StatisticalOutlier

The comment was that they feel safe going into NYC because "the relatives are packing legally," and just a few posts before that they had mentioned having relatives in law enforcement, and law enforcement officers are allowed to legally carry guns when off duty. Sure doesn't sound like packing lunch to me (plus they even said they were going to have lunch in the Village before going to the museum--why would packing your own lunch when having lunch at a restaurant make anybody feel safe?). But, you know...whatever. But then the post was edited to take out the part about feeling safe because they were packing. It's not the crime, it's the cover-up. 🤣

I don't get it. You originally said (it's been since edited out, but someone else quoted it), "No worries, as the relatives are packing legally, lol. We feel safe." Why would a relative packing a lunch make you feel safe?

You mean guns?

I've never heard of having biopsies done on fibroids.

I'm in the path of totality and it was cloudy but the clouds were breaking up and moving around because of the wind. I watched pretty much the entire time, start to finish. Sometimes you couldn't see the sun at all, and sometimes the sky was clear blue. A lot of the time there was enough cloud cover that I could look at the sun without the glasses. I like it better in the natural colors. The totality was through varying amounts of clouds except for about 10 seconds in a well-timed gap in the clouds, and we all saw a very distinct red dot on the perimeter, which it turns out was a solar flare. At the very end there was just a little moon left, on the upper left side. It looked like the sun was wearing a beret. Here are a couple of photos, taken on a phone with no filter. The first is no zoom, just point and shoot; the eclipsed sun is in the middle. The second was taken with the camera zoomed but still no filter.

Depending on where the fibroid is, it could definitely be the cause of urinary urgency. It definitely was for me. I could go all day without peeing, and then got the fibroids and couldn't even make it through The Last Waltz without going to the bathroom. Leaving during a movie is strictly verboten for me; fortunately, as soon as Joni Mitchell came on the screen I knew I could run out without missing anything good.

Wrong by a not insignificant factor of 20X. And it's the murder rate, not the crime rate. FWIW, I really enjoyed the articles you linked to, which delved into the "why do we think what we think when the data don't support it?" conundrum. People just can't stand details, and even those who can stand them generally don't really understand them, and statisticians and the people who analyze statistics are all about the details. It must be a terribly frustrating job.

Yes. Within a matter of days I heard about fentanyl for the first time (being used as an agent of war, no less), and found out, while lying on the gurney for a procedure gynecologists were telling me could or even would ruin my life, that I would be getting fentanyl myself. Fun times.

Oh, gosh. I hear happy loud all the time. If I read about a group of older guys hanging around at the same donut place regularly talking loud about sports and local scoop, I'd figure they were hard of hearing.

Well, they've deleted my posts without telling me and definitely without telling me why, but they DID fix the "[insert link]" in the yellow warning. Happy to be of service.

But in a post that probably crossed with yours, BlueSkies said, "Hassled or uncomfortable? No." So...no hassling is occurring. I'm having a really tough time imagining this scenario with someone placing an order at Dunkin Donuts. And besides, every day we encounter people who might not like something we say. Why are we assuming this group is particularly dangerous in that regard? BlueSkies never said they were angry.

I think we need clarification. BlueSkies called them annoying and off-putting, that "They go on and on about sports and the local scoop if you will." That constitutes being hassled or made uncomfortable? I have a friend whose father owned the local restaurant for decades. There was a group customers they called "The Coffee Drinkers"--several men who came in every morning and ordered a cup of coffee and talked. Apparently it's a common phenomenon. I even saw a group of what I suspect are Coffee Drinkers™ at the grocery store, in the little area where there's a Caribou Coffee counter and a couple of tables. I saw them every time I'd go in morning, taking up all the seating, just talking. Oh, I don't know...I enjoy hearing the word "influencer" when it's followed by how they imploded or at least revealed to not have the perfect life they portray. But I know that people will flock to a different influencer with a perfect life. They never learn.

I'm sure it's statistically much more likely to be hit by a car that drives up on the sidewalk, or runs over you in the crosswalk. Or an e-bike, these days. There's no doubt people are doing some crazy shit these days, but they've always done crazy shit. What are the odds of a given person being a victim? That's what the news media doesn't report, and frankly, societal consequences aside, that's what most people should be concerned about. What was originally asked was: "Is it as bad as the news media portrays it?" And people gave their personal experiences without regard to what the news media reports. To be fair, the instances you're citing (in DC, and not NYC) are from news media reports. You said you haven't gone into DC in four years. And back to the odds of being a victim, one of the incidents you cited was, "Two young teenage girls were fighting over a sauce packet at McDonald's last fall & one of them solved the problem by killing the other." I'm obviously concerned that this type of nonsense happens, but not on a personal level. A detective testified: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/16-year-old-girl-fatally-stabbed-washington-dc-mcdonalds-dispute-sauce-rcna102359 I'm not going to argue with anyone over sweet-and-sour sauce, and even if I did, I'm not going to hit anybody, and I'm definitely not going to try to get into her vehicle to continue hitting her. This incident has nothing to do with whether it's dangerous to visit Washington, DC. Unless maybe to advise, "Don't hang out at McDonald's at 2:00 in the morning if there are teenagers around," or "If you're hitting someone, don't follow them into their car so you can continue hitting them."

I can see that establishing a causal connection between the fibroid and your leg swelling would be a stretch, although I'm no doctor. And if that's the only reason to remove the fibroid, then there's probably no reason to do it. But if you do want it treated regardless of the lack of leg-swelling correlation, and you want a non-hysterectomy alternative, you should consult with an interventional radiologist--the specialty that performs the embolization (UFE). As I said elsewhere, there's apparently still a turf war between gynecologists (who don't do UFE) and interventional radiologists (who do). The war isn't as bad as it was 20 years ago, when it was almost impossible to get any gynecologist to even talk about UFE, never mind suggest it, never mind recommend it. In the intervening years some people have said their gynecologist was the one who brought it up. Hurrah!! But not all do, so to get the full picture, I'd always advise to talk to an interventional radiologist who does UFE. (Off topic: For some reason, I can never remember what year I had mine. However, I have a method-- I know it was Halloween, and when they were talking about the pain meds I'd be getting, as I was lying there on the table, someone said "fentanyl" and I exclaimed, "The stuff they used in the theater attack in Russia???" A few days before my UFE, Chechens had taken over a theater in Moscow during a play, and held everybody hostage. The Russians pumped fentanyl into the theater to subdue the hostage takers, and it killed them and a bunch of the hostages, too. But my guys assured me it was safe.)

And yet people complain that they become invisible as they get older.

Further limiting it will be our new yellow light warning: I'm guessing whoever issued the warning isn't familiar with Chris. Then again, maybe this is a loophole: "Contemplate how your words might affect someone who likes or relates to a person featured on the show." Surely nobody here relates to him, and if we all agree Chris is a horrid human being, can we let loose? I like this part in particular: It's comforting to know that such care is being taken when advising us we have until May 4 to shape up or we're gonna get shipped out.

I don't have an actual count, but I don't think statistics would support the assertion that people are being pushed off the platforms left and right. But you wouldn't need to worry about it even if it were true, since you don't like getting near the platform edge anyway. The last thing I want to do is convince someone to go somewhere they're scared of, but here's my experience. Mr. Outlier and I spent four days in NYC in December. We walked about 40 miles, trying not to retrace our steps, so we covered a LOT of Manhattan. We never felt unsafe at all. I expected to have to step around bused-in asylum seekers living on the sidewalks, but didn't see any. There were homeless people around, and people who were obviously having mental issues, but it didn't seem particularly different from the 1990s, when I used to go to NYC a couple of times a year, for a week or two at a time. Except the smell weed is pervasive these days, but that doesn't make for danger, and probably lessens danger because stoned people generally aren't aggressive. We took the subway once because we were running short on time and it was a quick way to get up to Henderson Place for a long walk back down the east side, plus it was on the new Second Avenue line, which I'd never been on. It was fine, and I wouldn't have hesitated to take other subways if they'd worked into our plans. It's funny--I have a friend who went with me on three or four of my 1990s NYC trips, running around all over the city, including a memorable jaunt from Battery Park to Central Park, just for the hell of it. I saw her recently and mentioned going to NYC and she was asking me if I felt safe. I thought, "Huh? Why are you asking me that?" Then I figured out she's probably paying attention to certain news stories that may not reflect the experiences of most people who are in NYC, especially tourists. It's a shame. We always had a ball when we went to NYC. Mr. Outlier and I also spent some time in the DC area. We didn't stay in the district, but I took the metro in three times to go to museums or to a movie, and walk around. I was in the touristy areas, where most tourists go, and I have no recollection that it was much different from the dozens of other times I've gone there. I remember people camped in that collonade-type semicircle in the Federal Triangle, and random homeless people around, but no crime or any aggression toward me. I'm 66. Has your friend had bad things happen to her? If not, and she has no choice but to take public transportation, maybe she should lay off watching the news because it's clearly not making her life better. Just keep using the same city-living skills she's been using for decades.

This used to bug the shit out of me. Or, actually, it still bugs the shit out of me but I understand it. Apparently when someone asks a question about a product, Amazon will send that question directly to certain people, and they (incorrectly) think the person is asking THEM, and probably are just being polite by answering. As with almost everything on the internet, and with technology in general, nobody understands how it works, so they do stupid shit like that.

This is the hallmark of managed care--your PCP coordinates your care, and handles everything he can, and sends you to somebody else if more expertise is necessary. I've always thought it's a sound concept, having an individual doctor coordinating care. I like the idea of someone keeping an eye on me. And there have been plenty of cases where someone is prescribed some medications by one doctor and some by another doctor, and there's nobody overseeing the combination, to the patient's detriment. I have one friend in particular whose elderly mother was on all sorts of drugs prescribed by various doctors, and wasn't doing well. They finally wiped the slate clean and started over, and her mother thrived. However, the HMO model becomes less attractive when profit is inserted into the process. Every referral or test or service costs an HMO money, and the more costs the HMO incurs, the lower its profits. So there's a financial incentive for the HMO to limit the amount of care it provides to its members. That's bad enough, but on a more granular level, the HMO's doctors can be financially incentivized to refer more frugally or use fewer services. That directly affects the care that patients receive. Not that the alternative, fee-for-service, is much better, since it financially incentivizes providers to provide more services that produce more revenue to them. And ordering more tests could be a CYA measure by doctor. Plus undergoing more tests often makes patients happier, especially if it's insurance, not them, that are paying for it. The problem is that the increased revenue to the providers is paid for by members' insurance premiums, or traditional Medicare (this doesn't apply to Medicare Advantage plans), which makes premiums rise (whether under-65 health insurance or a supplement to traditional Medicare) and costs to Medicare rise. All the alternatives available to Americans have their advantages and disadvantages. The best we can do is pick one that aligns with how we want our healthcare handled--if we can afford the alternative we want. For example, there are people who would prefer not to deal with the restrictions of an HMO, but plans with more choice are generally more expensive. The key, of course, is knowing exactly what it is you're choosing, which is where a lot of people fall short. Unfortunately, that's not surprising given the clusterfuck that is the U.S. healthcare (and health insurance) industry. I don't remember if you posted an update before. What did all three doctors tell you about treatment for your fibroid? For that matter, what were you asking?

Armada Health is not a medical practice or a medical group. It's not any sort of healthcare provider, and has nothing to do with any healthcare providers. It's definitely not setting the rules for any medical practices. It's a service you can pay for to give you a list of specialists. They will consider your diagnosis, your insurance, and your location, and use "big data and expert clinical insight" to come up with a list of providers that "match" your needs. They're differentiating themselves from "a random online search or the word of mouth of friends" (their words). That's all. And note that THEY are the ones who require you to see a primary care physician (PCP) before they'll recommend a specialist--it's not the specialist, and it's not your insurance company. It's this middleman imposing this additional burden but using some crafty wording to not make it obvious: All perhaps true, but it's not clear that THEY are the ones making you see a PCP first, and not the specialist. THEY are the ones who want a "working diagnosis," not any specialist they include in the list. And you know that they know that people will see that part about a PCP taking care of the testing and imaging and assume it's at the specialist's behest; it's not. And note they don't call it a referral, while the question that's being answered in the FAQ does IS about referrals. They go on to say: Sez who? The don't say where they got this information. What does "many" mean? They're also munging the "see a PCP first" and the referral process--they are not the same thing--and I don't think that's an accident. It certainly caused confusion here. https://armadahealth.com/expert-human-intelligence/ They don't mention they impose an additional hoop to jump through that is completely unrelated to the specialists they include in their lists. But people won't realize that unless they parse all of the mumbo jumbo. Anyway, Shapeshifter, what this company does has nothing to do with what you're experiencing. From what I can tell, specialists choosing to require referrals on their own, even if insurance companies don't require them, is not a prevalent practice. You hear a LOT about doctors not taking new Medicare patients, and I would think that people with traditional Medicare or under-65 PPO insurance plans that don't require referrals to specialists would be bitching loud and clear about how specialists are refusing to see them unless they have to have a referral even though their insurance company (and traditional Medicare) doesn't require it. And you certainly hear a lot about hospital chains that are dropping Medicare Advantage plans from their networks. But nothing, really, about specialists on their own refusing to see people without a referral. Which does bring up the question of what Medicare Advantage plan you have. Is it a PPO or an HMO plan? If it's an HMO plan, then insurance IS the issue because they DO require a referral from a PCP to see a specialist. Advantage PPO plans do not, although the specialist has to be in the plan's network (some Advantage PPO plans allow you to see providers outside the network, but you have to pay more to do it). Or maybe you just happened to run across a specialist who, just because he wants to, requires people to have a referral to see him, even if the patient's insurance doesn't require it. If he's super busy, it might be a way to keep down the numbers of people who show up but didn't really need to see a specialist. But I'm just spitballing because I honestly haven't heard about this being a thing.

Arithmetic would appear to indicate that the M&Ms couldn't be solely to blame. Doing the math: Dark M&Ms are about 4 calories each (M&M's site says 34 pieces is 140 calories). Eating 5 a day adds 20 calories. If it takes 3500 calories to gain a pound, in a year those 5 M&Ms every day would add 7,300 calories, or a little over two pounds. It would take over 10 years to produce a weight gain of 25 pounds. Or, wait--did you mean 5 bags of dark M&Ms? But that would be hard to maintain for very long, especially because it looks like the dark M&Ms come only in the 9.4-ounce "sharing size," with 1,300 calories per bag. Even a sugar fiend like me wouldn't be able to down five of those every day for an extended period of time (plus I don't like dark chocolate). I say all that, but 40 years ago I realized Mrs. Baird's (bread company out of Fort Worth) was using the wrong nutrition information box on their loaf of white bread. I cut the nutrition information box out and sent it to them. They sent a letter back saying I was mistaken, that I was using Texas toast. I sent a letter back saying all I use white bread for is a delivery mechanism for butter and sugar and cinnamon for cinnamon toast, and I'm not going to waste calories on extra thick bread for that. More letters back and forth, until I eventually went to the store and bought another loaf, and sent them the whole wrapper, with the clearly incorrect nutrition box on it. However, before they got that wrapper, they'd sent me a terse letter saying I was wrong and to bug off, which I hadn't received yet. So imagine my surprise when one morning, Vernon Baird himself calls me on the phone, long distance, person-to-person. (For those of you who grew up seeing Mrs. Baird's commercials on TV, I can say that I would have recognized his voice even if he hadn't identified himself.) Vernon was profusely apologetic, saying I'd been right all along, and they were going to figure out what had happened. I said I was glad to hear that because I knew I was right, and I was wondering if I should call the FDA or something and he said, "No, no, no, don't do that." He then asked what I did for a living or whatever, and I said, "I'm in law school." And he said, "That's a good place for you." 😀 So we hung up as friends, and then I got the terse letter they had sent that he obviously very very sincerely wished they hadn't. Suffice to day I don't believe everything I read on a given nutrition information box, but 5 M&Ms a day just can't be enough to produce a such a significant weight gain.

Wait. What?! It’s certainly not helping anything. Are they not removing them these days? Isn’t it painful? I've discussed fibroids elsewhere. Fibroids don't necessarily cause any symptoms. I had fibroids the size of a 20-week pregnancy and the only problem they caused was, well, having a mass the size of a 20-week pregnancy on a normal sized body. No pain, no abnormal bleeding. The go-to for gynecologists is a hysterectomy (remove the uterus) or a myomectomy (cut out the fibroids). The hysterectomy obviously permanently takes care of the problem, and a myomectomy might or might not--fibroids can grow back. But those are NOT the only treatments. They are the treatments that gynecologists do. I had uterine fibroid embolization over 20 years ago, but it wasn't easy because one gynecologist said if I had it he would fire me as a patient, and another gynecologist wouldn't even talk about it--she just said I needed a hysterectomy. (So much for seeing a woman gynecologist because she might better understand my desires.) UFE is now much more accepted, but beware of gynecologists who don't mention either it or other treatments that they don't personally perform. Interventional radiologists do UFE and from my limited exposure to them, they don't seem like they're big on advertising their services; they're behind-the-scenes toilers. (UFE has been around for a long time, as a method to stop women from bleeding out during childbirth.) My IR didn't even have an office--we just met in a room at the hospital. I gather that there are now even more alternatives to hysterectomy and myomectomy than UFE, which is great for patients. But it's still on us to find out what they are. I'm very very very grateful to the women who gathered in the early days of the internet to let others know that hysterectomy and myomectomy weren't the only options, contrary to what their doctors were telling them.

I think I thought I was slinging it up from the toes of my left foot. Next time I'm on wet pavement I'll walk super slow and keep an eye on my right foot.

Ouch. I get only four credits a month. However, I can record to a standalone DVR, and Season 1 of Detectives has 8 episodes. So at the end of April I could borrow the first four episodes, and at the beginning of May I could borrow the second four episodes. But then I searched for it on my TV interface for Hoopla, and Detectives isn't on there. But it IS on Hoopla's website. So I figured I could add it to my watchlist via the website, and it would show up in the watchlist on my TV, like how it works on Max and Hulu. But no. There's no favorites or watchlist. Just borrow. Then I noticed that under each episode of Detectives on the Hoopla website on my PC's browser, it says "This title is available for streaming and downloading (mobile devices only)." So it really isn't available to watch on TV no matter what I do? But there's a "borrow" button on the screen on my PC, which isn't a mobile device. But I don't want to click it because I don't want to burn a credit. Argh. I give up. I think I'm best served using streaming only to the extent I can bend it to my will, and just doing without everything else.

There's something about the way I walk that makes water on the ground sling up onto the top of my left foot, soaking the mesh and my sock. It'll do it on the right foot, too, if I walk normally, but even if I walk really slowly and carefully and try not to flex my ankles, water gets slung on top of my left foot. I can't figure out what I'm doing to cause it. I once got descriptive audio in a theater. I'm mostly deaf so it's really hard for me to hear where sound is coming from, and I kept thinking someone behind me was talking. But I was the only one in the theater. It was an Italian movie, so the people in the movie were speaking Italian but I could swear I was hearing English. After about 15 minutes I finally figured out it was descriptive audio in English. But the voice was not only describing what what was on the screen, it was reading the subtitles out loud. While the regular soundtrack was playing. I thought I was losing my mind. FWIW, there's a forum about streaming services, and people are pretty good about trying to help everybody figure out how to get streaming to work right. https://forums.primetimer.com/topic/16493-to-subscribe-or-not-to-subscribe-that-is-the-question-paid-streaming-services/page/42/#comment-8329139