular gastroenterologist who primarily does sedated colonoscopies, you want one who has experience with non-sedated ones. They have a better idea of what hurts and how to mitigate that.
Do you have specific risk factors that caused your doctor to recommend getting it at 40, or did you have to convince them? My understanding is that if the doctor doesn't order it, many insurance companies won't cover it.
I had bleeding, light red, most likely from hemorrhoids (it was), but had a few other factors that the doctor took it seriously. The insurance didn't cover much as far as I know (or any?). Owed like $1800.
There's an option which doesn't involve drinking any yucky fluids, just water. SuTab. You have two rounds of twelve pills that you drink with three cups of water at various intervals.
I've done it enough times that I'm totally fine with it: the electrolyte drink tastes like slightly bad-tasting Gatorade, which is hardly worth caring about.
And you get diarrhea-like bathroom runs half a dozen times maybe.
Yes it was annoying to get the runs and gross to drink the stuff the first few times, but people eat things like cow tongue or live octopus or whatever... I can handle some bad-tasting Gatorade and some diarrhea just fine, especially given the 5 years of peace-of-mind it buys me afterward.
People react differently. I took the same prep but the waves of nausea and cramping were so intensely painful I sweat through all my clothes and passed out on the toilet. It was some of the worst hours of my life. I’m just over 40 and have some symptoms to check which turned out to be benign, but it was such a harrowing experience I will be doing this as infrequently as possible.
Same thing happened to a family member. Dunno why the effect is so variable- I guessed it was more of a mental / expectations thing initially than a direct physical response. I see now I was probably wrong.
I had a colonoscopy + upper endocoscopy a few months ago, age 29.
The prep was horrible, particularly the electrolyte drink they make you take the night before. I almost puked several times trying to get that stuff down.
Actual procedure was a breeze. I was sedated, and then I woke up and it was over.
"I can state flatly that heavier than air flying machines are impossible.
— Lord Kelvin, 1895"
I'm sure this doesn't apply to you since you're not Lord Kelvin. On the other hand, people like Peter Norvig state in a popular AI textbook that, for example, they don't know why similar concepts appear close by in the vector space, so maybe you just know something other people don't.
I'm not taking a position here but the person you're replying to stated that Anthropic are working on AGI, not that their current LLM offering will evolve into AGI.
False, and you've given no argument to the contrary. There's certainly no definition that precludes it. It isn't, currently; there's no reason it can't be, any more than there's reason that Conway's Game of Life can't be, given sufficiently interesting data to process. Any Turing-complete system could simulate AGI. It might not be the most efficient mechanism for doing so, but that's not the question at hand.
At worst, this would only be temporary. Yes, it will cause hardship, but once it trickles down to regular companies, that an LLM is a word predictor, workers will be back. Seems Andrew Yang has never used an LLM to the lengths we do as software developers.
The thing we have to worry about is what's after the LLM.
I don't understand why "it's just predicting words, bro" is still seen as a valuable argument. A LOT has to happen to accurately predict the next word(s) for any given topic.
If that supposed to be a dismissal, it's not a good one.
Mac has always had horrible window management. Made worse because applications and windows are a separate concept. Used to seem clever but in the world of multiple workspaces it's a terrible decision. Now it's even worse trying to manage multiple llms and projects.
Yes, but it's much worse than that because it makes multiple workspaces essentially unusable. Try them on Windows or any Linux desktop. When a window is also an application it makes handling them much more seemless. Not to mention the animation on Macos (slide or fade) takes multiple seconds, then when it completes it takes 500ms to actually focus. That's if it actually focuses to the right window when switching, which is currently a bug. Been there for years.
To be fair, a lot of doctors were sounding the alarm in 2021 that forcing the Covid shot was going to cause blow back. They said word for word, that we might see the rise of measles and other similar diseases. It's actually very well documented on zdoggmd youtube channel (podcast) during this time. But there were tons of doctors saying the same thing.
Because the docs knew that far too many people would rather face risk to avoid doing what they’re told to do. And far too many people just don’t give a shit about other people. The npc’s aren’t real or pertinent.
- Reduced demand on emergency rooms and other limited medical resources
- Decreased insurance claims, which are paid for by other patients in the form of premium increases
- Prevented burdens on taxpayers from illness or premature deaths of workers (welfare payments, orphanned children, lawsuits, etc.)
No one in a developed, Western society is an island. They borrow from society in childhood and pay society back as an adult. And they use common resources like drugs, hospitals, and (in the case of insurance) risk.
If we made everyone over 300lbs lose 100lbs, we’d also see those benefits.
Same if we limited the amount of cigarettes or alcohol people purchased.
Certainly the same if we enforced our drug laws around things like fentanyl (although ODing in a Waffle House parking lot at 32 might actually save the taxpayer some money in the long run).
> If we made everyone over 300lbs lose 100lbs, we’d also see those benefits.
> Same if we limited the amount of cigarettes or alcohol people purchased.
We already attempt to do these things through public health campaigns and laws against the purchase of cigarettes/alcohol by minors.
You're actually making my point for me, because public interventions to reduce smoking have saved tens of millions of lives and many billions of dollars of taxpayer money.
> Certainly the same if we enforced our drug laws around things like fentanyl (although ODing in a Waffle House parking lot at 32 might actually save the taxpayer some money in the long run).
In what universe is the US not trying to enforce laws around fentanyl?
Sure, and I'm saying that under that same justification, we should extend the same requirements to these other public health crises that President Biden tried to create for COVID vaccination.
Private sector business with 100 more employees? Nobody is allowed to smoke on premises because of the risk of second hand smoke, just like the OSHA justification for vaccination requirements.
>In what universe is the US not trying to enforce laws around fentanyl?
Oregon passed Measure 110, decriminalizing heroin, methamphetamine, and fentanyl, only backtracking because the policy was so bad. California has Prop 47, knocking possession down to misdemeanors on par with jaywalking. New York has safe injection sites, and I'm going to guess this isn't for safe injection of insulin.
Your point being ? That we should not do anything unless we do everything with no exception (that's an absurd way to view things and not a counter argument whatsoever), or that those things should be done (which is probably true but doesn't change his point at all) ?
Funny how bodily autonomy is all that important when it comes to right wing fear of vaccines, but completely irrelevant when it comes to abortions, womens rights in general, sexual abuse, trans rights and generally rights of anyone disliked by this admin.
> any vaccine that predominately helps old people actually increases costs to society in the long run
I think that big difference between the political sides is that one of them does not see "kill all old people" as ethical strategy.
> ok for the government to take away peoples bodily autonomy, as long as it benefits the economy
No. That's a straw man and you know it. I'm against forced vaccinations. No one in the US was forced to be vaccinated.
However, most of the people against vaccination in the US are against abortion rights, so how could this debate really be about bodily autonomy? Forced birth is actually forced by the government, unlike vaccination programs. There is no situation where you could be put in jail for refusing a vaccine.
> No one in a developed, Western society is an island
And you know the anti-vaxxers know this because they also intersect heavily with the set who get very mad/judgemental about unemployed people or about people who don't eat well and exercise.
The best way to keep immunocompromised and people who literally can’t take vaccines safe is by having so much herd immunity that the likelihood they a virulent load of a virus cannot get to those people.
A great way to get herd immunity is through mass vaccination.
Except herd immunity for COVID isn’t feasible or even possible. It mutates too much, the vaccines don’t confer effective enough immunity, etc.
It’s unfortunate, but it’s the reality of this disease. I’m not immunocompromised, but I still modify my behavior to try and protect myself: mask on planes, avoid certain situations, etc.
Could have something to do with vaccines going from recommended by doctors after decades of trials to entirely new vaccine methods being YOLO'd onto everyone via government policies.
> This was evident in the dialogue from the antivaxers who had done their research on mRNA changing your genome and being activated by 5G radiation.
Well, no, it was evident in the fact that mRNA vaccine manufacturers would only sign contracts with countries that agreed to give them blanket immunity from any and all possible legal consequences.
While it's understandable that intelligent people eventually come to the conclusion of figuring out how they can change themselves, we need to stop absolving the destructionists of responsibility. The political machine that made a public health emergency into a political issue did much more damage to our country than the vaccines being practically, but temporarily, mandatory.
It's not temporary though. The Covid vaccine push has caused an entire generation to now doubt simple life-saving vaccines. They erased a century of goodwill.
It really didn’t. It caused a subset of people already predisposed to such things to become harder stance on it and it expanded that insanity by making it a political talking point; but it is *not* a whole generation, it’s likely 30% of one country; and, over time, hopefully less.
A century of goodwill? It's not like US vacvine skeptics are a new thing. Ol' ben franklin was a vaccine skeptic until his son died to smallpox.
The new thing is the right has recently embraced antivaxxers as part of the coaltion.
Giving it a mainstream platform for a few political points was a deal with the devil, and they deserve to be condemed for that.
The only thing most people know or remember about the covid vaccines are that they're the reason the lockdowns ended and things got back to normal. The only people still mad about it are the types who were easily manipulated to be mad about it from the start.
It's my experience that a major part of the "anti covid vax and measures" point of view depends on refusing to understand that people who get grave form of covid but don't die from it still saturated hospital causing side deaths from other causes.
Yeah I saw this blowback coming, but two wrongs (to the extent you see the first as a wrong) don't make a right.
There's no reason to be hindering availability of safe and effective vaccines because a previous administration made it mandatory for some people to get some vaccines.
Can people stop flagging dham's comment when they simply disagree?
FWIW, I think what you're saying here and in another comment, about this burning a century of good will, is true.
People turn it into a liberal vs right partisan issue, but that's a convenient simplification.
The people protesting the lockdowns, mandatory vaccination, ID checks everywhere were not politically homogenous: if you looked at who was vocal about it, there were people on the right, but the other half were wokes, hippies, liberals, leftists, socialists, antifascists.
What burned goodwill is the authoritarian measures, the weak arguments, the demonisation of those against it for political gain and status (Trudeau and Biden would routinely accuse those opposed to mandatory vaccination and lockdowns of various -isms in public speeches).
The pandemic was indeed a major public health issue, but the way this was managed made it about a fight against the erosion of rights and societal polarisation.
It's not so much the writing of the code (which I did like), it's the aesthetic of the code. It's solving a problem with the right code and the right amount of code (for now). That's still the case, even with AI writing most of the code. You have to steer it constantly because it has very bad instincts, because most people in the profession aren't good at it, so it has bad training data. Mainly because the "learn to code" movement and people getting into this profession just for the money and not the love. Those people are probably screwed.
I walked in and walked out no issue and went on about my day. Prep was fine but would be hard if I didn't work at home.
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