Fortnightly Issue #8
Healthcare, nuclear war, and more
Hello, friends!
With the spring coming up in the Northern hemisphere and more vaccine shots being administered to people, I feel a growing desire to go out and meet everybody. I was not much of a party animal before the lockdown and I won’t turn into one because of it, but even a homebody like me can miss new company sometimes.
That said, my weekend was densely packed with social interactions so I can barely type these lines right now, not to speak about anything more complex.
Nonetheless, I have a couple of things to share and a question for you!
Healthcare of the future
I have a moderately clear picture of how medicine should look like in the far future: a full check-up every night — or even constant monitoring if there are nanobots inside your body, most of the needed surgery is done by a household-owned robot — or again by the nanobots, and only the most complex issues are fixed at a specialized facility.
But these are dreams of the far future. Right now, we need to fix what’s wrong with the current state of affairs in healthcare and improve medical practices and technology to make the bright future happen sooner. I’ve been brooding over this for some time, and I may write about it once but today I’d love to hear prompts from you. What is it that worries you the most in modern medicine? What do you want healthcare to be, as a patient? If you’re a doctor, it would be great to hear what you would change.
Please, share your thoughts in the comments!
Nuclear war
Last week, I stumbled across a thread on nuclear war, with many points being far from obvious. For instance, I learned that nuclear winter is a highly disputed topic with no consensus about its most probable climate impact scenarios. The dynamics of such a war are even more unclear. Without spoiling it further, I recommend you reading the original thread, it’s certainly worth it:
And… I shall allow myself one minor spoiler: when the government in your country makes moves toward accumulating military nuclear power, it’s not always a bad thing.
Recommendations
Just a couple of them this time.
Anki
Surely you’ve heard about Anki flashcards. People remember foreign words and other factual material with their help. I was hesitant about using them since it was easy for me to remember new words, and I never considered it for anything else. Until now.
After a certain threshold, unfamiliar words occur too rarely in the text which renders them nigh impossible to remember. I’m starting to use Anki for such words with high hopes to extend my active vocabulary to the Shakespearean level.
Another direction I overlooked is using Anki for specific knowledge in mathematics and machine learning — or anything technical, actually. I haven’t set up the format for this yet but I intend to give it a try in a couple of weeks.
Restaurants
It may be wise to order the least appetizingly named dish at an expensive restaurant. The logic behind this is quite simple: it must take long to cook (that's why it sounds bad) but it must be tasty (that's why it's on the menu). At a good place, they won’t waste a menu item on something undeserving. Since we’re approaching the moment when we can again visit any place freely, this might be a valuable piece of advice!
That’s all for today. I hope you’re not mad at me for not writing more. It will happen from time to time as I will have been too busy or learned too few things, alas!
Anyway, thanks for reading, and till next time!
From experience as a patient, I want doctors who can think from first principles, and have the data to assist. But truthfully "first principles" in biology is the domain of career scientists who study specific systems, not doctors whose domain is really praxis. Most doctors don't have the time or training to be anywhere near the vanguard, with the exception of hyper-specialists and scientist-clinicians. There needs to be a better method for doctors to leverage biological knowledge on a case-by-case basis — and to be able to use data *contextualized to that biological knowledge* to inform their diagnosis, treatment, and more generally clinical decision-making.