nurseaverse

talk to your coworkers about this. remember that the "taking advice from everyone except the experts" thing cuts both ways. you can be the non-expert guy at work who isnt an expert and gives someone advice they decide to follow based on vibes, but your advice can be the right advice instead. this is something we can all do.

This means:

If you draw a hard line between "drug" and "medicine" based on current legality where you live (or any other criteria) you've gone wrong somewhere,

If you think legality and/or prescription status tells you all you need about a substance's capacity to do massive harm to someone's body, mind or well-being you've gone wrong somewhere,

If you think legality and/or prescription status tells you all you need about a substance's capacity to contribute meaningfully to someone's healing, function or happiness you've gone wrong somewhere,

Women wanted to be lawyers and engineers and chemists. They wanted to use their brains in challenging and interesting ways. They wanted to get the satisfaction from solving problems and inventing new shit and getting attention for it.

The way I explain it to my patients is that our neurons don’t regenerate. They make connections with each other and that’s it. If you don’t use your brain, they make fewer connections and, if one of them dies, you’re gonna miss it, because that was the only one that knew how to do X. Now, if each one of them has many, many connections, you won’t notice the difference when one of them dies. The others pick up the slack.

As of 2024, 45% of dementia risk factors are modifiable. Relevant to this conversation, 5% for less education and 5% for social isolation.

We absolutely are going to see the reflection of this, but it’s gonna take decades and it’ll be too late. So, for the love of your brain, pretend that it’s a muscle and make it work. People complain about “when am I ever gonna use this maths formula in my life?” You’re not. You’re teaching your brain to think logically. Those sinapses will be there for when you need to figure out your week’s schedule. English classes taught me how to interpret data and how to convey it in this text so it’s clear and you understand what I’m saying, not because I needed to justify why the curtain is blue.

Make your brain know how to do different things. Logic games, puzzles, taking care of a garden even if small, planning a church’s event or birthday, learn a new instrument, learn a few words in another language, look at a calendar every day, do some manual labor if possible. Do not, I repeat, do not let your brain get rid of sinapses by letting AI do everything. Your brain uses 20% of your body’s energy — do you really think it’s going to maintain connexions that aren’t in use?

Most cases of Alzheimer’s are sporadic, meaning no family history. Family history of a first-degree relative with Alzheimer’s starting before they were 80yo increases your risk in 2-3x on average.

One shot of alcohol won't kill you, not would it necessarily kill the bartender.

The Trump administration is now pursuing "the most serious effort in decades to curb contraception," said Mary Ziegler. The Department of Health and Human Services recently unveiled an overhaul to its Title X grant program that promotes "natural family planning" over the birth control pill, IUDs, and other means of contraception. The administration is also expected to strip all remaining federal funding from Planned Parenthood, a major provider of contraception. Opposing birth control should be "a political third rail," as 90% of Americans support widespread access. But President Trump is under pressure from the "unwieldy political coalition" of social conservatives, MAHA zealots, and anti-immigrant extremists who want Americans to have more children. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr's MAHA movement claims that contraceptive pills and implants are "artificial" and unsafe. Instead, his department is now promoting fertility and pregnancy; for family planning, it recommends the "rhythm method" and unreliable tracking apps. Taking a hostile stance toward birth control helps Trump appease religious conservatives before the midterms. "Contraception has gone from being politically untouchable to a real target on the Right."

But

Meanwhile, according to a 2016 study on retired boxers, about 11% of all retired boxers examined had a mild case of CTE, and about 6% of the boxers had major neurological problems. And if you just looked at boxers who were over the age of 50 and fought in over 150 fights, the rate of CTE went up to 50%. (2)

I’m sorry, but it is absolutely reasonable for a boxing fan to say that American football should be illegal due to the injury risk, because American football is a much more dangerous sport than boxing in relation to the risk of traumatic brain injury.

And if you’re surprised to learn that American football is more dangerous than the sport where you literally punch each other. Well. I’d say that that’s part of the problem, actually.

(1) Mez J, Daneshvar DH, Kiernan PT, et al. (25 July 2017).

To be clear, I personally don’t think that it’s necessary to outright ban American football. There are a huge number of things that we could do to make the sport dramatically safer, short of just banning it altogether! But I think that part of the issue is precisely that people don’t know the relative risks of these things. Many fewer parents are comfortable letting their kids play the “hit each other in the head” sport than are comfortable letting their kids play American football, and that’s absolutely an issue of informed consent.

While it is overwhelmingly focused on the NFL, it does also get into how dangerous football is for young kids. Which they could research because they tragically have some kids die young for unrelated reasons and researchers got to look at these teens and 20 somethings brains. And they had signs of damage. Even in some people that had never had a concussion reported.

Basically its cumulative damage via deceleration... not just concussion. Kids that haven't gone through puberty yet are particularly susceptible to damage done *below* the threshold for a concussion because they haven't fully developed neck strength. So anything with a lot of sudden sharp deceleration via collision where they may effectively get whiplash (or just below diagnosable whiplash) is the culprit.

So it's not the time they got a concussion, it's doing repeated tackling drills with the sudden stop. The helmet doesn't help, because damage is due to brain moving inside skull due to the sudden stop. Helmet helps vs collision vs a secondary object but not just sudden stops.

Teens and adults are at lower risk because of greater muscle mass that can absorb more of the force safely, but still AT risk because when they DO tackle... they have a lot more mass which means a lot more force is involved. Its sheer physics. A little more resistant to the low speed collisions, but engaging in far more high speed, high force ones.

Which is also some of why football is more dangerous than boxing. You've got full body mass accelerating/decelerating.

Force = Mass X acceleration

a boxer isn't using his full mass or running speed, so even though its a direct head strike... its still got less force applied than quarterback getting plowed by a linebacker. And just by the nature of boxing, routine practice is not involving head strikes or rapid deceleration of the head with near the force of someone plowing into a tackling dummy.

Overall young kids shouldn't play tackle football. It's not necessarily a hit in game that's the risk, its repeated drills in practice that aren't done in a safe way. With insufficient rest in between. brains are really delicate and heal slowly from even minor trauma you can't see. teens & adults likely aren't getting near enough rest to recover either, especially for routine practice cumulative stress. There's techniques to make it safer but it's never really safe because of the cumulative nature of damage without time to fully heal in between.

Football is, unfortunately, often the only way some teens can get scholarships to try and get out of where they are... all while destroying the ability to benefit from same scholarship. Same kind of trap as military recruiting.