It seems very likely that it's possible to force people into lucid dreaming. However, it seems that any external methods rely on external cues during REM sleep and I'd worry that in doing so you might be subtly reducing quality of REM sleep.
Yes, rickets and osteomalacia (when caused by vitamin d deficiency) are both treatable with vitamin d. Randomized controlled trials clearly show this, unlike the vitamin d trials for most other things that people are pushing vitamin d for.
Everyone should probably have their blood level of vitamin d tested. Most people are not going to see dramatic changes to health from vitamin d supplementation.
Yet nearly every controlled trial supplementing Vitamin D has limited or no effect, except maybe in the most deficient people. Many many trials have been conducted. Vitamin D advocates always have an excuse — it’s too little vitamin D; no, actually you also have to add Vitamin K2; etc
Part of the problem of all the observational trials looking at vitamin d is that low vitamin d is a biomarker for being less healthy. People who are ill spend less time outdoors. People who spend more time outdoors are already healthier and are also getting other benefits from their outdoor activities.
You can try to control for all of these things, but every time we actually try to test what happens if you give people Vitamin D, we find almost no benefit.
Methotrexate is standard of care, considered “strongly recommended” over hydroxychloroquine (source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/acr.24596 ) for rheumatoid arthritis. If I read the paper right, hydroxychloroquine may be favored in “low disease” states.
So I would certainly expect some sort of difference in patient population. It would suggest those initiated on hydroxychloroquine would normally have less severe rheumatoid arthritis (or have some other difference that their doctor would choose to not use methotrexate by default), although I don’t know if that’s the case in reality.
Yes, my wife is an emergency medicine doctor. She frequently ends up wearing her mask in the car and other places where it’s unnecessary until I remind her she’s wearing it.
You're asking me to comment on the entire theory, I think. I'm only commenting on the value of an unseen intelligence report of unknown source. None of what you've said increases the validity of this report.
Everyone commenting on this post is acting immediately as if this report is 100% true, but the reality is that we know very little about the report.
Maybe. But this is according to a paraphrase of unverified (possibly not even American) intelligence. Both the document's authority and origin are disputed, and the WSJ can't even say which department or agency wrote this. This does not seem like any sort of official US intelligence report.
This isn't hard for to check. Yes, basically all research on RaTG13 did appear after the Covid pandemic, as you would naturally expect given that scientists were interested in it given the similarity. Nobody was interested in the RaTG13 previously.
However, the evidence is pretty clear that this was found and published earlier. It was originally described as "BtCoV/4991" and it was described and published as far as I can find as far back as 2016. (The name was changed to RaTG13 to describe that it was collected in 2013 in Tongguan).
> And the decline has not been because of a lack of testing. Since late September, 1.3 million specimens have been tested for influenza, more than the average of about one million in the same period in recent years.
My wife is also an ER doctor and agrees that there were times that they didn't perform many/any flu tests--mostly in the spring of 2020 and after none of the flu tests were returning positive for a while. But this past winter people have definitely been tested for the flu. Rapid influenza tests are also usually performed first, only sending to labs when confirmatory testing is desired.
That would have nothing to do with HIPAA. HIPAA generally only covers patient information held by health providers, payers, etc. It only applies to "covered entities", which is a specific set of entities. It's a myth that HIPAA applies to health information generally. There's even dispute about whether or not HIPAA applies to doctors and medical services who don't accept insurance ( https://www.lebauerconsulting.com/hipaa-is-my-cash-practice-... )
(although some states have more strict health privacy laws)
"Physician and clinical services" includes far more than pay for US doctors -- it's the entire costs for "services provided in establishments operated by Doctors of Medicine (M.D.) and Doctors of Osteopathy (D.O.), outpatient care centers, plus the portion of medical laboratories services that are billed independently by the laboratories". Doctors do not get even close to all of that money paid to them.
> In fact, physicians represent about 15% - 16% of the top 1% of income earners in the US.
This may be accurate, I'm unsure, but it wouldn't change that if US doctors were paid the same as their European counterparts, it would not make a truly significant change in overall US medical spending (this would even be true if doctors did actually make up 20% of medical expenditures, like you assert earlier).
It's true that US doctors are paid more (although the gap isn't as big as it used to be). However, pay for US doctors makes up a fairly small portion of overall US medical expenditures (less than 10%). So, you could ask every doctor to work for free and not significantly change costs.
Many therapists don't write names in their psychotherapy notes, and instead use initials, and store them separately from records that require identifying information. It could be possible, but difficult to identify people from these records -- certainly not on a large scale like has happened here.
Nothing in the article suggests that you should not say no to your kids -- it just says that your kids will be upset about you saying no, which is probably beyond your control and therefore is a factor that will weigh in your decision. Your response seems to me like criticizing the whole article by saying "Even better, learn to have the willpower to just not eat the damn cookies".
You're missing how many people have gotten infected and where. If a region has not yet had substantial transmission of the coronavirus, then it won't have many deaths. This would also be like saying in August, "the flu has only killed 100 people, I guess the flu won't be very deadly this year."
Approximately 0.25% of NYC's entire population has died of COVID, which is significantly more than die of the seasonal flu.
Even if you're right (and finger count is a common example for students to teach the concept of heritability), this will run counter to what people think when they hear "heritability."
Most people wouldn't think "number of fingers is heritable because their propensity for risk taking is genetic" they would say it's because the number of fingers we are born with is genetic, which would be a mostly incorrect reason for any heritability statistic on number of fingers. I think your possible explanation about why number of fingers might be fairly heritable only reinforces my point about what most people understand about heritability.
And, for the same reason, while risk taking seems to be heritable, we don't know the particular genetic contribution to risk taking.
It's important to understand that the way many people understand heritability usually isn't what most scientific researchers mean when they say "heritable."
> Heritability is an important concept in quantitative genetics, particularly in selective breeding and behavior genetics (for instance, twin studies). It is the source of much confusion due to the fact that its technical definition is different from its commonly-understood folk definition. Therefore, its use conveys the incorrect impression that behavioral traits are "inherited" or specifically passed down through the genes.
...
> Heritability measures the fraction of phenotype variability that can be attributed to genetic variation. This is not the same as saying that this fraction of an individual phenotype is caused by genetics. For example, it is incorrect to say that since the heritability of personality traits is about .6, that means that 60% of your personality is inherited from your parents and 40% comes from the environment. In addition, heritability can change without any genetic change occurring, such as when the environment starts contributing to more variation...High heritability of a trait, consequently, does not necessarily mean that the trait is not very susceptible to environmental influences. Heritability can also change as a result of changes in the environment, migration, inbreeding, or the way in which heritability itself is measured in the population under study. The heritability of a trait should not be interpreted as a measure of the extent to which said trait is genetically determined in an individual.
I agree there are reasons to be concerned overall, but Tim Cook is very clearly stating in this interview, which happened after the nationalization, that 1) China doesn’t have access to the encryption keys themselves and 2) for much of the data (like messages) not even Apple has the keys, 3)
China is not able to access the data any more easily than any other country.
If you are targeted by the CCP, then yes, they can make a “legal” request for the data of an individual that Apple is able the decrypt (which isn’t all of it), but they aren’t able to apply mass surveillance to the iCloud data.