Have them smile is very key for the face one. Faces aren’t perfectly symmetric. People often use the phrase facial droop which is a somewhat misleading phrase. Older individuals with looser skin and wrinkles there may be a “droop” but not otherwise. It’s really the lack of activation of the lower facial muscles on one side that helps you tell. Facial muscles help move the side of your mouth both up and down, and they both get weak in a stroke affecting the face. So unless someone has a lot of loose skin it’ll probably just look kind of flat. So again, have them smile, the inability to elevate the corner of the mouth or decreased ability to do so is key.
There’s also a lot of misleading graphics out there with upper facial weakness too, like inability to close the eye. That can happen with certain strokes, but it’s much more common for only the lower face muscles to be weak, with the eye and forehead muscles being fine.
Here’s a good example of what it’ll usually look like irl:
This is someone trying to smile, the side affected by the stroke would be the person’s right side (left side of the picture), not the side that’s “drooping” that’s actually the normal side.
You’re not wrong. It’s still an important step for the field though. Having a net positive within the reaction itself could theoretically mean eventually the energy from the reaction can help sustain the reaction after the initial higher activation energy. But with the poor state of science journalism the result was reported with extreme hyperbole.
Unfortunately doctors have no magic fixes for back pain related to muscular strains or degenerative disease/arthritis, which is most back pain. Treatments are basically physical therapy and nsaid medications. Surgery for low back pain from degenerative disease/arthritis alone has poor evidence with most randomized trials suggesting no difference. Even opiates fail to show any superiority over nsaids (like ibuprofen or naproxen) for back pain. Not saying don’t see your doctor about bad persistent back pain, there’s always edge cases or bizarre causes that may need addressing. But unfortunately no magic bullet for the vast majority of typical low back pain.
Review on surgery indications in back pain ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10107811/#mja251…
Randomized trial of opioid and nsiads in back pain, hip pain, and knee pain from degenerative disease/arthritis pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29509867/
Also, I know it’s a meme, but the billing code doctors use for even the most complicated of visits going over an hour and involving multiple potentially life threatening conditions or treatments isn’t anywhere close to $3000. Let alone a visit for routine back pain which wouldn’t qualify for anything like the highest billing codes.
Exactly. I was a big fan of the Batman, adapting the neo noir feel really helped it stand out.
Disney is kind of starting to figure this out on the star wars side with Andor and the Mandalorian. Creating unique stories with varying, structure, genre and tone. Every marvel movie just feels so generic and blends into every other, gets boring. Wanda vision had a glimmer of genius before devolving back to generic marvel meh stuff.
People say the content of the meme in all seriousness all the time too is mainly why, thinking the doctor is responsible for that cost. I didn’t want it to become an attack on OP though, not my intent. And maybe my comments will encourage more wholesome memes about evil health care administrators and insurance company execs instead, the true enemy, haha.
It depends on the journal. I’ve only published in medical related journals, but some journals don’t charge a fee if the article remains closed access. Some journals just have an embargo period, so you may be free to republish to pubmed central or something similar after a year or two. Open access of course always costs money, or more if they do charge a publishing fee. A lot of nih grants have requirements to make it open access within a year, so some publishers at least are just embargoing for a year now.
You’re right it wasn’t a very scholarly article, that article was just the first thing that pops up on a Google search meant for people who weren’t familiar with Olestra, was mostly intended as a joke.
To take it more seriously though, a lot of those studies took place after a formulation change, so the later incarnations may have been better. It’s also possible that some of the reports came from people consuming large amounts of it at once. The studies I saw that didn’t show much difference all had a relatively small amount of chips ingested (see studies cited by article here www.acsh.org/news/1996/…/whats-the-story-olestra#…), for instance one of these studies was a double blind crossover with only 2 Oz of chips. I’m not aware of studies that would simulate downing a whole can of Pringles with Olestra at once. It was often included in snack foods that people don’t always moderate themselves on. Many of these studies, like the one you cite, were run by the manufacturer so important to be skeptical of the methods. They apparently started to fortify it with fat soluble vitamins to address concerns it could exacerbate deficiencies of those vitamins (besides basic science which should logically suggest this would happen, there’s evidence to back that up as well jn.nutrition.org/article/…/fulltext). The principle of every stool softener on the market now is that it’s something your body cannot absorb that will remain in the gi tract, eat enough Olestra or anything like it and it’ll have an impact on your stool consistency, just a matter of dosing. Animal studies also suggested it doesn’t cause weight loss and may even lead to increased weight. In the end it stopped being sold in the US altogether, because why go to all that trouble for something that probably doesn’t have any benefit.
It’s tough though, common symptoms are common. Many side effects you see on medications or things like Olestra may not even have anything to do with the product and were just coincidence or nocebo effect.
It’s not uncommon. Especially strokes affecting the non dominant side of the brain, people often don’t realize there’s anything wrong. Takes other people around you to tell to you that something is wrong.
You shouldn’t feel bad, it could happen to anyone. Just depends on where the stroke is in the brain if someone is capable of recognizing it themselves or not.
An especially difficult one for people to detect on their own is strokes that are affecting visual centers of the brain. People expect they’ll see black or something. But you don’t see anything at all, field of vision is just narrower. It’s like, you don’t see black out the back of your head normally right? Usually if people notice anything it’s that they’re bumping or tripping into stuff on one side, or like driving and get in a car accident because they’re not perceiving one half of what’s in front of them.
A US sting operation in cooperation with Thailand and Interpol caught him in 2008. He was eventually extradited and convicted in the US. In 2022 he was traded back to Russia in exchange for Brittney Griner.
It is covering it, for workers on average. Your employer is stiffing you compared to the rest of the economy then if you didn’t also get 20% of a raise compared to your salary in 2019.
Real wages in October 2019 (normalized to 1982-1984 dollars) were $10.95/hr on average in October 2019. In October 2023 (again normalized to 1982-1984 dollars) they were $11.05/hr (which is $34/hr in current dollars). So as we stand in October the inflation from 2019 to now has been fully compensated for in wages with a little bit of an increase in real dollars. Wages have been growing faster than inflation since January 2023. Hopefully that will continue as labor remains in high demand and unions continue to make gains. Union gains even help non unionized individuals in their industries whose employers also will have to give pay raises to remain competitive with union jobs.
Not saying even more couldn’t be done to combat things like income inequality and poverty and many other issues, things weren’t exactly perfect in 2019 either. Just frustrated by the current media narratives casting hyperbolic doom and gloom in the economy and the potential of that narrative to send trump back into the white house.
Those auto tldr summaries can be super random and misleading too regardless. The auto tldr summary doesn’t imply anything like this either. It’s just a section of the article with an expert making fun of whatever expert the DA hired who missed that it was a forgery and thought it was authentic. So it’s embarrassing because they told this country, he we recovered your priceless artifact and threw the guy in jail who smuggled it. And the country is like, oh well that’s nice but the artifact was never missing in the first place. If you want to comment on something at least read the article first, or you’ll just be spreading misleading clickbait headlines even more.
It’s big, not huge, but there’s not a lot of other big cities out west. In terms of metro area population, it falls right in between Detroit and Minneapolis.