As much as I hate to defend this blithering idiot, I believe what he was trying to say is after a tree falls, it dries out and becomes fuel for wildfires.

Edit, source: I’ve worked for several blithering idiots and I’ve developed some skill at translating their gibberish into conherent communication.

None of that precludes notifying patients in the waiting room that the doctor is running late.

It was hectic. She loved being an eye doctor, but she hated running the practice. Unfortunately, she got sick and was not able to keep working.

It’s not that complex.

A mutation happens. It can result in either a disadvantage that prevents the plant from surviving to reproduce or an advantage that helps the plant survive to reproduce.

There’s no “knowing” involved. There is no intent on the part of the plant. It’s just random. You’re seeing the descendants of the plants that got an advantageous mutation.

What you’re not seeing in your yard are the billions of different plants that never survived because their mutation was a disadvantage.

Holy shit that’s bad!

Yeah. My wife was an eye doctor in private practice, and she was positively militant about never getting behind schedule.

She very rarely ran behind. It would require a cascade of emergencies.

I usually don’t get all that pissy about doctors running late. However, there was one time I was really irritated.

I took my wife to the doctor for an appointment. She got the first appointment of the day. We were there 45 minutes early. We waited more than 30 minutes past when the appointment was supposed to start. While we were waiting there, the doctor came in through the waiting room.

It’s one thing to be running late because of the normal day to day delays that happen in a medical practice, but if you’re actually just running late getting to work, you should call and have your staff let the patients know.

I think I understand what jetlag is, but I don’t understand how this smells like that.

I’m not going to hold my breath.

Just “Phobic”

Describes conservatives perfectly.

The Party of Fear and Hate

That being said, the precedent here is very straightforward, and any ruling in favor of the law would be a huge shift in how the separation of church and state is applied.

Good thing the Supreme Court respects precedent. Otherwise they could decide to just change the interpretation of the Constitution to allow states to establish their own state religion, since the Constitution specified “Congress”.

Spicy!

You should go to the doctor at least once a year. They can check you out in a physical, and order blood work, and see how things change over time. It’s also easier for them to deal with other routine illness when you’ve been seeing them regularly, and they can make sure you’re getting your routine vaccinations. It doesn’t matter if the symptoms have passed. You can still describe them to the doctor and they should still consider them.

Regarding how to know if the doctor you’re seeing is competent, a lot of that is how you feel when you’re with them. How do they treat you? Do they remember what you told them last time? Have they been thinking about it, reading about your symptoms, looking up possible causes?

Regarding a psych referral, it depends on how that was brought up. If they mentioned that some of your problems sounded like depression, then they might be suggesting that there’s something there for you to deal with. However, if you think there’s a medical problem, and the psych referral feels to you like they’re not trying, that’s a bad sign.

“To a hammer, everything looks like a nail”

A medical doctor should be looking for medical causes for symptoms. The way they come to a diagnosis is by identifying possible causes and ruling them out one by one. If they jumped to psychological causes without ruling out medical causes, I’d be concerned that they aren’t really trying.

When I started seeing my current doctor, I already had two issues that had been diagnosed: Hashimotos Thyroiditis, and gout. When I came to him, I wanted to avoid taking meds for the gout, so he recommended drinking coffee to prevent flare-ups. In that first visit he also gave me a referral to see a sleep specialist because he thought I had sleep apnea.

I ended up having a sleep study and got a CPAP machine. That allowed me to have actually restful sleep for the first time in years.

Each time I returned, he had done more research into what my issues were and he had new things to try. He also has my family medical history, so he’s watching out for issues that I might be prone to because of genetics.

I’m on medicine to reduce uric acid for the gout now because he had done additional reading and in one of my appointments he explained that new research showed that the high uric acid that causes gout flare-ups could also cause other issues due to causing general inflammation. Even though the coffee was preventing severe flare-ups, he convinced me to try allopurinol to reduce the uric acid.

He’s also been concerned about the weight I gained due to the thyroid issues, so he’s been working with me to help me lose weight.

What I’m saying is, after every visit, I leave feeling like my concerns have been addressed. He listens to what I’m telling him, and responds to what I say.

If you’re not happy with the doctor you’ve seen, you should seek out someone who you feel comfortable with. My current doctor isn’t the first doctor I’ve seen. There were probably five or six doctors I’ve seen over the years that were underwhelming before I found him. One good way to find a doctor is to talk to friends, family, or coworkers and find out if they have a doctor they like.

Do you trust the doctors with your life?

Remember what they call the person who graduated in last place from medical school: Doctor.

They aren’t all bad, but many are overworked, too busy to focus, and perhaps burnt out. They also might need a full history over time to make a diagnosis. By way of example, during an annual physical, my doctor noticed my weight gain, and said there was no way I could gain that much weight in a year without something wrong. He ordered blood work and found a thyroid disorder. That also explained why I had no energy to do anything more than the bare minimum to survive.

Looking just at thyroid disorders, a doctor might just check TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone). The “normal range” is 0.5 - 5.0. So your TSH could be 4.9, and your doctor would say it’s normal. However, I know a bunch of people with thyroid issues, and everyone I know feels “normal” when their TSH is close to 1.0.

If your doctor orders a thyroid antibodies test, they could discover Hashimotos Thyroiditis (which happens to be my diagnosis, as well as my wife’s and my three children). Basically that means your immune system is attacking and destroying your thyroid gland. When she was first diagnosed, my daughter’s TSH was normal, but the antibodies test was positive, so they knew it was just a matter of time.

I wonder if this trivia item will end up on his IMDB page.

The woman on the left: “You asked for the TV to be removed, and you did nothing about the fact that my eyes were closed?!?!?”

As you should be!

If you can’t hide evidence before you can be tried as an adult, you deserve what you get.

My wife and I just started watching “Your Honor” on Netflix. In the first episode, the judge’s son kills someone in a hit and run and comes home and tries to wash his bloody clothes. He doesn’t know how to use the washer and ends up flooding the laundry room.

I turned to my wife and said, “that’s why we insisted on teaching the kids to do their own laundry.”

If you’re doing it right, by the time your kids are 18, they should be able to take care of every basic task in the home on their own.

My mom often used two:

“Useless as tits on a bull” (often referencing her husband, my dad)

And also, “shit fire and save matches”, which I never understood to actually have a meaning, it was more like just an exclamation of surprise.

Have you checked with a doctor? There might be a medical cause.

I mean, work sucks, but unless you’re swinging a sledgehammer all day, it shouldn’t drain you completely the way you describe.