Health Problems

Theres a sorta silent epidemic of colon cancers in younger folks that seems to be worsening. Your insurance should pay for a screening colonoscopy starting at age 45 now, I’d highly recommend getting one. I wouldn’t trust anything but a camera up your ass until we have more data on the newer poop labs

Captain Suave said:

14 daily doses of miralax in 2 hours. It is... effective.

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You didn't forget your 4 bisacodyl pills on top of that did you?

I'd make fun of you but I prepped today (yesterday at this point) too, although my instructions had me taking the powder at quite a bit wider of an interval than 2 hours. 2 bisacodyl at 3pm, mix the miralax with 64oz of fluid (pretty sure almost everyone uses gatorade) and put it in the fridge, start drinking 32 oz of it at 5pm, pop two more bisacodyl when thats finished, then start the other 32 oz at 10pm. I wouldn't say I'm having a good time but it's definitely been easier than the nightmare I went through prepping last year. and yes, im stuck getting these fucking things yearly for the time being.

weeeeeelp.

Turns out the proper followup for what they found at last years entrail expedition was 3 years, not 1. Thank god the prep wasn't as bad this year or I might have snapped at the doc but instead I was just relieved to not have to undergo sedation. I certainly wasn't going to insist on a medically unnecessary surgery no matter how minor the procedure is and I actually thought it was kind of weird that they would have gone ahead and done it if I insisted.

So last year when I saw my surgeon's last name I immediately looked up her qualifications and I swear to god that I saw an American medical school listed, and it seemed to be a respectable one too when I dug into it. When I double-checked her qualifications just now it instead lists a fucking med school in India with an American residency and I swear that's not what I saw last year. She's no longer employed at the hospital and I was handled by a proper east Asian surgeon this time who was apologetic without being obsequious and professional enough to not throw his former colleague under the bus, although it seemed clear to me from reading between the lines that this was her fuckup.

Really illustrates what a rollercoaster/shitshow the healthcare system can be sometimes. The only reason I got last year's colonoscopy was because an incompetent/lazy ER doc did a half-assed examination of my ass and couldn't find an external source for the bleeding at the time and attributed it to an internal source (it absolutely was external). So an ER doc's fuckup led to a medically unnecessary surgery which found moderately serious problems that retroactively justified the surgery, and then that surgeon scheduled me for another medically unnecessary surgery which I was saved from by my new surgeon doing proper diligence on the medical notes from my previous procedure.

Cutlery said:

I totally understand due diligence and proper healthcare schedules and shit, but it is REALLY hard to take seriously when you hear about so many of these incompetence related fuckups from an industry that should have way more competence than not.

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The ultimate irony being that the incompetence of the original ER doc may very well have saved my life.

Scope done. All is well in the 'ol colon. I have never enjoyed a salad so much in my life.

Captain Suave said:

Scope done. All is well in the 'ol colon. I have never enjoyed a salad so much in my life.

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I went straight for a mushroom and swiss. My mouth was very pleased but my stomach is politely reminding me that maybe I should have started off with something like crackers.

All i can say after having about 4 colonoscopies is stay away from the low volume sodium based laxatives-- ClenPIQ I believe is the last one I took. Insist on the miralax based one and just chug that shit. ClenPIQ dehydrated the living fuck out of me and gave me the worst headache of my life.

IMHO the worst part of a colonoscopy isn't the prep or the procedure, it's being an idiot and not making your appointment for first thing in the AM. You're going to be up much of the night anyways, so having to further starve/dehydrate yourself until noon or whatever is killer. Make your appointment for 7am.

PS: Every 3 years means they found a pre-cancerous polyp. When/if you go again and they don't find one it gets set back to every 5, or at least it was for me.

Frenzied Wombat said:

IMHO the worst part of a colonoscopy isn't the prep or the procedure, it's being an idiot and not making your appointment for first thing in the AM.

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Mine was at 1:30 PM, not that bad. I did the major round of prep starting at 5pm the day before and it tapered off enough that I could get some sleep. Did the third round as soon as I was up in the morning. The extra 12h without food kidna sucked, but I was so zonked out by everything anyway that I barely noticed.

Captain Suave said:

Mine was t 1:30 PM, not that bad. I did the major round of prep starting at 5pm the day before and it tapered off enough that I could get some sleep. Did the third round as soon as I was up in the morning. The extra 12h without food kidna sucked, but I was so zonked out by everything anyway that I barely noticed.

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Yeah, having to make it from 7am to 1:30PM for me with no food, and most of all no morning coffee, would be fucking torture.

LiquidDeath said:

There is no evidence that stations reduce heart attacks. They reduce cholesterol and have horrific side effects.

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Bullshit


If you want to find studies to support a pre-determined viewpoint you can definitely find them but the overwhelming data behind statin therapy is that it works for people at risk of CV disease IMO

Kithani said:

Bullshit

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(16)31357-5/fulltext

If you want to find studies to support a pre-determined viewpoint you can definitely find them but the overwhelming data behind statin therapy is that it works for people at risk of CV disease IMO

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That study doesn't say what you think it says.

Statins lower your cholesterol, period. There is no evidence that lowering cholesterol lowers your risk of future heart attacks, there is only a cherry-picked correlation between "high" cholesterol and heart attacks because people with unhealthy lifestyles tend to have higher cholesterol. The people publishing these papers can't even square the fact that the relationship between dietary and serum cholesterol is a mystery to medical science at this point in time, but they are dead sure that reducing dietary cholesterol definitely reduces serum cholesterol and that is definitely a good thing.

Feel free to link any kind of evidence that high cholesterol is causative of heart attacks. I'll wait.

LiquidDeath said:

There is no evidence that lowering cholesterol lowers your risk of future heart attacks, there is only a cherry-picked correlation between "high" cholesterol and heart attacks

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Reduction of LDL cholesterol with a statin reduced the risk of major vascular events (RR 0·79, 95% CI 0·77–0·81, per 1·0 mmol/L reduction), largely irrespective of age, sex, baseline LDL cholesterol or previous vascular disease, and of vascular and all-cause mortality.

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Ok

Frenzied Wombat said:

Yeah, having to make it from 7am to 1:30PM for me with no food, and most of all no morning coffee, would be fucking torture.

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I already hadn't eaten since Saturday (36h) and coffee was allowed on my prep until three hours pre-anesthesia. I was so hypoglycemic I probably could have gone for another 24 hr and not felt worse.

Edit: If anyone is doing this in the future, invest in a bidet. Your asshole will thank you.

Kithani said:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(12)60367-5/fulltext

Ok

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First, one article with no replication isn't evidence of causation, so fuck off with all that. **EDIT** I take this one back, I was looking at the old article and not the linked one which is a meta analysis of 22 studies up to 2012.

Second, I see bullshit article from 2016 and raise you a meta analysis of 21 such articles from 2022:

Findings In this meta-analysis of 21 randomized clinical trials in primary and secondary prevention that examined the efficacy of statins in reducing total mortality and cardiovascular outcomes, there was significant heterogeneity but also reductions in the absolute risk of 0.8% for all-cause mortality, 1.3% for myocardial infarction, and 0.4% for stroke in those randomized to treatment with statins compared with control, with relative risk reductions of 9%, 29%, and 14%, respectively. A meta-regression was inconclusive regarding the association between the magnitude of statin-induced LDL-C reduction and all-cause mortality, myocardial infarction, or stroke.

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Regardless, nobody with a brain gives a shit about any of the studies of these cash-cow drugs now that we know they are entirely fake and gay.

The same medical doctors publishing this shit are the same doctors who have overseen a more than half decade epidemic of uncontrolled obesity and heart disease by telling us that we should eat more processed carbs, refined sugar, and chemically extracted seed oils and also limit our intake red meat. If you want to keep taking their advice and fuck yourself up by decreasing your LDL with statins, when all available evidence shows that all-cause mortality is only increased at severely elevated levels, but also at relatively low levels versus what most doctors want to see then fucking go for it. Don't act like I'm the idiot for not believe a single goddamn thing they say, though, when the majority of medical professionals are clinically obese but they definitely know why you are unhealthy.


Before anyone says anything, I don't even trust that JAMA analysis I linked. These meta-analyses pull together a whole lot of data in very obtuse ways and present them as if every paper was researching the same problem with the same methods, which is obviously bullshit. The replication crisis in science is real because they just want to fund new shit instead of trying to verify the old shit was right in the first place.

I haven’t researched it at all but my cholesterol is through the roof and my doc says since my calcium score is zero on a catscan there’s no need for statins.

Frenzied Wombat said:

I haven’t researched it at all but my cholesterol is through the roof and my doc says since my calcium score is zero on a catscan there’s no need for statins.

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My doctor says the same. A CAC score is the best medical indicator we have to predict future heart attacks.

Anyone have a breakdown of various lasik/smile/PRK etc Annoys the fuck out of me that they arn't covered under vision insurance etc, but that's a giant racket by VSP when they own most of the stores and factories.

Wife and I both intersted, I want least chance of fucking me up, but then again if ones 2k vs 10k guess that makes a difference when out of pocket.

Cutlery said:

My buddy that offed himself earlier in the year had it done. His eyes were dry as fuck for the entire time he was alive afterwards. He said it wasn't quite enough to make him regret it, but honestly, I think if he had lived a little longer he might be on that train now.

I've seen plenty of people that they work for, but it's always seemed like such a huge risk to me. I'll pass and just stick with contacts I can wear for a month straight.

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Take em out at night? That's the big headache for me. And my dailies give me dry eyes on top of already I feel like having kinda dry eyes.

For everything to gun stuff, to trying to wear my respirator doing various farm shit and mowing fields, not wearing glasses would be a major plus. If I lose my glasses I can't even drive I'm mega blind