Here’s a great video by Fort Nine that explains how and why the shape and size of these trucks are a threat to everyone outside the vehicle.

From the emergency medicine perspective on that last bit…we don’t care if you have a DNR somewhere on file. If you show up in cardiac arrest and someone isn’t shoving an official POLST into our hands, we’re running the code. We’d rather someone try (and fail) to sue for malpractice for saving them than accidentally let someone die that didn’t want to.

These companies investing in nuclear is the only good thing about it. Nuclear power is our best, cleanest option to supplement renewables like solar and wind, and it has the ability to pick up the slack when the variable power generation doesn’t meet the variable demand. If we can trick those mega-companies into lobbying the government to allow nuclear fuel recycling, we’ll be all set to ditch fossil fuels fairly quickly. (provided they also lobby to streamline the permitting process and reverse the DOGE gutting of the government agency that provides all of the startup loans used for nuclear power plants.)

I will pretty frequently just eat straight peanut butter with a spoon, but peanut butter cookies are also great. Peanut Butter an Co. has a cinnamon sugar peanut butter that is obscenely good. I found out about it because Babish did a peanut butter tier list video and the cinnamon sugar peanut butter was the highest rank.

Peanut butter, nice bread, and hoarding shiny little trinkets.

For something very relevant to health: cooking, knowing how to measure food, and how to read a nutrition label. Obesity would be much less common if people were able to cook their own food more often, and knew how to actually measure out accurate portion sizes.

I totally get that time, upfront costs like cookware, and access to decent ingredients are MAJOR factors in whether or not someone can learn how to cook, but anyone can and should know how to read a nutrition label and know how to measure accurate portion sizes for the things they eat. If you are trying to lose weight or work on healthy habits, a food scale is infinitely more valuable than a body weight scale. Most people do not know what 28g of chips looks like.

And I’m pretty sure she’s from the UK…

If you have a doctor that you can see, you could ask about trying Prazosin for the nightmares. It’s a blood pressure medication that has been shown to reduce PTSD nightmares, and getting better quality sleep can make a huge difference in your ability to handle everything else. It’s a dirt-cheap medication with minimal side effects, and it’s not a controlled substance that shows up on anything.

Brains are very finicky things and they get very upset if there’s any disruption in their supply of glucose and oxygen, but anesthetics are carefully selected to not disrupt that as much as possible. Anesthesia might paralyze the muscles you use to breathe, but that’s what the intubation and ventilator is for. The anesthetics we use don’t affect the heart muscle because it uses different ions and chemicals than every other type of muscle in the body to generate contractions. However, open heart surgery will absolutely mess with the heart which will disrupt circulation.

I would wager that it’s more to do with the surgery itself. Even transient hypoxia from blood not getting to your brain for a little bit can make a big difference. Anesthesia is used very frequently with rare complications, but complex heart surgeries have higher complication rates.

That will be a good downtime activity, but I also want to know what the algorithms are shoveling.

Dr. Oz and Oprah are featured in Behind The Bastards for a reason. Oprah actually got a 7-episode mini-series.

That covers some things, but the algorithm feeds people such nonsense at such a high rate that it’s hard to keep up with.

I do ask them, but some of the things they say/ask about are just so baffling that I’d like to know about it ahead of time so I know what to respond with or recommend instead. Also, it’s kind of along the lines of needing to know all the slang terms for drugs so I know what they’re talking about when they OD on something or take something that interferes with their actual medications.

It hurts my soul that this is actually a good addition.

That would be more similar to the Caduceus anyways given the number of snakes.

That’s the only time I think it’s acceptable. Ambulances are kind of a venn diagram of healthcare and couriers, so the 2 snakes on the star of life makes sense.

The medical symbol of the staff with the snake is only supposed to have 1 (one) snake on it. A staff with 1 snake is the Rod of Asclepius (the son of Apollo and Greek demigod of medicine), a staff with 2 snakes is a Caduceus which is carried by Hermes as a messenger or herald.

Physicians get 1 snake. Couriers and heralds get 2 snakes. Any medical professional or organization that uses 2 snakes is wrong and needs to go study the humanities and classics for a bit.