I know it’s illegal but whenever I get antibiotics from the doctor I save a few and give them to friends or coworkers who don’t have insurance so that when cold season comes they might be able to shorten their illness
That is not good- that’s not quite how antibiotics work.
Antibiotics kill some bacteria, but don’t manage to kill other bacteria. Just like when you get a particular sickness (or a vaccination), your body can protect you from future infections, any bacteria that came into contact with the antibiotic is protected from future doses of that antibiotic. Bacteria are very virulent breeders, so they spawn more resistant bacteria.
If you take the full dose of antibiotics, your natural antibodies can deal with the cells that are resistant while the medicine kills off the bacteria that isn’t resistant. If you don’t take the full course of antibiotics, then your body has to deal with both the resistant and the non-resistant strains of bacteria, and it can become overwhelming. Also, most bacteria are able to pass on genes between still-living cells, so that previously non-resistant strains become resistant, and you have inadvertently cultivated a stronger strain of bacteria.
Furthermore, colds and the flu are viral infections, so antibiotics don’t work against them anyway. The best protection against viral infections are vaccinations, as there are not many viruses that we have developed anti-viral medication against, once you already have the disease. If there are anti-viral medications, it is even more important that you take the full dose of the medication, because anti-viral medication is even harsher against the body than antibacterial medication is.
Spread this around; antibiotics are not candy
To put it shortly: antibiotics don’t do shit for the cold. You need to take the entire bottle that is prescribed to you. People not doing that is how antibiotic resistant infections crop up. People like OP are literally why diseases like MRSA exist.
OP shouldn’t feel bad about good intentions but this is really dangerous. There’s also the risk that your friends are allergic to the specific type of antibiotics you give them.
things that a better-off person can do for their sick less-well-off friends that don’t involve breeding superbacteria through misue of antibiotics:
- Buy them cold medicine
- Buy them cough drops
- Buy them fancy tissues with lotion
- Make them too much soup to eat in one go and freeze half for later
- Find them a low-cost clinic and accompany them there
- Tell them you are giving them their day’s wages and they are staying home Friday/Monday and then do.
- Go to their house. Wash the dishes, take out the garbage, walk the dog, scoop the cat or just plain change the whole litter box, clean the bathtub and mom voice them until they take a hot shower or steam their head.
- if they have asthma or bronchitis and are out of inhaler but you have a half-full one, that is a thing you can sanitize and share.
- ditto palliative prescription medication like “I have half a bottle of lidocaine gargle, you want it?” “I am bringing you the rest of my Robitussin with codeine” “here harvest some ibuprofen from my giant bottle of 1,000 ibuprofen”
I feel like some of this should have been covered in high school health class. It would do a lot to combat misuse of antibiotics. Superbacteria is really dangerous for everyone but is particularly bad for people with multiple antibiotic allergies and will lead to hospital stays for IV antibiotics of kinds they can take.
Agreed. High school health class curricula simply haven’t been set up to take into account a future in which the middle class has dissolved and a huge chunk of Americans can’t afford to go to a doctor if they get a cold. - _ -
Last year, I had caught a bad case of strep throat. I usually get it a couple of times a year because my tonsils suck, but this time it was BAD. I was taking amoxicillin like I had been before, but nothing was happening. I was still sick 2 weeks later. I told my doctor and he gave me a different antibiotic and it cleared up.
I was telling one of my friends about all of it, and he says “Oh do you need some amoxicillin? I never finished my bottle when I got strep because it went away after like 3 days”.
Like a week before I got sick, that same friend and I were out having dinner, and we shared a bit of food. This asshat gave me an amoxicillin-resistant strain of strep throat because he didn’t finish his antibiotics. I couldn’t eat anything solid and could barely drink for 2 weeks because someone thought he was “feeling better and didn’t need medicine”.
Finish your god damn antibiotics people!!!!
Yeah, i was taught this in year 3. This is just another thing you americans can add to your “why our our educational system is crap” list and its really scary how this isnt common knowledge there
Not finishing the course of antibiotics is VACCINATING THE BACTERIA.
starklett asked:
are male gay lions actually a thing??
bunjywunjy answered:
almost all forms of complex sexually reproducing life on earth are known to exhibit behavior that humans would characterize as homosexual, from penguins to insects! it’s a known function of being an animal.
so while biologists can quibble over the wording a bit, yes! gay and lesbian lions are actually a thing.
and this isn't just limited to sexy fun times either, animals of the same sex routinely form lifelong pair bonds in species that mate for life!
I know quite a bit about animal homosexuality due to doing an extensive literature study (unpublished still) a few years back on modern homosexuality research in the past few decades.
We can’t assign sexuality to animals because sexuality is a very human concept, though there are alot of research on animals who will only mate and form bonds with members of the same sex. When we talk about animal homosexuality we tend to focus on sex, but mating is just a single behaviour when we’re talking about any kind of sexual behaviour in animals. Animal sexuality includes all these behaviours for example: courtship, pair-bonding, parenting, affectionate behaviour and yes sexual behaviour.
The reason we still don’t know much about why or to the extent is because most animals aren’t dimorphic so scientists often just assume animals they observe mating are male and female. Observing animal mating is also hard to do in the first place. There is also the fact that science was (and still is) extremely homophobic and heteronormative. Scientists had been observing homosexuality in animals for decades but didn’t ever report on their findings.
That was until Bruce Bagemihl, an openly gay cognitive biologist and ecologist published Biological Exuberance in 1999. A 750 page book detailing all (at the time) known observations of homosexuality in vertebrates. It’s a massive book and still extremely important. It doesn’t even touch on invertebrates. It’s worth a read if you’re interested in animal homosexuality. As is:
- Evolution's Rainbow by Joan Roughgarden
- Homosexual Behaviour in Animals: An Evolutionary Perspective by Volker Sommer and Paul Vasey
Designed for the layperson, I heartily recommend Dr Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation by Olivia Judson, 2002
every few months someone explains to me what “GNU Terry Pratchett” means and then I immediately forget
it’s a vicious cycle
ok, but like what does it mean ?
For people who are wondering, it comes from the book Going Postal, one of the Discworld series.
The book features 'the Clacks' a sort of primitive telegraph system run from high towers that Terry Pratchett descibed as "sort of what the internet would be, if all you had was a lot of bits of string" (I'm paraphrasing here from what I remember from the intro to the film). Messages are sent from one tower to another using flashing lights in morse code, until they reach a tower within walking distance of the people they are meant for.
The people who own the business are so set on providing The Best (and most expensive) Service, that they refuse to stop the machinery so as to allow time for maintenance or proper breaks for the workers, leading to multiple people falling to their deaths due to exhaustion/poorly maintained towers. The actual plot of the book is about an ex-conman trying to rebuild the historic city post-office, so as to destroy the Clacks company's monopoly on long distance communication.
Thing is, whenever a Clacks worker dies on the job, the Clacksmen (and women) have a tradition called 'sending home', where the person's name is sent through all the towers, ending at the one closest to their home. The exception is John Dearheart, the son of the man who invented the Clacks system originally (and then had it stolen from under his nose), whose death is rumoured to have been a murder at the hands of his employers.
His name is sent around along with the code 'GNU', which is a signal to the Clacksworkers recieving it that they are meant to always send it on to the next tower, whatever happens. The idea is that, since a person is said to only truly die the last time their name is spoken, if John Dearheart's name is constantly being 'spoken' by the Clacks Tower mechanisms, then he's not really dead.
After Sir Terry's death, fans picked up the idea. GNU Terry Pratchett essentially just means 'remember Terry Pratchett'. You're meant reply with the same, so as to ensure that the name never stops being spoken, and so he lives on.
Soooo GNU Terry Pratchett
GNU Terry Pratchett
GNU Terry Pratchett
In addition to this, remember that secondhand is most sustainable and that if you have to buy something new, invest in quality garments from companies that are environmentally conscientious!
Synthetic fibers shed microplastics into the ocean, BT cotton is literally driving farmers to suicide, and none of these "good" fibers are nearly as warm (especially when wet) or durable as wool/protein fibers but sure, this categorization totally works and has no flaws whatsoever! /s
How is alpaca wool bad, I’ve literally never heard of alpaca farmers raising their alpacas as anything other than productive pets, no one eats alpaca meat in the US and shearing is just a haircut lol what
What a wack infographic
What farmers have committed suicide from BT cotton?
it's a huge problem in India particularly. lots of people have been taken advantage of by monsanto and are now going bankrupt after converting to growing BT cotton.
"Synthetic Materials" are almost always PETROLEUM BYPRODUCTS
The Earth is quite happy for you to use NATURAL fibers-- plant and animal textiles-- because they biodegrade
hmmmm can't shear sheep but can poison half the oceanic ecosystem with microplastic fibres & wreck the land with monocultured cotton crops huh
I want to point out that “satin” isn’t a fiber, it’s a weave. You can make satin from lots of things. Polyester, sure. If it’s cotton, it’s “sateen”.
But silk satin is VERY much a thing and has been a thing for centuries.
Indian farmer suicides due to BT cotton is unsubstantiated at best, anti-biotech propaganda in most likelihood. Look for the references 26 and 26 at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bt_cotton to see data refuting the suicide link.
We will never know their names.
The first victim could not have been recorded, for there was no written language to record it. They were someone’s daughter, or son, and someone’s friend, and they were loved by those around them. And they were in pain, covered in rashes, confused, scared, not knowing why this was happening to them or what they could do about it - victim of a mad, inhuman god. There was nothing to be done - humanity was not strong enough, not aware enough, not knowledgeable enough, to fight back against a monster that could not be seen.
It was in Ancient Egypt, where it attacked slave and pharaoh alike. In Rome, it effortlessly decimated armies. It killed in Syria. It killed in Moscow. In India, five million dead. It killed a thousand Europeans every day in the 18th century. It killed more than fifty million Native Americans. From the Peloponnesian War to the Civil War, it slew more soldiers and civilians than any weapon, any soldier, any army (Not that this stopped the most foolish and empty souls from attempting to harness the demon as a weapon against their enemies).
Cultures grew and faltered, and it remained. Empires rose and fell, and it thrived. Ideologies waxed and waned, but it did not care. Kill. Maim. Spread. An ancient, mad god, hidden from view, that could not be fought, could not be confronted, could not even be comprehended. Not the only one of its kind, but the most devastating.
For a long time, there was no hope - only the bitter, hollow endurance of survivors.
In China, in the 10th century, humanity began to fight back.
It was observed that survivors of the mad god’s curse would never be touched again: they had taken a portion of that power into themselves, and were so protected from it. Not only that, but this power could be shared by consuming a remnant of the wounds. There was a price, for you could not take the god’s power without first defeating it - but a smaller battle, on humanity’s terms. By the 16th century, the technique spread, to India, across Asia, the Ottoman Empire and, in the 18th century, Europe. In 1796, a more powerful technique was discovered by Edward Jenner.
An idea began to take hold: Perhaps the ancient god could be killed.
A whisper became a voice; a voice became a call; a call became a battle cry, sweeping across villages, cities, nations. Humanity began to cooperate, spreading the protective power across the globe, dispatching masters of the craft to protect whole populations. People who had once been sworn enemies joined in common cause for this one battle. Governments mandated that all citizens protect themselves, for giving the ancient enemy a single life would put millions in danger.
And, inch by inch, humanity drove its enemy back. Fewer friends wept; Fewer neighbors were crippled; Fewer parents had to bury their children.
At the dawn of the 20th century, for the first time, humanity banished the enemy from entire regions of the world. Humanity faltered many times in its efforts, but there individuals who never gave up, who fought for the dream of a world where no child or loved one would ever fear the demon ever again. Viktor Zhdanov, who called for humanity to unite in a final push against the demon; The great tactician Karel Raška, who conceived of a strategy to annihilate the enemy; Donald Henderson, who led the efforts of those final days.
The enemy grew weaker. Millions became thousands, thousands became dozens. And then, when the enemy did strike, scores of humans came forth to defy it, protecting all those whom it might endanger.
The enemy’s last attack in the wild was on Ali Maow Maalin, in 1977. For months afterwards, dedicated humans swept the surrounding area, seeking out any last, desperate hiding place where the enemy might yet remain.
They found none.
35 years ago, on December 9th, 1979, humanity declared victory.
This one evil, the horror from beyond memory, the monster that took 500 million people from this world - was destroyed.
You are a member of the species that did that. Never forget what we are capable of, when we band together and declare battle on what is broken in the world.
Happy Smallpox Eradication Day.
hey @ goyim could y'all reblog this if you’re actually willing to listen to Jewish people and protect us?
we really need allies right now, and I know seeing this on people’s blogs could be comforting to other Jewish people.
why should we when you just called every non jew a derogatory term
“Hey so we know that people literally want you dead but u hurt my feelings so :(((”
not to mention liky ‘goy’ is literally just the way we refer to a non-jew just like ‘cis’ is the word for a non-trans person
if you looked down literally two centimeters in google search you would have seen the beginning of this page
and of this page
but i guess our lives are worthless to you because we called you a debatable-at-best word we use all the time for non-jews so we don’t have to keep saying “non-jews” all the g-ddamn time
^^ yeah p much lmao
This goy loves his Jewish friends
“Their word for us is secretly an insult” is such a tired old racist rumour, brought to you by the type of dipshit who gets angry when they hear people speaking another language in public because they assume the speakers are saying something bad about them.
Personally, I don’t like the word Goy.
Not because it feels insulting, but because it define me depending on what I am not instead of what I am.
Cis does not mean “not trans”, it means “who identify with it’s gender of birth”.
Goy means “not jew”
To be called as such makes me feel uncomfortable, as if I was lacking something instead of being different but valid.
Well, first of all, it actually means "Nation” in biblical Hebrew (for example, the song “Lo yisa goy el goy cherev v'yilmadu od milchama" means “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation”). Hence, when we use the words, we are literally calling you “The people of the other nations” (as Judaism centres around peoplehood in a tribal sense). So, what you have an issue with is being called “a person who belongs to another Nation, rather than of Am Yisrael,” which…is exactly what you are? You do belong to another Nation/Tribe/Identity?
Secondly, lots of groups have words for people who aren’t of their ethnicity? Gadje, Haole, Pākehā, Padakoot, Gaijin, etc. It’s pretty common for groups of small people, especially in a tribal sense, to differentiate from themselves and the greater world—especially when they’re a vulnerable population, which brings me to my last point…
Our right as a persecuted people to describe our experiences as such entirely outweigh your discomfort with being called “not Jewish.” Your bio says your French. Mazel tov, you come from a country that has a long and storied history of ant-Semitism, and you have no fucking right to police how we relate to the persecution you inflicted on us. If you hadn’t segregated and oppressed for 2,000 years, maybe we wouldn’t have such a strong sense of otherness now, but you did, so I guess we’ll never know. Grow up and deal with it.
hey @ goyim could y'all reblog this if you’re actually willing to listen to Jewish people and protect us?
All day every day
THE SOLUTION TO THE OPIATE CRISIS IS MOTHERFUCKING NOT TO MAKE OPIATES MORE ILLEGAL OR HARDER TO GET
IT JUST FUCKING ISN’T!!!!!!!!!
How about stop the kick backs doctors get for prescribing them? Obviously the fact that they’re so readily available is an issue, but there are people that honestly need them for their pain. Are there long term alternatives? Yes, are they affordable in the United States? Probably not.
Actually, the problem is not that they’re so readily available. They’re selectively readily available.
What started this all was really OxyContin’s 12-hour dosing problem: Purdue lied about how long it’s effective for. The drug only lasts 8 hours for most people. If someone gets a month of Oxy, and takes a pill every time the last one wore off, they run out of pills on Day 21. And Purdue sued doctors for saying, “Okay, if you need three a day instead of two, I’ll just give you 90 for the month instead of 60.”
Also, the instant a doctor suspects their patient has become addicted to the drugs, they have to cut them off cold turkey. If someone just wants the drugs too much–say, they come in and say, “I’ve run out of those painkillers you gave me, they worked great but I went through them too fast”–a doctor can be legally prosecuted for writing them a scrip, because Drug Addicts Don’t Deserve Health Care.
Opiate withdrawal is quite literally hell. It is UNBELIEVABLY painful. When people are ALREADY in pain, and then go through the ACTUAL HELL of withdrawal, they get two choices:
1. Suffer
2. Buy black-market opiates, which are probably unevenly-diluted fentanyl or carfentanil, and risk dying of an overdose.
Option 3, which is missing: THE DOCTOR JUST GIVES THEM AN EXTRA PILL A FUCKING DAY.
Option 4: The doctor gives them a different, lesser opioid, and helps slowly wean them off opioids. (That whole “pharma companies that caused this problem are now selling drugs to solve it”? Literally the least part of my worries. Buprenorphine saves lives and should have been routinely available to begin with.)
Also addicts that are just addicts without chronic pain still deserve to be treated like humans too
Yes! Although honestly longterm addicts overwhelmingly have brain conditions rooted in early childhood toxic stress and trauma that means their brains basically aren’t able to self-soothe and self-regulate (abilities that drug use further atrophies), so they’re constantly marinating in the neurotransmitters that communicate “pain”. Even when nothing’s “physically wrong” with them.
Now, there are different KINDS of drugs that are better or worse for helping them live happy lives—opioids have some massive drawbacks so it might be better for their longterm health to find something different—but it’s not as though addicts without Chronic Pain™️ aren’t actually in chronic pain or don’t have conditions that non-negotiably need treatment.
So it’s all kind of uh… yeah. We need to stop criminalizing addiction and treat addicts like human beings and get them the healthcare they need, which ISN’T a 12-step group and Finding Jesus and “being clean.” We need it desperately.
This reminds me of eighth grade, when the school made possession of chewing gum against the rules. Why? Because a small minority of the kids weren’t chewing gum responsibly, and when they were done would just stick the gum to the underside of their desks.
A few weeks afterwards, the vice principal pulled me aside and asked me (a known goody-two-shoes) if I would help them figure out who the hell was bringing gum into the school. Even when they caught kids with gum, they only had one or two pieces on them. They identified likely suspects, searched their bags and lockers, nothing. And based on the gum under the desks, gum usage was worse than ever. They were begging me to be a snitch.
I told them I’d look into it, and the next day I gave them a couple of names. They searched those kids’ bags and lockers, and one of them had a couple of packs of gum. The other was clean.
And lemme tell ya, those two packs of gum I planted on the kid who was beating my ass regularly? They barely made a dent in my profits for the day, because I was selling gum by the piece at about a 200% markup, and going through about ten packs a day. By the end of the school year, I had three other kids working for me, and I was regularly using the administration to a) fuck with kids who bullied me (although I only planted it the once, I knew who I was selling TO), and b) eliminate any competition.
And if you think that’s not a good metaphor for drug prohibition, you’re not paying attention. And had it not been a school entirely attended by white kids, you can bet it would have resulted in minority kids being shaken down.
This is a deeply serious topic but I’m having trouble formulating any coherent thought over the SCREAMING DELIGHT in my head. That’s AMAZING.
Ok, ignoring the gum slanger above for a moment, I got addicted to opioids briefly after surgery, and when i made myself get off them, agreed it was fucking hell. I now have depression because of it (which I never had for 30+ years before that). Your doctor should wean you down and then off. But just “allowing addicts to keep taking the drugs and surely they’ll get off them when they want to” is a fucking stupid comment. I’m not saying to cut them off cold turkey, that’s cruel and painful, but come the fuck on. Oxy is harmful af and can continue fucking you up more and more the longer you take it. Plus, some people have very addictive personalities (thank the gods I don’t) and need help kicking addictions. Y'all need to get a grip on your “everyone deserves to do whatever they want uwu” mentality.
Well, here’s the thing: We can discourage addiction, and tell people, “It’s not good to be addicted, let’s help you be less addicted to this.” Addiction treatment and getting people off substances is good!
But we should move other drugs to a system more like alcohol. If someone wants to drink themselves into an absolute stupor, they just have to go to the liquor store, buy the alcohol of their choice, and start drinking. If they want to change their relationship to alcohol, they can do that at any time.
When alcohol was illegal during Prohibition in the 1920s, the government did its best to deny people any access to drinkable alcohol. Alcohol necessary for medical or industrial purposes was mixed with poisonous additives. And you know what people did? They drank the poisoned alcohol. They drank alcohol distilled out of rotten fruit and wood shavings. They drank hard liquor instead of beer because it was easier to smuggle. They went blind or died because their access to a safe, legal supply was cut off, and profits from organized crime soared.
And yet a lot of people with drug or alcohol problems quit on their own not because somebody forced them to, but because they don’t like being addicted and wanted to stop. Ironically, being addicted to an illegal substance makes it harder to do that–you spend so much time worrying about where your next hit’s coming from, how you’ll pay for it, how you’ll hide it, and how long until the one after that, that it’s hard to focus on the basic everyday tasks like keeping a job or seeing your doctor that make life livable. There really isn’t evidence saying that involuntary drug treatment actually works; its most impressive effects come largely because it can be so difficult and expensive to get into voluntary drug treatment that court-ordered treatment is better than people could get on their own.
In a system where heroin is legal–places like Portugal, Switzerland, or a few pilot project places in Canada–or even supervised injection sites, what it looks like is: Someone comes into a clinic every morning for their daily dose. They walk past bulletin boards full of advertisements for addiction treatment options. They talk to a nurse, who talks to them about the weather and helps make sure they inject cleanly and safely. Then they have a cup of the free coffee, say hi to the addictions counsellor who’s sitting by the door who invites them to drop by the therapy group on Wednesday night, and they go on with their days. If they want to get into treatment, it is quick, free, and easy.
I’m not uwu about this. I’m cold hard facts, comparing piles of fatality reports. The more you criminalize and restrict drugs, the more people die. Drug prohibition is pretending to be tough on crime and really doing what’s worst for addicts.
the other scientists at the university of what it is: carlos i dare you to go to this cryptid town in the desert for $50
carlos: that’s unscientific. i’ll do it for free.
“That’s unscientific. What you’re doing is providing a $50 grant.”
oliviamunnpix1