Dr. Helen Cho

[tam--lin]

(7/30/26) The Red Cross just declared the second US blood crisis in its history.

Summer sees both a drop off in donations and, at least for our trauma center, a spike in traumas. Trauma centers across the US are in danger of running out of blood for our trauma patients TODAY, which is very scary but, unlike much of the other scary national news coming across our screens these days, is something you can help fix immediately and directly.

We need ASAP donations of blood, for people to spread the word, and for manager types to help facilitate others' donations. All blood types are needed, but universal donor blood (type O) is especially dire.

[tealin]

Mucus Buster

Everyone's got lingering congestion this year, so as someone who's no stranger to phlegm, and inherited the folk wisdom of a stage actress (the show must go on!) I share with you my recipe for making things better:

2L water

the juice and rind of one lemon (just dump the juiced rinds in, don't zest them, you maniac)

a small thumb of fresh ginger, sliced in coins

about a dozen cloves, some star anise, peppercorns, and maybe whole cinnamon or allspice or whatever else you like, in a tea ball (except the cinnamon if it doesn't fit, obvs)

good dollop of honey, to taste

Bring the water to a boil then dump in all the stuff. Keep it hot but not boiling – a slow cooker is good for this. Keep this pot on a low heat all day and serve yourself a mug every so often, adding water as necessary. At some point you will need to add a new lemon and some more honey, but the spices can generally carry over two pots if you're drinking it regularly.

The acid helps clear the gunk, ginger is good for the circulation, and clove/aniseed/pepper have some sort of decongestant/soothing properties. Honey is both nice and antiseptic, and apparently is a cough suppressant as well? Anyway, I just got over another run of Covid and this was wasn't 100% effective but it worked better than phenylephrine.

[rowenabean]

Actual facts they have studied this and lemon/honey/ginger drinks are as effective as over the counter cold medicines (anything you can get from your pharmacy). Also a lot cheaper. I haven't tried adding the other spices but tbh if nothing else that sounds delicious

[rosalesbeausderholle]

One thing that worries me about the use of AI is whether or not it can worsen people's dementia and alzheimer's in the future. When my grandmother was first diagnosed, we got her math activity books. Now, my grandmother never had a formal education, but we did our best to keep her sharp, get her to do math and writing activity books, sudokus, playing board games that required some level of strategizing with her. Her family is prone to alzheimer's and dementia (both her siblings had it and deteriorated very very very quickly, which yeah, scares the shit out of me being her granddaughter) but she was the one whose mind lasted the longest, she only passed away two years ago, at 88, ten whole years after her initial diagnosis and sure, she had forgotten things, recipes and where she put her glasses and appointments, but she never forgot any of us, ten whole years in, she still remembered us. Now, this may have been luck, but doctors always said the constant mental work + companionship + medicine helped her a lot. So I'm thinking, these people who are now relying on AI for everything, from email-writing to thinking what's for dinner to casual conversations, I've even seen people rely on it to calculate what time they should leave their house if they need to be at a place at a specific time and their commute lasts X number of minutes. As if that's not... the simplest math operation possible? You shouldn't even need a calculator for that!!! Idk I don't know how long it'll take us to see the effects of this + exposure to brain-rotting short form content that is completely meaningless + people addicted to right-wing conspiracy style media. Idk I'm very worried. Please, read, read complicated books! Take up a book on philosophy and try to decipher it and make your own opinions on it, please buy a maths activity book and relearn how to do math, please get a hobby that involves lots of thinking and concentrating. PLEASE!!!

[notalotgoingonatthisinstant]

As a neurologist, I’ll give you the pretty name for it: cognitive reserve.

The way I explain it to my patients is that our neurons don’t regenerate. They make connections with each other and that’s it. If you don’t use your brain, they make fewer connections and, if one of them dies, you’re gonna miss it, because that was the only one that knew how to do X. Now, if each one of them has many, many connections, you won’t notice the difference when one of them dies. The others pick up the slack.

As of 2024, 45% of dementia risk factors are modifiable. Relevant to this conversation, 5% for less education and 5% for social isolation.

We absolutely are going to see the reflection of this, but it’s gonna take decades and it’ll be too late. So, for the love of your brain, pretend that it’s a muscle and make it work. People complain about “when am I ever gonna use this maths formula in my life?” You’re not. You’re teaching your brain to think logically. Those sinapses will be there for when you need to figure out your week’s schedule. English classes taught me how to interpret data and how to convey it in this text so it’s clear and you understand what I’m saying, not because I needed to justify why the curtain is blue.

Make your brain know how to do different things. Logic games, puzzles, taking care of a garden even if small, planning a church’s event or birthday, learn a new instrument, learn a few words in another language, look at a calendar every day, do some manual labor if possible. Do not, I repeat, do not let your brain get rid of sinapses by letting AI do everything. Your brain uses 20% of your body’s energy — do you really think it’s going to maintain connexions that aren’t in use?

Most cases of Alzheimer’s are sporadic, meaning no family history. Family history of a first-degree relative with Alzheimer’s starting before they were 80yo increases your risk in 2-3x on average.

TLDR: Yes. From the knowledge we have today, AI will increase the number and severity of dementia cases.

[mylordshesacactus]

Something to take a moment today and remember: As a collective, imperfect, often-divided human species, there is one disease--one--that we have ever managed to hunt to extinction. Because after thousands of years of watching it torture our children to death? Saving SOME people, saving MOST people, wasn't fucking good enough.

We have never hated anything more than we hated smallpox.

We have never loved anything as much as we love each other.

Happy Smallpox Eradication Day.

[mettatonsass]

PSA DO NOT USE PORTABLE GAS HEATERS INDOORS!!!

Hi this psa is brought to you by my boss nearly killing us via carbon monoxide poisoning.

Heaters like this are labelled for Indoor/Outdoor usage, however that indoor label is misleading af.

Indoors in this context means a drafty garage or car port, not your living room or bedroom. Unless the room you're in is well ventilated with fresh air, don't use this fucker indoors.

Please reblog for visibility, this could quite literally save a life.

[duckbunny]

THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING TO GET YOUR MEDS BEFORE THE PHARMACIES CLOSE

they are going to be CLOSED OVER THE HOLIDAYS and so will the DOCTORS WHO SIGN YOUR PRESCRIPTIONS.

if you don’t have enough meds to last the next THREE WEEKS, put in for your repeats and refills tomorrow! that’s Wednesday! do it! don’t go to hospital at New Year because you ran out of stuff!

[duckbunny]

it’s that time of year again! get your meds!

[depsidase]

[lilliephoenix]

autumntides

10h

"In the instance an employer makes an illegal request for a photograph as part of a job application, you may submit a complaint to the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission." Successful violation fee collections are paid partially to the one who suffered the violation, which in many cases exceeds a year of work at these shit jobs. There's only two weak points to a corporation, and those are in the budget and in the supply chain. Hit them where it hurts.

[kamikaze-kumquat]

Fucking word.

Learn your rights!

[ms-cellanies]

AUTO REBLOG IN CASE YOU MISSED THIS THE 1ST TIME AROUND.  It is important to KNOW YOUR RIGHTS.

[theconcealedweapon]

[knowing-smile]

Vintage EPA photos reveal what US waterways looked like before pollution was regulated

In the years after the US Environmental Protection Agency was founded, the agency dispatched photographers to document pollution and contami

What was food like before the FDA?

Formaldehyde, brick dust, lead, and borax once made grocery shopping a minefield.

Shit used to be wild, and this is just what I could find that had decent sources, I've heard a lot more horror stories.

I'm not excited to live in a word without regulation. 🙃

[bogleech]

"Regulations don't exist because governments enjoy them" is an important statement here. The government has to spend money and labor to enforce regulations. The government has to be begged for years and sometimes threatened by the American people into even creating the regulations. The people with the money want you to believe regulations are "BIG GOVERNMENT INFRINGING ON OUR FREEDOMS" so you'll help them undo the regulations your grandparents had to force that same government to install in the first fucking place. They count on you being ignorant of the past so they can make another round of dirty money by poisoning you all over again.

[haunteddollsgeorg]

As a society we have benefited so much from successful public health measures that we now have the privilege of declaring that we must not need them anymore

Bitch before enriched flour, neural tube defects like spina bifida were far more common. Even now, spina bifida clinicians and researchers are begging to have salt and maize fortified to reach groups that don’t use as much flour. Before iodized salt, the United States had a fucking GOITER BELT. Eleven years after the introduction of fluoridated water, a city in Michigan found the rate of dental caries among school children dropped a staggering 60%— in an era where tooth decay regularly fucking killed people

I’m literally not even going to start on vaccines, which are among the most successful and robustly studied public health measures in world history

You might say “oh well today we all have access to vitamins and toothpastes and dentists so we don’t need those things in our food supplies” and boy do white people on social media loooove to fucking say that. But here’s the thing: no, people don’t all have easy access to those things. That’s privilege talking yet again

[closetscorpio]

[i-add-sources]

USC Agents of Change establishes hotline to help move immigration hearings online

Since Monday, a group of 15 USC student, alumni and faculty volunteers have already received thousands of calls for help on open immigration

this is true

edit to add additional sources under cut

Hotline helps immigrants move hearings online to avoid arrest at court

A group of students, alumni and volunteers from the University of Southern California are banding together to help people with upcoming immi

[cantanopeshitthatwastaken]

It’s interesting how diseases rip through schools at incredible speeds despite being in an arguably modern, clean(ish) environment. I wonder if it has something to do with the whole “you need a doctor’s note to excuse your absence of even one day” combined with the average price of going to a doctor, the lack of education on things like “you’re still contagious even after the fever goes away”, and the overwhelming message of “if you don’t struggle through it, you’re a failure!”

[thatgiraffebutt]

On my campus there tends to be a problem where even I you have the doctors note professors will still take points off of your final grade regardless of how sick you are. I’ve seen people show up to class with the stomach flu, pneumonia, respiratory infections and all sorts of other contagious ailments.

[literallyaflame]

Here’s a fun story:

The school system I grew up in put an absolutely ungodly amount of pressure on kids to Show Up Every Day No Matter What. Many schools are like this, but looking back, my town’s was borderline fucking dystopian. They asked me why I didn’t just “postpone” a surgery at one point— when I was fifteen— to give you an idea of how monumentally obtuse these people were.

So, in elementary school, I started having chicken pox symptoms, right? They were mild because I was vaccinated (yay!) but my mom recognized them quickly and took me to the doctor, because my mom is a reasonable human being with standards. The doctor said “yup, you’ve got those pox, it may seem mild but please for the love of god DO NOT take her to school, she is very contagious even though she may FEEL okay.”

So I had to stay home from school until I got clearance from my doctor to go back. I was an angry little gremlin the whole time, because I wanted to go to the school library and read books about the human skull, but my mother said, “no, you cannot leave this house, and do not scratch the bumps please.” So I sat at home and tried not to scratch the bumps, like a good little gremlin.

A few days into my Chicken Pox Related House Arrest, we got a letter from the school. I was far from the only person with chicken pox, as it so happened. Like… a tenth of my second grade class had Confirmed Pox. We all fell ill within DAYS of each other.

So how did this happen, you ask? Well, a kid had chicken pox, and he came to school anyway. “Ah, well perhaps they didn’t know,” you may very well say. “Maybe his parents didn’t notice!” No. No, they noticed. In fact they KNEW it was CHICKEN POX. They sent him to school anyway.

The kid’s parents…….. were, in fact, teachers at the school. And they KNOWINGLY made him go to school sick, because they didn’t want to risk hurting his precious “perfect attendance” record. They figured that since he wasn’t, like, Literally Dying, it was better for him not to miss school. Never mind the fact that they were actively endangering hundreds of little kids.

Fast forward to my freshman year of college. A kid came to class with mumps because he ‘couldn’t afford to miss’. Guess what happened? Mumps outbreak! Diseases are, as it turns out, good at being diseases! Vaccinations are phenomenal, but they can only do so much, and some people rely on herd immunity to not be killed by preventable illness.

This entire attitude needs to die. It’s dangerous. Food service workers are forced to show up sick, little kids are forced to show up sick, college students show up sick because they’re afraid of flunking out.

And on top of it all, misinformation campaigns are encouraging people not to get vaccinations! It’s 2019 and we’re flirting with the plague! Next thing you know some blogger is gonna be like “actually we should all be fucking rats and eating our meat raw, death to all science and god bless america”

[madd-catter]

Many kids at my school will show up really sick because we only get like three days of excused absences without a doctor’s note.

[gen-is-gone]

this is what those in literary academia call “foreshadowing”

(note the dates)

[anarchistmemedistro]

this post aged like an ice cube in an oven

[weneed2quatschen]

Lots of adults go to work sick, and in America we don’t even have much of a cultural expectation to wear masks to lessen spread. It’s caught on a little after Covid, but not a lot.

[ace-of-moons]

I work at a daycare. A lot of our kids will come in sick, obviously having been given cold meds to bring their fever down. Many of our families are low-income. They can’t afford to take the day off. It’s not that they don’t care, it’s that they don’t really have another choice. Living wages, and adequate sick and safe leave are mandatory to stop the spread of disease in school.

[mira-mi-bookreviews]

This year, thousands of doctors will attend to millions of TB patients, and just as my great-grandfather could not save his son, these physicians will be unable to save their patients, because the cure is where the disease is not, and the disease is where the cure is not.

– John Green, Everything is Tuberculosis

[splendentgoddess]

FOR PARENTS OF YOUNG KIDS IN THE US!

Someone over on bluesky posted this and I figured I'd better repost it here. It's the pre-RFK 2025 vaccination schedule for babies and young children, ya know, just in case it mysteriously disappears. Save this and give it to your child's pediatrician; tell them this is the schedule you want your child on.

[depsidase]

[roach-works]

REMINDER: luigi mangione has been accused of killing the CEO, not convicted, and the evidence presented is extremely questionable. luigi mangione is NOT the claims adjuster until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt in a court of law, and the widespread presumption of his guilt makes it much more likely he will be falsely convicted.

[the-moon-loves-the-sea]

(X)

[sirfrogsworth]

This is one of those things where the discourse is just completely broken. Both of these takes are shit and no one is concerned about the actual problem.

Republicans want to bring back incandescents because they just want to trigger the libs and have decided light bulbs are woke.

And the "LEDs are fine" crowd are throwing people with flicker sensitivities under the bus. And, no, you don't have to be "pretty far on the spectrum" to notice a difference. And even if you did... why in the world is this person so dismissive of the millions of autistic folks?

LEDs, for the most part, are superior to incandescent bulbs. Collectively they save people billions of dollars in energy costs and greatly reduce fossil fuel use. You have more options for color and brightness. You can control them with your phone. LEDs are fantastic.

Unfortunately there is a design flaw that makes LEDs hard to use for certain people. Due to AC power, most LEDs have a 60hz refresh rate. Meaning they turn off and on 60 times per second. With incandescents this didn't matter because the filament didn't have time to lose its glow between cycles.

Most people cannot see this flicker in LEDs. But there are millions of people who are sensitive to it and it can cause migraines and discomfort.

The solution is definitely not to go back to incandescents. There are flicker free LEDs and I think with some regulation we could make sure all LEDs are flicker free or at least make sure flicker free bulbs are easy to find and not priced at a premium.

Thankfully there is a group testing bulbs to find the ones that will most likely cause no discomfort. They call themselves the Flicker Alliance and their website has a pretty decent selection of tested and approved bulbs.

Flicker Alliance

So if you feel like your LED bulbs might be causing you distress, that is a good resource to try. I think there is also something you can do to make sure the LED drivers are using DC power, but I haven't really looked into that.

[thefrogman]

It's probably not as important as preventing migraines, but bulbs with bad flicker also cause a lot of problems for photographers and videographers. Photos can have heavy banding and video can have these horizontal lines that just slowly travel down. There are some newer cameras that can detect the flicker and sync your shutter to it. And Sony just released a global shutter camera that also fixes this issue. But it would just be a lot easier if they started manufacturing LEDs without flicker in the first place.

In any case, I just thought this was an important subject that doesn't get a lot of attention so I'd post it here as well.

[rowark]

Luigi Mangione's lawyer is SO good

like, she didn't miss a beat in the arraignment, calling out the police, the perp walk, the mayor...

I hope this trial is televised tbh. i will not miss a second of it if it is

ETA: ANNNNDDD calling out the mayor for not using the word "alleged".. YES!

I get SOO annoyed whenever people complain about the media using the word "alleged", especially when there is video footage of the crime happening... people complain that it's some sort of media bias, and not like... straight up a VIOLATION OF A CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT if they don't say "alleged"

The presumption of innocence is a right. Luigi's rights have been violated repeatedly in this regard.

And possibly also his right to a fair trial, since they are creating SO MUCH bias against him

[rowark]

@arewestill

You're 100% right, and that's not even gaslighting. That's exactly the question everyone SHOULD be asking.

Do we know he did it? Absolutely not. And unless a jury reaches a guilty verdict, we are all supposed to assume he did not do it. That's exactly how the presumption of innocence works.

Everyone saying that we all know he did it is just doing the prosecution's job for them. We don't know that Luigi Mangione is the guy in the CCTV footage. The prosecution has to prove that he is, and if they can't, he gets acquitted.

And that's exactly why the media has to say "alleged". It wouldn't even matter if they had footage that clearly showed his face, because the media and the general public doesn't get to decide if someone is guilty or not.

And that's why it's so good that his lawyer has already called this out, because without the presumption of innocence, you can't have a fair trial.

In every court case, the burden of proof only falls on one side, and in criminal cases, it's always on the prosecution. So basically that means if you are on trial, you walk into a court where the assumption is that you are not guilty, and the prosecution has to convince the jury that you are guilty, while the defense just has to raise reasonable doubt.

Since the presumption is that you're innocent, if the defense can poke holes in the prosecution's case, enough that the jury isn't 100% convinced that you absolutely did it, they have to acquit.

But if you walk into a court where everyone already thinks you're guilty, it's going to be a lot harder for the defense to raise reasonable doubt, and the burden of proof is going to essentially be lifted from the prosecution, because they're just proving something that the jury already thinks is true.

So when the police and the Mayor of New York keep going out of their way to present Mangione as guilty in public (the perp walk, having 4 officers behind him at the arraignment, as though he's a danger to society, not saying "alleged"), they are convincing the public that he's guilty before a trial even starts, and it's going to be difficult to find an unbiased jury. If the jury is made up of people who think he's guilty before it starts, he doesn't get a fair trial.

So it's not gaslighting to ask if we actually know it's him... we don't know, and people very much need to keep remembering that.

None of us were eyewitnesses. The CCTV footage doesn't show his face. We didn't see the police find the alleged evidence on him. We haven't seen this evidence in person. We have not heard any sworn testimony. We have not heard a confession.

We very much do not know that he did it. People are literally only assuming he did it because they've been told that he did. They're accepting it without proof, and that's dangerous.