AND a race one since the most affected regions will be Africa, Asia and Oceania

as a friend pointed out, this headline makes it sound like supply will be dwindling. supply is fine. people will be *priced out*.

this is fucking MURDER.

insulin has been mass produced (from animal extracts) since -1923-. slow acting insulin has existed since the ‘50s, and ‘human’ genetically engineered insulin (derived from E. coli bacteria) has existed since 1982.

insulin treatment for diabetes is not some new or ‘unproven’ treatment. according to beyondtype1, “Humalog rapid-acting insulin came on to the market with a list price of $21 a vial in 1997.” adjusting for inflation, a vial these days should cost about $34 at most. instead, it costs over $300. there is NO reason for it to be steadily gaining in price to the point that diabetics are unable to afford their lifesaving medication, other than the sheer inhuman greed of pharmaceutical manufacturers.

let me reiterate: life without insulin (for Type 1 diabetics in particular) is a slow and painful death sentence. the ability to treat diabetes is a relatively modern phenomenon that has allowed countless people to live full, healthy lives. we should be expanding full covereage and access to insulin to diabetics the world over, and it should be FREE.

Have y’all heard about Open Insulin Foundation?

“ We’re a team of biohackers with a variety of backgrounds, and skills, and relationships to insulin and diabetes from many cities and countries around the world, including Oakland, California; Baltimore, Maryland; Paraiba, Brazil; Dakar, Senegal; Yaounde, Cameroon; and Puerto Rico. We’re working to develop the first practical, small-scale, community-centered model for insulin production to make insulin accessible to all. We envision a world in which communities in need have local sources of safe, affordable, high-quality insulin, and where people living with diabetes and their communities can own and govern the organizations that produce the medicine they depend on to survive. 

What We Do

We are creating an open-source (freely available) model for insulin production that centers on sustainable, small-scale manufacturing and open-source alternatives to production. We are developing protocols to produce short-acting (lispro) and long-acting (glargine) insulin, working on developing open-hardware equivalents to traditional production equipment, are researching sustainable regulation pathways to bring our insulin to the public, and are building capacities for local, small-scale manufacturing.

How Do I Participate?

Our work would not be possible without the support of volunteers, interns, and community advisors. We welcome people of all backgrounds from all over the world to bring their enthusiasm, time, connections, and experiences, both in life and in work. Our volunteers promote us on social media, build equipment, run experiments, write reports and blog posts, facilitate meetings, connect with other organizations and groups, meet with experts in the field, run virtual events, and contribute in designing tools, resources, and methods of all sorts.

Potential Partners

We welcome collaboration with other groups that share our mission―community labs, academic institutions, patient advocacy groups, and NGOs.

Donate

Your donation will help us get closer to our goal. With a healthy financial situation, we can pay for lab supplies, acquire lab equipment, recruit scientists, and pay for consultation fees for regulation and manufacturing experts.”

Open Insulin Foundation

A doctor discovers an important question patients should be asked

This patient isn’t usually mine, but today I’m covering for my partner in our family-practice office, so he has been slipped into my schedule.

Reading his chart, I have an ominous feeling that this visit won’t be simple.

A tall, lanky man with an air of quiet dignity, he is 88. His legs are swollen, and merely talking makes him short of breath.

He suffers from both congestive heart failure and renal failure. It’s a medical Catch-22: When one condition is treated and gets better, the other condition gets worse. His past year has been an endless cycle of medication adjustments carried out by dueling specialists and punctuated by emergency-room visits and hospitalizations.

Hemodialysis would break the medical stalemate, but my patient flatly refuses it. Given his frail health, and the discomfort and inconvenience involved, I can’t blame him.

Now his cardiologist has referred him back to us, his primary-care providers. Why send him here and not to the ER? I wonder fleetingly.

With us is his daughter, who has driven from Philadelphia, an hour away. She seems dutiful but wary, awaiting the clinical wisdom of yet another doctor.

After 30 years of practice, I know that I can’t possibly solve this man’s medical conundrum.

A cardiologist and a nephrologist haven’t been able to help him, I reflect,so how can I? I’m a family doctor, not a magician. I can send him back to the ER, and they’ll admit him to the hospital. But that will just continue the cycle… .

Still, my first instinct is to do something to improve the functioning of his heart and kidneys. I start mulling over the possibilities, knowing all the while that it’s useless to try.

Then I remember a visiting palliative-care physician’s words about caring for the fragile elderly: “We forget to ask patients what they want from their care. What are their goals?”

I pause, then look this frail, dignified man in the eye.

“What are your goals for your care?” I ask. “How can I help you?”

The patient’s desire

My intuition tells me that he, like many patients in their 80s, harbors a fund of hard-won wisdom.

He won’t ask me to fix his kidneys or his heart, I think. He’ll say something noble and poignant: “I’d like to see my great-granddaughter get married next spring,” or “Help me to live long enough so that my wife and I can celebrate our 60th wedding anniversary.”

His daughter, looking tense, also faces her father and waits.

“I would like to be able to walk without falling,” he says. “Falling is horrible.”

This catches me off guard.

That’s all?

But it makes perfect sense. With challenging medical conditions commanding his caregivers’ attention, something as simple as walking is easily overlooked.

A wonderful geriatric nurse practitioner’s words come to mind: “Our goal for younger people is to help them live long and healthy lives; our goal for older patients should be to maximize their function.”

Suddenly I feel that I may be able to help, after all.

“We can order physical therapy — and there’s no need to admit you to the hospital for that,” I suggest, unsure of how this will go over.

He smiles. His daughter sighs with relief.

“He really wants to stay at home,” she says matter-of-factly.

As new as our doctor-patient relationship is, I feel emboldened to tackle the big, unspoken question looming over us.

“I know that you’ve decided against dialysis, and I can understand your decision,” I say. “And with your heart failure getting worse, your health is unlikely to improve.”

He nods.

“We have services designed to help keep you comfortable for whatever time you have left,” I venture. “And you could stay at home.”

Again, his daughter looks relieved. And he seems … well … surprisingly fine with the plan.

I call our hospice service, arranging for a nurse to visit him later today to set up physical therapy and to begin plans to help him to stay comfortable — at home.

Back home

Although I never see him again, over the next few months I sign the order forms faxed by his hospice nurses. I speak once with his granddaughter. It’s somewhat hard on his wife to have him die at home, she says, but he’s adamant that he wants to stay there.

A faxed request for sublingual morphine (used in the terminal stages of dying) prompts me to call to check up on him.

The nurse confirms that he is near death.

I feel a twinge of misgiving: Is his family happy with the process that I set in place? Does our one brief encounter qualify me to be his primary-care provider? Should I visit them all at home?

Two days later, and two months after we first met, I fill out his death certificate.

Looking back, I reflect: He didn’t go back to the hospital, he had no more falls, and he died at home, which is what he wanted. But I wonder if his wife felt the same.

Several months later, a new name appears on my patient schedule: It’s his wife.

“My family all thought I should see you,” she explains.

She, too, is in her late 80s and frail, but independent and mentally sharp. Yes, she is grieving the loss of her husband, and she’s lost some weight. No, she isn’t depressed. Her husband died peacefully at home, and it felt like the right thing for everyone.

“He liked you,” she says.

She’s suffering from fatigue and anemia. About a year ago, a hematologist diagnosed her with myelodysplasia (a bone marrow failure, often terminal). But six months back, she stopped going for medical care.

I ask why.

“They were just doing more and more tests,” she says. “And I wasn’t getting any better.”

Now I know what to do. I look her in the eye and ask:

“What are your goals for your care, and how can I help you?”

-Mitch Kaminski

Source

A beautifully written account of what it is like to be a good doctor, whose only concern is: “how can I help”.

The best doctors I have ever worked for have asked this.

im not even joking rn this fucking painting made me start uncontrollably sobbing. Do you know how long it took to paint? How expensive it was? The cat was content for hours and so loved that the girl held him there and paid for him to be painted with her. Imagine having such a bond… imagine being so loved and loving so much back…

Apparently this is almost a genre of painting. Its human nature to love and cradle cats …. And the bond these cats and their people have. To sit together for hours to get a painting to attempt to immortalize the love you two shared

i think i’ll continue to wear a mask when this shit’s all over, and huge sunglasses. my face is none of your business

post quarantine looks

i was going through wikipedia and other archives while i was bored at work the other day and found out chuck e cheese used to be a cigar smoking smartass back in the day

but 90s kid syndrome hit and this happened

so now all I can see is an old smoker voiced rat trying to be hip

Man found the stoplight cameras were activated during yellow lights and decided to cut the wires of it.

Florida Man: Chaotic evil. New York Man: Chaotic good.

Holy shit. Nah dude look up the entire story, it’s INSANE.

The dude got arrested once before this for using a painter’s extension rod to point the stoplight cameras into the sky instead of cutting the wires. He didn’t cut the wires until AFTER he got out after being arrested the first time–which he did after posting facebook videos that prove that the stoplights are intentionally rigged to trick drivers into citations–the yellow lights at intersections with cameras only last THREE SECONDS, as opposed to the five seconds they last at other stoplights without cameras in the same county.

When he cut the camera cords, he reported his deeds to the news -himself,- and then politicians pressured the local police force into arresting him. The local police and sheriff deputies actually SUPPORT him for his actions because the lights have been killing innocent people! During his most recent arrest, one of the Sheriff’s Deputies actually -offered to bail him out-. When he got home again after these incidents, there was a surveillance camera planted at his house BY THE GOVERNMENT to watch him! His reaction to being surveilled? He painted over the camera in America’s flat out fucking ballsiest “fuck you” to the gubmint I’ve ever heard of. And it gets EVEN CRAZIER. After painting over the camera, suddenly this guy–his name is Stephen Ruth by the way–started GETTING ATTEMPTS ON HIS LIFE. He reports that a car intentionally tried to hit him in a head-on collision, and after talking about the car to his neighbors, they confirmed that the car in question (Or at least, one that was visibly identical, its occupants included) had been staking out his house! Somebody was legitimately trying to MURDER HIM over his discovery and his actions!

As a final insult to injury, Ruth pointed out that the VAST majority of the cameras were found SPECIFICALLY in lower-to-middle-class neighborhoods. As well, the victims of these rigged stoplights tried to go to the local news station to talk about the deaths of their family members that occurred from the rigging. Aaaand… The local station, “News12″, never aired their interviews. Remember how I said that, after cutting the cables and calling the local news station, Ruth was arrested because of pressure from politicians? Get this: News12 is actually owned by CableVision, who PROVIDES INTERNET SERVICE TO THE CAMERAS.  Whereas mister Ruth was only trying to help people and save lives, he’s been caught up in a full-blown fucking government conspiracy that’s out for his blood. This guy isn’t Robin Hood, he makes Robin Hood look like a -CHUMP-.

Totally not us.

Love that in a lot of classic literature people just “randomly” fall ill but bro their homes were stacked to the roof with arsenic and asbestos and lead and radium of course they were sick all the time.

And then they’re like “we took my ill wife to the seaside and her condition improved remarkably” and it’s like Edward your house has seven time bombs in it please just leave your wife at the seaside and she’ll do very well not getting mesothelioma.

Edward your wife may be entitled to financial compensation

in Finland, it is illegal to kill a bear when it’s hibernating. If you ask a hunter why that is, a number of them will tell you it’s wrong simply because it is the law, and they don’t make a distinction between what is right, and what is legal. Most people like that are perfectly normal, decent and respectable people, just like the rest of us.

 But if you ask people who think about things, the answer is vague. Killing a hibernating bear would just feel… impolite? You can’t fucking shoot a man when he’s sleeping, that’s just fucking rude. It’s just not the right thing to do.

 Long before hunting laws were established in Finland, you couldn’t kill a sleeping bear, and what commands you is something older than law: tradition. Even at a time when hunting was a matter of life and death, and a bear fighting for its life is mainly a matter of death, you just didn’t kill a hibernating bear, you have to wake it up first. Hunters risked their lives, the lives of their brothers and everyone in the hunting party, who were friends, family and men that they loved, to give the bear a fighting chance.

 In the modern time, the hunting season of bears is in the summer, for the warmest summer months. There are many reasons for why they are allowed to tread safely in autumn and to sleep in peace through the cold months, almost all of which are rational and scientific, and do not touch the old traditions.

 Old faith says a living thing has many souls - henki, luonto, itse. Plants only have one - the one that wills them to grow. Animals have two, both the spark of life and nature that enables them to act. A human being also has the third, one that makes them a person, personality, itse, literally “self”. But the soul that travels in your dreams is not the soul that defines a human - animals have that one as well. When your dog runs in her sleep, her soul is elsewhere, where a dog is needed.

 One’s waking soul is elsewhere when they sleep and dream. A bear’s soul is somewhere else when they are hibernating - there are two words for “hibernation” in finnish, one of which is talviuni, “winter sleep”, and that is the one that bears have - and if you kill a sleeping bear, their soul is not in the body, it is still out there, and it can find you, and as a revenge for killing its body, Ghost Bear will kill your entire fucking family.

MEGAN FOX Let’s Unpack That | InStyle

you people will just. say anything

#Tbf tho the bechdel test is pretty shitty #Like dgmw this is a stupid take but it's a lame test anyway

okay but do you understand that liz wallace made the bechdel-WALLACE test because she was a dyke who wanted to go to movies and pretend the characters were dykes and her friend alison bechdel happened to put her silly little litmus assessment into a comic strip and then the rest of everyone else decided it was a bona fide way of means testing media for Feminist Content? do you know that? it doesn't sound like you know that

some of you are the dumbest motherfuckers alive

"What if the conditions for passing were the opposite?" is... not a counterargument...

Too many people don’t understand that this test is a joke, and I mean that literally. It was published in a comic strip, with a very clear joke structure. There is a setup: The simplest, most basic, most entry-level test for whether women are treated like normal people in a movie imaginable. And there is a punchline: The world is so sexist that the vast majority of movies fail even at this super-easy test. It’s the kind of joke you laugh at because the world is shitty.

(And the few movies that do pass the test often do so by accident. The original comic strip had the punchline that Alien or Aliens passed because Ripley talked with the alien queen.)

People keep treating it like it’s this huge feminist thing that’s super important to judge whether a movie is good or not. And then other people keep pointing out that it doesn’t actually work for that. They’re right. But that’s because it was never meant to.

This test is the most simple, most meaningless hurdle for depiction of women in media to clear. The absolute bare minimum. That’s because it originally was the setup for a joke. Today, it is only useful if it is the start for a discussion of women in media; not the end of it. And I think it’s still very useful for that.

A good point to help visualise this is the inverse test: How many movies have two men, who have names, and talk to each other, about something other than a woman? Well, all of them, give or take a few. That imbalance is really the issue here.

It doesn’t really matter that much whether any given movie passes or not. What really matters is that not passing this is, still, the normal default case.

Listen, at some point during this quarantine you might watch Tiger King on Netflix. I'm here to tell you that whatever memes you've seen, whatever people have told you, or whatever you think it's about from the trailer,,,, nothing, and I mean NOTHING in heaven and earth Horatio, can fully prepare you for the amount of whiplash this crazy dumpster fire of a show gives you every 3 seconds from the 5000mph curve balls it's throwing.