I recently saw someone on Lemmy point out that the UK has an emergency plan to move precious artwork to bunkers in the event of a nuclear attack, but no such plans exist for the people. Paintings can be replaced or remade. People cannot. The planet cannot. There are many things in this world far more valuable than art, in part because life is the source of art.
It was a legitimately nonprofit hospital and he probably was overpaid, but at least he was a practicing physician at one point and did seem to give a damn about his staff.
I once worked at a hospital in the ER where the department director was a union-busting bastard, but the CEO was pretty reasonable. After I left, one of the other ER techs went to the CEO about our pay being messed up and got everyone $5-6/hour raises to actual market rate. Also, there were a few weeks when we were really understaffed that the hospital encouraged admin folks to volunteer as “candystripers” in the ER to do stuff like help clean/turn over rooms, and answer patient call lights for water, blankets, etc. And the CEO was down in the ER for a couple hours every evening helping out most of that time period. It was encouraging to see the CEO of the hospital putting on some gloves and helping us with basic stuff like cleaning and stocking.
The current recommendation for colon cancer screening in those with a family history is to start routine colonoscopies at the age 10 years younger than the family member who was diagnosed. So if your Dad was 55 when he was diagnosed, you should start getting regular colonoscopies and screening at 45 (which is around the recommended age these days anyways).
The problem with AI and poorly educated professionals is not the ability to diagnose and treat based on evidence-based medicine. The problem is that you have to know enough about medicine, and enough about real human people to know what kinds of questions to ask in the first place. If nothing else, there is a massive amount of information gained from a patient’s body language, mannerisms, behavior, and the physical exam itself that would be extremely hard to quantify in a meaningful way for someone without the background education and experience to come to any useful conclusions.
Were I in any other field, I might agree with you, but given that I am in the medical field, stupidity and incompetence cost real human lives and I cannot tolerate that if it can be at all avoided.
It’s not quite a catchphrase yet, but when discussing cases or whatever, I frequently use the sentence: “I’m not sure, lemme go look that up.”
I worked professionally in medicine for a few years before starting medical school, and thus far my approach has been to entirely disregard anything they said on the subject and continue as normal unless the nonsense they’re spouting has the potential to cause serious harm. Our patient care professor is training us to listen attentively, then dismantle the nonsense as politely as possible while guiding the patient’s viewpoint back to something approaching reality.
There’s some things you look for that are difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t seen it before. That’s part of why experience is so valuable in Emergency Medicine, and it’s not uncommon to put your best nurses out in triage. People will do this kinda twitchy/wilting/loss of focus/change in pallor/change in posture right before they go down. I don’t have a good way to describe it, and it might be easier to draw even, because it really is a body language thing and the general appearance of the patient that can inform your decision making.
I have thought about trying to plan out a learning algorithm that could spit out suggestions for triage level and preliminary tests based on input data like vital signs, symptoms, and complaints… but I would never implement something like that as anything beyond a tool for the nurses at triage to use. There would have to always be an option to override the algorithm because there’s some aspects of patient presentation that are not easily quantifiable. I’d never be able to explain it in a way that one could input it into a computer, but even with my limited experience, I can tell which patients are going to crump on me.
NPs working under a physician with actual oversight is fine. The ones I have problems with are the ones that have a physician sign the hundreds of notes a month while maybe reviewing a handful, and worse, the ones pushing for independent practice without even that sham of oversight involved.
At least I can rest assured of the fact that AI will be next to useless in my intended field. Emergency medicine is an environment where you get a random constellation of symptoms and complaints with very little direction on which are related to the current illness, and which ones are not currently relevant. Also, in the time it would take to get all the info into the AI for a trauma/cardiac/code situation, the patient might be dead or rapidly heading in that direction.
I try to remind myself that I’ve only gotten as far as I have because of hard work. I don’t have any special talent, I’m not some kind of genius, I just know how to work hard for the things that matter.
I’m asking about your opinion. If Hamas refuses to cooperate, how many Palestinians does the IDF have to kill for it to be too many in your mind? When does the mass murder of Palestinian civilians exceed a reasonable metric for “defense”?
Why does Hamas have insights into your personal opinions and beliefs?
That’s not answering my question. How many Palestinian lives is too many?
The fact that Netanyahu has supported Hamas in the past as a foil to the PA says otherwise to me. To a certain extent, Israel has made its own monster out of Hamas and Gaza through their policies and positions.
I think you are misunderstanding how the demographic shift in Gaza has happened. They didn’t have a baby boom, it’s just that many of them do not survive very far into adulthood because of violence, health and environmental problems, and, when they can manage it, emigration.
Secondarily, I’m interested to hear how you justify calling Hamas genocidal without making the same observation about the Likud and Netanyahu.
So how many is “too many” for Israel to have killed? Or do the citizens of Gaza not count the same way Israelis do?
I think an important consideration is who gets to decide what knowledge and culture get preserved. For example, I would say that medicine, agriculture, and human language would be much more important to preserve than computer science or economics, but I’m sure someone would disagree.
In general, I think art is very valuable and should be protected when possible (and not just European art), but if the choice is between a painting or a human life… the painting goes every time.