meme: Five Qs from oursin

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks to oursin for these questions—if you’d like to continue the meme, raise your hand in a comment.

Have you read anything lately that really blew you away?

Cost of Living, an essay collection by Emily Maloney

Her precise, funny prose explores the interface between social norms and actual brains at personal and societal levels. Her neurodivergent thinking brings insight from her own experiences on both sides of the US medical complex. As a suicide survivor and psych patient, she acquired huge medical debt while getting inaccurate diagnoses and physical mistreatment. To pay down that debt, she worked as an emergency-department—based EMT tech, often in charge of doling out medications she was also taking. She translated medical studies into marketing copy for large pharmaceutical companies.

Two hundred words on the "opiate crisis" and pain prescribing:

Pain docs feel they’re being treated unfairly. Yes, there were bad actors, but not as many as described. Yes, there are pill mills, but most of them have been shut down. In the meantime, the government is interfering with physicians and other healthcare practitioners ability to do their jobs. The government should not be regulating how many [morphine equivalent doses] you prescribe; it just creates more paperwork, results in more prescriptions for the same drugs. There had been a lot of discussion around the fact that the United States writes a lot more prescriptions for opioid medication than Canada. What many don’t realize is that a lot of physicians can no longer write for more than a few pills at a time because of new state legislation; to get around this, they write more prescriptions. In Canada, you could write one prescription for X number of pills and three refills; in the United States, that equals at least four prescriptions, and possibly more, depending on the dosing. In Florida alone, you are not allowed to write more than three days worth at a time, meaning Florida physicians are stuck writing hundreds of prescriptions for their chronic pain patients. Dr. Jay explained that this sort of thing is representative of a larger problem that began in the late 1980s, when insurance companies stopped covering everything besides opioids. This is true: biofeedback, acupuncture, and other non-pharmaceutical pain management tools stopped being covered, resulting in more prescriptions. The opioid crisis didn’t happen overnight; it was a slow steady burn comprised of issues that seem small and individual at the time and combined to make the difficult storm we see in the news each day.

If you were in a murder mystery, what part would you be playing?

The clueless guest who keeps asking “What’s going on?”

Is there is a musical instrument you wish you could play?

Sighs mournfully in F minor. The acoustic guitar I played daily from age 13 until I could no longer physically handle it, ca 33.

Favourite season of Buffy?

Season 3. I like the Faith-Buffy tension.

What kind of weather do you find most congenial?

Sunny with many puffy clouds, a fresh breeze, and temperatures between 50 and 65°F (10–19°C)

Comments

[pauraque]

Maybe! I tend to assume that if I heard of a phrase more than two years ago, by now it's no longer cool.