If you have a doctor that you can see, you could ask about trying Prazosin for the nightmares. It’s a blood pressure medication that has been shown to reduce PTSD nightmares, and getting better quality sleep can make a huge difference in your ability to handle everything else. It’s a dirt-cheap medication with minimal side effects, and it’s not a controlled substance that shows up on anything.

As a woman who has been trying for literal decades to exist in traditionally male nerdy spaces, there are a LOT of asshole gatekeeper guys that keep the women away. I’ve gotten everything from inquisitions into my “nerd cred” to outright rape threats from guys in nerdy and gaming communities.

Brains are very finicky things and they get very upset if there’s any disruption in their supply of glucose and oxygen, but anesthetics are carefully selected to not disrupt that as much as possible. Anesthesia might paralyze the muscles you use to breathe, but that’s what the intubation and ventilator is for. The anesthetics we use don’t affect the heart muscle because it uses different ions and chemicals than every other type of muscle in the body to generate contractions. However, open heart surgery will absolutely mess with the heart which will disrupt circulation.

I would wager that it’s more to do with the surgery itself. Even transient hypoxia from blood not getting to your brain for a little bit can make a big difference. Anesthesia is used very frequently with rare complications, but complex heart surgeries have higher complication rates.

This looks like a great recommendation, thank you!

I have to know all of the medications for my board exams, but knowing what bullshit the pharma companies are advertising would be useful. There’s a lot of people who will ask for Ozempic and then be horrified when they learn about the side effects (or the price of the medication). I worry a lot about the “compounding pharmacies” that will mail people knock-off Ozempic with minimal medical oversight. It’s just a matter of time before someone gets killed by the pancreatitis or something.

One account in the milieu isn’t going to make that much of a difference.

That will actually be helpful towards the weird stuff that men get into in addition to wholly unnecessary “hormone replacement therapy” (aka juicing on steroids)

That’s actually super helpful. I’ll need a few “content creators” to seed the dummy account with.

That will be a good downtime activity, but I also want to know what the algorithms are shoveling.

Signing up for emailing lists is probably a good place to start. I also accidentally subscribed to an RFK apologist Substack when it was recommending health-related writers to me.

Dr. Oz and Oprah are featured in Behind The Bastards for a reason. Oprah actually got a 7-episode mini-series.

I’ll be looking into free versions of Chat GPT and the like. And I like the idea of AI summaries of Joe Rogan because I don’t think I could actually listen to him without having an actual aneurysm.

That covers some things, but the algorithm feeds people such nonsense at such a high rate that it’s hard to keep up with.

Truth social is one I hadn’t thought of. I should also look into getting on an emailing list from Goop.

Bookmarked on my personal accounts because then I’ll have access to full text articles through my institutional subscription when I go digging. :)

I do ask them, but some of the things they say/ask about are just so baffling that I’d like to know about it ahead of time so I know what to respond with or recommend instead. Also, it’s kind of along the lines of needing to know all the slang terms for drugs so I know what they’re talking about when they OD on something or take something that interferes with their actual medications.

It hurts my soul that this is actually a good addition.

I got a Firefox plugin to block Gemini results because whenever I look up something for my medical studies, it runs a really high chance of spitting out garbage or outright lies when I really just wanted the google result for the NIH StatPearls article on the thing.

As a medical professional, generative AI and search adjuncts like Gemini only make my job harder.

“Then” means that you will be doing something subsequently. “Than” means that you will be doing something instead of something else. Normally this is a grammatical nitpick, but it actually changes the meaning of your sentence by using the wrong word.