I’ve never heard anyone with the flu say they didn’t feel all that bad but just had no energy. for most, it feels like death.
Flu
- Thread starter She Mate Me
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Covid. They also told me there’s a strain of flu going around they don’t have tests for yet.
And my post was in no way directed towards you fwiw or questioning your recommendations.
The human immune system knew what it was doing during the Spanish Flu, where the body's immune response was the primary cause of morbidity in its response to the infection. But do go on.
That's a perfectly good and satisfactory answer if you don't have the desire or capability to do any research or get multiple opinions from people with a background to have an informed opinion, but there are way more idiot doctors than I would have believed two decades ago. Doctors often are repeating a mantra of something they haven't done any research into. You can believe replacement hormone therapy should have been banned or not, but lots of doctors just took it at face value that it was bad based on a basically fraudulent study, or lots of doctors are convinced an otherwise good study wsa basically fraudulent.
And I heard a doctor that I know did well in school tell me that there were no side effects from the mRNA vaccines. This was when he signed his child up for one of the shots in the I guess clinical trials used to get emergency authorization? He said nobody had identified a plausible mechanism for the side effects being predicted and in his mind that somehow meant there would be no side effects. I was expecting him to backtrack and basically give a statement showing that he doesn't understand tail risks or have a framework for accounting for them, and instead he gives one of the dumbest most illogical statements I've heard from somebody that in theory has more than enough capability to understand logic. And this wasn't a heated argument or something here he dug in on a stupid statement and he wasn't crazy political and making a religious statement of faith. He just was being a moron.
That said, I pretty much do what doctors tell me (other than the usual advice that everyone ignores like drink less, eat healthier, exercise more) and don't spend a lot of time "doing my own research". I'm just more aware of how non-ideal that approach is, even if it's still the optimal one given other constraints.
Not that doctors don't have their unique experiences that are good information, but we've primarily broken healthcare through government interference. We've put a stranglehold on the supply of healthcare, heavily interfered with healthcare finance and insurance, and then subsidized it both through preferential tax treatment and just outright pumping money into it. I don't know that doctors have a lot of particular expertise in how to fix that.
This is an interesting anecdote. I had the opposite experience in the fall, when my mother had a sudden medical emergency. She survived a surgery after I talked frankly with the surgeon about the likelihood of her returning to pre-emergency baseline. She did well for about a week, then began to wind down. I talked with her doctors and the surgeon and they gently guided me to the decision to move her to full palliative care off of a ventilator. This included a number of medical providers who were all on the same page. I felt very supported by that team of doctors.
From my experience with three parents who have now passed, most doctors encourage shortening the time spent on life support for the benefit of the patient. One of the toughest parts of medicine must be the family counseling aspect. Nothing but respect here.
This is a pretty limited sample, but everyone I know that has seen somebody get shingles got the shingles vaccine as soon as it was available. A few that never got and never will get the COVID shot got the shingles one as soon as they were eligible.
I was in the generation of kids that still had "chicken pox parties." My parents and some of their friends got us all together to have chicken pox because they were going to Europe in a month or two and wanted to make sure none of us threw a wrench in that trip. Parenting in the late 70's/early 80's sure was something!
Still kills me that we are fighting over all this vaccine stuff. I'm sick as a dog right now and I'd take just about anything I was given to ease the symptoms.
The thing is, if you go back to 2020-2022 you can find just about everyone at some point who said something wrong. It was a pandemic, people were scared, nobody really knew what to do. But that doesn't keep things from turning into talking points, though, and some are still pushing them today.
Was it needed to shut everything down, act like animals and print a bunch of money? No.
Should you reasonably take vaccines that may apply to your situation? Yeah.
It's really that simple.
The thing is, if you go back to 2020-2022 you can find just about everyone at some point who said something wrong. It was a pandemic, people were scared, nobody really knew what to do. But that doesn't keep things from turning into talking points, though, and some are still pushing them today.
Was it needed to shut everything down, act like animals and print a bunch of money? No.
Should you reasonably take vaccines that may apply to your situation? Yeah.
It's really that simple.
Being dishonest and shredding public trust is basically never the right thing for health related issues. Even if you think that misleading the public is the right way to go, the people that do it have to at the least be ejected from polite society. If it's important enough to shred public trust, it's important enough to make that sacrifice. That was also a root cause of a lot of the political division.
And there was info available from Italy very early on who was dying. It was going to be a tragedy regardless, but politicians, including our politicized but supposedly nonpolitical bureaucrats, made it much worse.
How would you judge someone has the background to have an informed opinion? I would say board certification in a specialty area would qualify.
I don't know if knowing this will make people more or less likely to get the flu shot, but if you assume average flu vaccine efficacy and average incidence rates, taking the flu shot every year versus not taking it will result in you getting the flu on average something like once in a 25 year period as opposed to 2.5 times on average. I'm going off memory so maybe it was a 20 year period, but it's not really surprising that lots of people go two decades without getting the flu despite never taking the flu shot or that people get the flu after taking the flu shot multiple times in a two decade period. It's efficacy just isn't that high even if it's high enough to make a big difference from a population wide perspective.
Which is the second caveat to those numbers, is that they are based on rough averages in a population where a lot of people do take the flu shot. If most people stopped taking it but you kept taking the flu shot, you would both get the flu more often and have more instances where you would have gotten the flu but for taking the flu shot.
I know it's pointless to try to understand things to you, but the more important part of that clause was "multiple opinions". While not specifically stating it, it was pretty clearly implying that a board certification is the type of credential that would be a strong indicator. Doesn't necessarily help with the "group think" or "settled science" situations but not sure what does.
I can't imagine that anyone believe the pharm industry has control of the news media. It seems like right now, "everyone" in Madison has the Flu, therefore, I expect the news to report when flu numbers go crazy. The benevolent side of me would say that they are doing it to be helpful, but the reality is likely that people will tune in to hear about illness. Bad news always leads ratings. At present, it has my senior adult in-laws worried about having everyone together at Christmas. It's kind of crazy to me to think that way.
And as always, Mark Twain was correct when he said: "The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane."
I got the Flu vaccine just last week because I have some important events coming up and I'd like to minimize the impact of the virus so I can enjoy them. Also, I'm not going to allow dubmass politicians to scare me away from modern medicine.
Here's some crazy news for you. Every year, they develop the vaccine ahead of the season with their best attempt at predicting what strain will be prevalent. Sometimes, that is not how it plays out. This year, they guessed Type A and Type B seems to be the strain that is hitting. I have no idea why they can't just develop one for all as they taught very little medical care in Simrall beyond CPR.
The reason for that is that the flu virus mutates often and rapidly.
I am writing this just so yall will know how we got to where we are. I have lived through most of this.
Medicare (especially) and Medicaid reimbursement drives the cost of medical care. Before 1980, Medicare paid on a cost plus basis (mostly). As long as the fee was "reasonable and customary" the government paid it. Costs went out of control. The Reagan Administration in the 1980's came up with scheme call " Diagnostic Related Groups" , DRG's, that began reimbursements on a set fee to hospitals and some hospital based physicians based on the diagnosis only, not any comorbid diseases, age or any other factor. Hospitals bottom line began to suffer, although most of them were still making plenty. Clintons attempt at Hillary Care spooked corporate hospitals into thinking they were going to lose their referral base, and they began to buy Dr.'s practices and consolidate. Every time Medicare cut reimbursement, hospitals and most physicians raised their prices on private insurance and private payers. These trends have continued to the present. Medicare keeps cutting reimbursement, and overall costs to everyone else keeps going up. Add to that that their is practically no competition because of consolidation, and most physicians now work for a corporate entity rather than themselves in their own practice (like North Mississippi). The result is that you have the worst form of corporatism, and most Dr's just like everyone else will not buck a system that pays them.
The feds will not admit that it cannot afford to provide free medical care to our elderly without a massive increase in taxes that wrecks the economy. The rest of us are paying the difference through increased fees and health insurance premiums. The only people that are happy are the corporate suits and the trial lawyers.
How to fix it? I honestly don't know. The only thing that possibly could help is some system that reimburses individuals for part of their insurance premium if they don't get sick. It seems the whole thing may have to collapse and rebuilt from scratch.
And no, single payer is not the answer, unless you like very long lines. The running joke among UK physicians is "We pretend to work, and Public Health Service pretends to pay us".
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How would I go about bucking said system?
the answer (at least part of it) to fixing healthcare is giving doctors the power to stop care when it is futile and to stop offering certain treatments when it is obvious they will not be beneficial. Those kind of conversations are political suicide, so they will never happen.
First paragraph, you can't and stay employed. I totally agree with your 2nd paragraph. Although there needs to be some guardrails. No one should have sole responsibility over the life and death of another individual.
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Agree 100%. But i have had multiple cases where the ICU doc, the cardiologist, the nephrologist, the hospitalist, the neurologist, and any other doctor you want to throw on the pile all say it is futile care and we literally have zero recourse but to continue on doing what I consider to be human torture if the family won’t do what is right. And to be clear, I don’t mean the moment something happens and emotions are high. I mean WEEKS into treatment as they are getting worse day by day.
I once had a daughter tell me that her mom was “a young 102”. I looked at her and said, “no ma’am, she isn’t. That isn’t a thing”
Yes, I know full well of what you speak. I saw it many times. And those people are never paying their own bills.
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You like to respond to posts with words that often don’t add or correct. Nothing you responded with disproved my post.
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No one is going to be surprised by this.
25 million dead and estimates as high as 40 million. It was particularly deadly to young people
I get that, but it seems always that they start with one type or the other, and when it is less effective, the reason is they picked the wrong type. If they truly start out with a TypeA/TypeB vax, I'd prefer that they just say the virus was mutating quickly this year. Regardless, the difference I've seen this year in vax vs not is that it seems to be gut punching people around here that did not get it and it seems that the ones I know who had it post-vax felt a little bad and had no fever. I hope I don't find out. I don't have time to be sick...
Thanks for an informational and honest post. There are no easy answers. I don't want to be like Canada and have be "lucky" enough to have something life threatening to get prompt care. I also don't want to be homeless because I can't afford health care. I also want to help people less fortunate than I am to have access to decent health care. I also don't want politicians deciding how that happens. There is no talking point that fixes all that.
Sorry, but that is a terrible idea and an example of doctors not having any particular expertise in a lot of the problems. Doctor's aren't God and don't have any special ability to weigh interpersonal utilities. Doctors are going to have a huge role in helping inform families on making those decisions, and maybe there should be a role for a doctor led committee or something when the patient is incapacitated and there isn't a health care directive as opposed to leaving decisions to next of kin, but the real solution is to let patients/families make their own decisions but stop letting them push 100% of those costs to other people.
A simple if not necessarily administratively simple step that would help a lot would be to keep a running tally of everyone's medicare taxes paid over their life, and then to the extent they consume more in medicare treatment, put a lien for the difference against their estates. You'd see a lot of people start to think very hard about how they want to spend their end years. At 66, yeah, go ahead and pull out all the stops to stay alive. At 86? Maybe people are more worried about what they leave to their children.
I personally think we should do the same with social security. If you consume more than you (and your employer on your behalf) contributed (accounting for some reasonable return, like say 5%), then the excess should be a lien against the estate. There is no fair way to fix social security as people were basically bamboozled and the money is gone, but that would seem to be a reasonably equitable fix to at least make sure some people (and families) don't make out like bandits while others get completely screwed.
I run nursing homes and we are seeing a massive increase in flu and norovirus. A little bit of Covid but mostly flu and norovirus.
Slowing it down and keeping it from killing millions more people was the purpose of the shutdowns and vaccine. The viral nature of a pandemic could have been drastically worse. As in mass graves of stacks and stacks of bodies, too many to put into body bags.
As mentioned here before, people can claim any random death was classified as COVID related. Yet what cannot be disputed is that more people between 40 and 60 died in 2 years than ever before in history. Due in heavy part to those over 40 not realizing their immune system was weaker than they realized. The elderly for the most part got the vaccine and didn't run around in public complaining about liberty and freedom (i.e. screw my fellow country man, I don't care if they die, I'm gonna roam free as a bird)
yes, because that is how the vaccine is created. they put out educated guesses on which strain will be prominent in the use based on global patterns so they can start early enough to make enough supply when it happens.
But since you are both highly educated in the medical fields, you'll know that partial cross protection is real even if it's a different strain
And the illness is also often milder. Sure you all knew that already though.
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100% agree. i'm just saying that that's the reason for when people complain "it dont' do nothin no ways" they'll work, just not as good if they don't predict it right