For those of you who haven’t experienced crippling back pain, it is more intense than you can understand.
One time, I had to be dragged across the house on a blanket by my aging father to get to the power lift chair because I fell down trying to get out of bed.
Another time, I had a flare-up and had to lay in the bed of my truck while a friend drove me home because I couldn’t bend my leg to get in the car.
I’ve shit myself rather than try to get up and go to the bathroom because of the pain.
And yes, the insurance company tried to deny the epidural I received that probably ended up saving me from eventual suicide.
That one injection in my spine has kept the sciatica from affecting my legs and within 24 hours my life had changed.
And it took an extra 4 months because the insurance company at first denied it, then approved it, but only for a 2-day window so I couldn’t schedule the procedure, and I ended up having to go to the Board of Insurance twice.
4 months where I’d get flare-ups that made putting on pants an hour-long process. 4 months where I couldn’t visit friends because I didn’t want to risk getting stranded at their house unable to walk. 4 months where I could barely work because sitting at the computer was nearly impossible.
I hate violence, but if I’d have met one of the insurance company heads during those 4 months, I might have shot them.
I hurt my back doing construction. The company I sacrificed my back to wouldn’t cover the cost of my physical therapy. The pain has got me in trouble at other jobs too. I was in the lab and bent over to pick up something that fell on the ground only for my back pain to flare up again. The pain was so intense it took everything I had just to stand up again and then I could barely move. My coworkers and supervisor were very annoyed that I could barely move when there were criticals that I was working on.
Whenever I read about the US healthcare system I wonder why it’s CEOs are not gunned down every single day.
Well either federal government cancel their job with single player of some form or they will will keep getting gunned down. They literally radicalizing people every day and some of these people are smart and capable.
Boardrooms, not classrooms.
Kinda hard for radicalized people to do much when they’re confined to the state their condition has them in - or they die.
As someone with crippling migraines, I am never ever questioning how debilitating someone else’s pain is.
I get migraines - not as bad now, post menopause and on low dose daily HRT that seems to prevent most of them.
But absolutely the worst pain I’ve ever felt is migraine, and I’ve had unmedicated childbirth, broken bones, plenty of injuries, IUDs put in, nothing has even approached the pain level of a migraine. I used to not understand when the doctor would ask how bad it hurt on scale of 1-10 because it exists outside that scale.
Back pain I think is similar, but probably its own sort of hell because it immobilizes people.
That part about the pain scale is spot on. HRT and adequate anxiety and pain medication have made mine less common and intense too. I don’t know how or why though.
Imho the weirdest thing about migraines is when you’re 4 to 5 hours deep and suddenly your brain goes out in a bang. The pain subsides for a bit and you feel that weird euphoric feeling.
The third pain that can compare to that according to what I’ve heard is tooth ache. Although I’m blessed enough to never have had any issues in that department.
I think it just smooths out the ups and downs; birth control pills made mine so much worse, I didn’t realize it until I had to stop them, and it made me very wary of the HRT but it is the opposite effect somehow. Anti anxiety probably same, the main trigger I have now is relaxation - if I am busy or stressed, then it eases, I will wake up with a headache. So I’d imagine if the stress itself is interrupted and the intense relaxation also, that would help.
I’ve experienced migraines of all severity levels since I was a teenager. I have a top 5 list of the worst migraines I’ve ever experienced. Number 3 was the one where my husband found me sitting at the kitchen table with a spoon in my hand completely out of it. When he asked me what I was doing I told him I was considering gouging my eye out. Number 2 was the three days I lost to absence seizures. I actually called out of work twice within a few hours because my autopilot is strong and my brain was gone. I almost lost my job for that one. Number one was the time literally crawled through the house on my belly for the phone and gave up in the living room before passing out. All I can remember of that one was laying there feeling my heart beat in my fucking eyelashes for what felt like ages. That was the one that made me go see a neurologist. I would never ever not believe someone’s pain experience.
I used to get those too when I was younger. I don’t envy you a bit there. I haven’t had one in over 20 years and the memory of them still frightens me.
I’ve had exactly one migraine and at every spike of it I remembered those stories of people who shoot themselves because of pain and was sad in the moment (but happy after) that I didn’t have a gun cuz I’d have absolutely used it
I would get blind spots in my vision about an hour before migraines would hit.
My plan if I ever see them again is to take my pistol to the truck and lock it in the hidden gun safe before going back inside and waiting for the migraine to hit.
I usually don’t get the blind spots before the pain sets in. My signs are muscle contractions in the neck and/or face and sudden sinus congestion on one side of the face.
I’m glad I don’t have the codes to the gun cabinet lol. I’ve broken two fingers by punching a wall repeatedly once. (actually twice…)
I legit experienced it only once and it wore me out so fast. Hope everything is better and you recovered from the experience 🫂
Remember, convicted felons can be president!
fyi - Mangione posted in July 2023 that the chronic pain he’d had for years had been eliminated by spinal fusion surgery, which he recommended highly. He said he was finally able to sit and do other things that had been very painful, and had not taken pain meds for days. Of course maybe the pain, which he had posted about frequently for years, came back and he didn’t think to mention it. The one and only time he mentioned insurance in all his tweets was to say Blue Cross had covered his tests for Irritable Bowel Syndrome a couple years ago.
I know after surgeries I’ve been elated at the seeming reduction in pain, and all I do is rave about how great it is, but then it always comes back and I’m depressed and I just stop talking about it. wouldn’t shock me if that was his case.
Valid point, but I would think a chronic tweeter would be a lot less likely to stop talking about it.
You know what has radicalized me the most? Getting a fucking math degree and understanding precicely how evil capitalism at large, but insurance companies in particular, is. To see the falsehoods they peddle because the consumers of their propaganda do not know what is being said. To see how they skirt and cheat every guard rail put in place to make sure that there is some level of ethics using statistics and a bit of other math bullshit. It is disgusting, egregious, and downright infuriating.
I’ve worked in healthcare for over 20 years, and the fact is that licensed, well trained, and caring individuals are forced to waste hours a day getting ‘approval’ from non-licensed high school educated insurance reps to try and justify their treatments. There can be entire departments dedicated to just dealing with insurance companies at pretty much every hospital, but often times insurance companies will only talk with the actual clinicians that care for patients.
The entire practice is fucked. First of all non-licensed non-medical people should not be dictating the treatment of care. Whether it’s directly or by means of denying coverage. Second of all there should be absolutely no way that they should even be allowed to look at your private medical records. And finally when it comes to something like auto insurance there are laws that insurance companies cannot steer customers to certain repair shops or dealerships. And yet when it comes to our health, health insurance companies are able to set up elaborate networks that essentially do the exact same thing they steer customers to certain institutions and prohibit them from going to others.
The entire setup of our health care industry seems like it would be at odds with most of our well-established laws regarding insurance, PHI Access, and delivery of medical care.
This is going to become more and more of a problem since the working conditions are burning out clinicians at alarming rates
they love the poorly educated
Same for me. Getting a law degree.
Read tens of thousands of pages. Hundreds and hundreds, probably thousands of cases, law review articles.
Story after story of police and corporate America fucking poor people.
In 2024 there are still companies arguing that asbestos is safe. Anything less than chattel slavery with strict runaway slave laws is insufficient for these psychos.
That’s a really interesting perspective. Was that material you sought for personal reasons or a required part of your education? Any specialization involved, if the latter? (I’m pretty ignorant about y’all’s schooling)
Good question. I’ve wondered how people could go to the same schools as I, sit through the same classes, and have wildly different political views. But it’s that they come into it with a different lens.
Example, There’s a Supreme Court case about a woman who was charged with obscenity for possession of porn. It didn’t belong to her. It was her boyfriends, maybe husband. Police came in with a warrant for his arrest, but he wasn’t there, and they wanted to squeeze her for information on his whereabouts, so they charged her with possession of porn he had squirreled away in the basement.
You’re could read that and be like “good, the police had a warrant and she should have cooperated, she had her turn in court and was convicted of possessing it, and we might disagree now but that was just the law of the day.”
Other students who were less ignorant, more fun to be around, and usually much better students and people read that and be like “could you believe these obvious racists jammed up this innocent woman over a porn mag just to serve a warrant?”
Speaking for myself, I could see that they were out there right now pulling the same type of shit and I thought now they’re going to have to go through me, once I get my card, let’s fight about it.
Then you start practicing and the lines start to blur a bit, things become grey, and you start to drink your own Kool Aid, whatever that may be. If you go defend corporations, you’re going to start thinking maybe they should have more rights, maybe they aren’t getting a fair shake by all these whiny plaintiffs and their surviving family members. You go prosecute criminals, you’ll think there is danger everywhere, suspicious of everyone.
I found a happy mix of picking and choosing cases of all kinds, now, but spent my formative years representing employees who got hurt at work. My Kool Aid was like “employees are being fucking by corporations, watch them or they’ll fuck you too, and insurance companies are evil, life sucking leaches.” So, my Kool Aid has no artificial flavor, right?
I did do a lot of extra reading as I was eic of the law review and a top student, able to remember obscure footnotes in great detail; reading stories and then drawing on them to remember rules and policy reasoning is very natural for my memory. Worked out well.
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Hey thanks. Glad to be out here. I personally find listening less effective than reading, especially for new material, mainly because with books you get a table of context and headings all right there to show you the shape and direction of the material, then you start reading and you have a rough idea of where you are and where you’re going. Plus, with a book you can stop, start, flip back, make notes in the margins, highlight. Even if you never look back at the highlights, the act of highlighting means you’re reading twice, same for margin notes, or even little pictures.
For studying and review, listening to recorded lectures while writing an outline, including my own reflections and examples, was most effective. Like for the rule that an assault can be a touching of an object intimate to a person, rather than the actual person, the classic case involves slapping a dinner plate out of the plaintiff’s hand at a dinner buffet, and the lecturer would usually toss in an example or two, or the reading might have a couple extra in the footnotes, and I would throw those in and add my own like, you could assault someone by slapping the hat off their head, pausing the lectur to create and reflect.
There was a journalist who went to write an article about those memory champions who memorize the order of a deck of playing cards, things such as that, and he asked them how they did it, and then the journalist ended up becoming the champion, because he realized there was nothing special about it: memory is a product of focus and attention. This basis of an ancient memorization technique called the memory palace, this and the fact that spatial relationships are naturally easy to remember, even if you just imagine two totally unrelated things having an arbitrary location to one another, just imagining it once will help you remember the two things. Even recall is a product of focus and attention. Like before an exam it’s way more effective to clear your head and separate from the subject entirely for fifteen minutes than it is to try and cram a few more items from your notes. Like, you already know the shit, you made the notes, it’s in there.
I have this eerie feeling that any large amount of legal documents is going to contain mostly stories of those with means fucking the rest of us.
Me too, actually. Would be some (maybe a lot) work to get set up, but it’d be interesting to run ~all of it through some classifier / analytical models and find out.
Study the stock market but not for too long. It’s like staring at Cthulhu.
I’ll give you a couple of caveats. (1) There is such a thing as Mutual Insurance, where the company is owned by its policy holders. Assuming they don’t have massive overheads, there is at least an ethical version of insurance that does exist. And (2) C’mon USA, get your fucking act together and do government health insurance. (signed, Canada)
Canada
If we’re not careful we’re gonna a vote in a scumbag next election whose people want to do away with healthcare access and put it back on “my death panel is my credit limit”.
Yes. It is always a battle. Unfortunately the pendulum will likely swing right next election, but hopefully we can limit the damage. Everyone is tired of Trudeau – combined with a lack of a counterpunching charismatic leader anywhere else means a lot of Canadians will hold their nose and vote PP. Fuck them all. But it’s going to happen, sadly.
The Canadian Future Party doesn’t have a hope in hell, but they at least have a promising platform. First past the post is bleh.
We have some insurance vendors that are mutual, but when it comes to health, vision, and dental you don’t get much of a choice (unless you want to spend even more money and go with a different plan than your work supplies assuming that it’s part of your benefits package in the first place).
I speak as a member of the country that indeed needs to get our shit together (like come on, every other country has this figured out).
Watch your back people have disappeared for less.
What is this picture of? I’m not sure I get it.
This was an attempted correction for a L5-S1 Spondy. Basically the 5th lumbar vertebra slips anterior (forward) over the sacrum. This stretches the spinal cord, causing pain. The correction was attempted by using posterior fixation pedicle screws and rods to pull the 5th lumbar vertebra posterior (backwards) relative to the sacrum.
Based on this image, it’s hard to say - but very possible that this expensive procedure did not improve the pain the patient was experiencing. The spondy is still clearly present.
The vertebrae needn’t come back to its place but still give pain relief in the long term by giving it stability. It is usually accompanied by other procedures which also reduces strain on the nerve giving relief.
BTW I am a surgeon treating and operating for back pain.
Yep, this is correct. It’s not possible to conclusively determine the outcome of this particular procedure without a pre-op x-ray and the patient’s feedback.
I’m sending you my MRI. We can discuss it later this afternoon, right?
As long as it’s lumbar or cervical spine related, sure! But I’m not a doctor, just have spent a few years designing implants for these procedures. :)
can you tell if this image off-angle or are the pins not parallel?
looks excruciatingly painful
Looking at the vertebral body endplates, I’d say this shot is off of a true lateral by some small amount. The screw placement looks OK (or at least, not glaringly bad) to me, I’d need higher resolution or an AP (anterior-to-posterior) to say for sure.
This is Luigi Mangione’s xray, showing his back pain issue.
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Pain certainly make you see things differently.
I’m on your side, but I take issue with “give everyone everything”. Some people can’t give, and they deserve enough, but not everything. You gotta rank up to giver yourself first.
As long as you remember that you are one of those people too. And don’t forget this, when you start experiencing pains. Because you agree that the corporations are the ones that are allowed to decide, not you.
You’re all doing your hardest to paint me like an asshole. You don’t decide what I think is enough. Being in pain is not enough. Having granite countertops is more than enough. My point is that I don’t want my economic value leeched to buy your dog treats while I can’t afford my own dog’s treats, but everyone’s hospital trips should be covered.
Nobody is trying shit. If anything you’re playing a victim card and making yourself look like an idiot.
Who says you would buy anything for anyone, by the looks of it you don’t like sharing and I’m surprised you’d even buy treats for a dog. What a stupid thing to say.
Shared healthcare should be for everyone. Including yourself when you’d need it. But when that happens I trust you will grab that victim card again and start moaning about how nobody is helping you.
I’m not playing victim. I’m playing “not your coddler.” I never said a damn thing about healthcare. Obviously everyone should have healthcare. Quit putting words in my mouth you fucking troll.
There are a couple people asking what exactly you are saying in your initial post. This whole thread is about healthcare.
Oh what the heck. I didn’t get notifications for those, but for the other replies in my inbox. I suppose I should elaborate up there. Or people can scroll down. People hear enemies in disagreements where there are no enemies.
what
Wtf are you talking about?
Hmm. That sure sounds like your saying some people deserve more than others.
Are you saying someone with downs syndrome only deserves ‘enough’ to survive even though it’s not their fault and can do nothing about it?
Fuck off with shit. That’s fascism through and through.
No, I think living with downs syndrome is hell and would want to die.
I’m saying that everyone should have enough that life isn’t shit, but you aren’t doing so much as me, so I get an Alfa and you get a Civic.
I dunno about you, but every person with Downs syndrome I’ve ever met was more satisfied with their lives than I will ever be. Most issues that Downs syndrome people suffer from are societal and financial issues
You can’t conceivably know that.
The entirety of human knowledge is at your fingertips. No excuses
I truly hope you get cancer that makes you choose between bankruptcy and suicide
I sure am glad I’m not a bastard like you, would be hell and would want to die. /s
Why is it me who’s supporting someone else rather than the other way around? Maybe I should just stop that.
