I recently worked as a physician in a Labor and Delivery unit at a county hospital where there is an extremely high rate of methamphetamine and fentanyl use among patients, I would like to provide a counter-point that I have never heard of anything like this happening. Even in patients who are admitted actively withdrawing from fentanyl we go out of our way to treat them with dignity and respect. Social work will be consulted following delivery, but I have never seen police get involved, and there will never be physicians and nurses present during CPS' discussion with parents.
Again, just from what I have seen at county where substance use is a pretty banal, common occurrence and CPS often placed children in foster care straight from the newborn nursery.
I'm sorry that you had such a negative experience. Maybe it was at a hospital that doesn't deal with substance use issues much?
Naumova EA, Dierkes T, Sprang J, Arnold WH. The oral mucosal surface and blood vessels. Head Face Med. 2013 Mar 12;9:8. doi: 10.1186/1746-160X-9-8. PMID: 23497446; PMCID: PMC3639856.
It also has antibodies (humoral immune response).
Immunoglobulin A (IgA) is the most abundant antibody isotype in the mucosal immune system.
Li Y, Jin L, Chen T. The Effects of Secretory IgA in the Mucosal Immune System. Biomed Res Int. 2020 Jan 3;2020:2032057. doi: 10.1155/2020/2032057. PMID: 31998782; PMCID: PMC6970489.
And the vaccine triggers the development of those antibodies.
We evaluated the serum anti-spike (anti-S) IgG, anti-nucleocapsid (anti-N) IgG and anti-S IgA response following vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 in a cohort of first-responders. Among the 378 completely vaccinated participants, 98% were positive for anti-S IgG and 96% were positive for anti-S IgA.
Montague, B.T., Wipperman, M.F., Chio, E. et al. Elevated serum IgA following vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 in a cohort of high-risk first responders. Sci Rep 12, 14932 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-19095-7
If you don't have a strong electronics background, the XGameStation [1] with it's accompanying textbook The Black Art of Game Console Design [2] involves soldering up a primitive game console with a bunch of example game source code to go with it. The book starts with basic electronics theory and gets into some pretty bare-metal discussions regarding stuff like NTSC and VGA video output programming.
This group has put so much effort into the open letter, but it's probably not receiving particularly widespread circulation.
Perhaps it would be more effective if this group gathered the detailed knowledge of all the people who signed the letter and published a really detailed book on the current political, social, and economic state of Iran with all the juicy details that they have insider knowledge of included? Surely it would be a richer source of information than the trickle of articles from the single journalist they're upset with.
If it provided deep insights into the nature of the regime, and wasn't just a screed about how the government is awful, this hypothetical book could have a significant political and cultural impact outside of Iran.
As psychologists worry that the coronavirus pandemic is triggering a loneliness epidemic, new Harvard research suggests feelings of social isolation are on the rise and that those hardest hit are older teens and young adults.
In the recently released results of a study conducted last October by researchers at Making Caring Common, 36 percent of respondents to a national survey of approximately 950 Americans reported feeling lonely “frequently” or “almost all the time or all the time” in the prior four weeks, compared with 25 percent who recalled experiencing serious issues in the two months prior to the pandemic. Perhaps most striking is that 61 percent of those aged 18 to 25 reported high levels.
Isn't this just basic antitrust regulation? I don't like to use the word 'propaganda' unless it's tongue-in-cheek, but ... "Ma’s assets have been stripped, shorn, and degraded" ... come on, give me a break.
I've tried breaking textbooks down into Anki cards, and it takes forever and afterwards I'm left feeling underwhelmed. But, if you're going to do it, I've found that my favorite method of review is TTS on the Anki app with swipe gestures, and I just go for loooong walks while grinding my flash cards, just holding the phone at my side and swiping with my thumb '1' or '3'.
One thing I tried that I liked was reading the entire textbook out-loud into a set of bluetooth headphones chapter-by-chapter. I then process the raw audio file using Audacity's 'truncate silence' tool, as well as increasing the tempo of the audio file by 1.5-2x speed. I read it mechanically, straight-through as quickly as I possibly can on the first run. Then I make 1-2 passes back through the entire book using the audio file of my own recorded voice sped up in order to pace myself.
That way I go through the entire book like 3 times. Once slow, twice fast. I might do my second or third pass months or years later. Doing it mechanically means that I can grind through nonfiction technical books that are hundreds of pages long pretty quickly, and I know exactly how long my reviews will take, since it's the length of my audio file. The largest book I've pulled it off with was 900 pages. It was a sufferfest, but if you smoke a little pot while you're doing it, you can get into a nice rhythm and it's kind of fun.
I don't remember every single detail of the book using this method, but I've found cranking through them relentlessly with some time in-between to be very, very effective from a practical perspective. It scratches the 'done is better than perfect' itch, and when I need a specific detail I know exactly where to look.
I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the database guy actually implements things in an environment that can be manipulated at will.
Doctors don't implement things in an environment that they control. Patients come to them with a chief complaint, and the doctor tries to resolve or manage it to the best of their ability with a minimal intervention according to a set of guidelines someone else wrote down.
A doctor can't sit there and play with the diagnostic/treatment process in the same way a database guy can go play with the database software. At best the doctor can sit there with a textbook or medical journal and try to memorize more facts, or take notes, but it's not the same as pulling apart code, running it in different ways, and seeing how it behaves.
Medical school is a continuous process of memorizing shit off of flash cards culled from a textbook. You don't actually build anything, or implement anything, or do anything in a real-world sense that would make you an expert in the same way as someone who was working with a system that they were able to take apart and play with and manipulate. There's no real way to develop the kind of deep knowledge you're talking about in that environment.
A diesel mechanic can pull apart and engine. Hold every part in their hand. Drive a diesel-engine vehicle. Observe all the things that go wrong. Simulate, and innovate. An individual doctor can't really do any of that. Medical schools are even axing dissections, so med students are lucky if they get to see what the hell peritoneum actually looks like.
They can have multiple free-of-charge parking garages on the outskirts that are associated with a light rail system.
So you park, hop on the metro, and head into the city without having to worry about the nightmare of parking or the stop-and-go traffic.
I never, ever drive into LA. I use the free parking at an outlying metro station and ride the train in (20 min). You can even leave your vehicle overnight so you can go out for drinks and crash at a friends place (even if you don't train runs until 2am). It's a night-and-day improvement on having to sit in traffic on the freeway, spend 40 minutes finding street parking, worry if someone is going to steal your catalytic converter, etc.
An added benefit is that I go into the city much more often than I otherwise would because I know that the whole process is pretty stress-free.
"In a legal context, a chilling effect is the inhibition or discouragement of the legitimate exercise of natural and legal rights by the threat of legal sanction."
"That email and other internal Purdue communications are cited by the attorney general of Massachusetts in a new court filing against the company, released on Tuesday. They represent the first evidence that appears to tie the Sacklers to specific decisions made by the company about the marketing of OxyContin. The aggressive promotion of the drug helped ignite the opioid epidemic.
The filing contends that Mr. Sackler, a son of a Purdue Pharma founder, urged that sales representatives advise doctors to prescribe the highest dosage of the powerful opioid painkiller because it was the most profitable."
"In a new 274-page memorandum, Attorney General Maura Healey details a chain of command that she alleges implicates eight Sackler family members, as well as nine Purdue board members or executives, in the nation's deadly opioid epidemic."
Sackler family members seemed to have played a very hands-on role in the aggressive marketing of the drugs, and probably have their fingerprints all over internal company policies such as:
"...a copy of a confidential Justice Department report shows that federal prosecutors investigating the company found that Purdue Pharma knew about “significant” abuse of OxyContin in the first years after the drug’s introduction in 1996 and concealed that information."
Unless I misread your comment and you just mean did they commit a crime in accepting the plea bargain, and then no I guess not in the letter of the law. Certainly the spirit of the law was not honored here, however, as no member of the Sacker family seems to have been brought up on criminal charges. They just wrote a check and walked away admitting.."no wrongdoing and will remain one of the wealthiest families in America."
Definitely appreciate your contribution to the discussion.
Just a suggestion.
Maybe consider reducing the number of links, and posting the citation adjacent so we can see the title of the paper, and what journal it was published in before clicking. A brief tl;dr from the abstract would be magnificent as well.
Otherwise I'm just sort of taking on faith that whatever you posted will be worth the time to click on, and there's like 7 links there, so I'm just not gonna.
Again, just from what I have seen at county where substance use is a pretty banal, common occurrence and CPS often placed children in foster care straight from the newborn nursery.
I'm sorry that you had such a negative experience. Maybe it was at a hospital that doesn't deal with substance use issues much?