Lucille: How’s my son? Doctor: He’s going to be all right. Lindsay Funke: Finally some good news from this guy. Doctor: That’s a great attitude. I got to tell you, if I was getting this news, I don’t know that I’d take it this well. Lucille: But you said he was all right. Doctor: Yes, he’s lost his left hand. So he’s going to be “all right.” Lucille: [Jumping on the doctor] You son of a bitch! I hate this doctor!

My favorite running gag, love the literal doctor

I’ve never heard of urgent care requiring referral from a pcp, that wouldn’t make any sense as the whole point of urgent care is being seen more urgently than your primary physician can accommodate. And seeing people who don’t have a primary physician and keeping them out of the ed if not necessary. I would ask your insurance for that policy in writing, that can’t be right. And if it is it should be reported to that state insurance commission because that’s totally asinine. I mean never underestimate the dumbness of insurance companies but I think something might be being lost in translation here.

This is mildly infuriating, I can give you a little more context though if you’re interested. I don’t know exactly about contracts between insurance companies and CVS so I can’t speak to that definitely. Probably something related to how much insurance is willing to pay minute clinic for such a short visit, and what things are feasible to address in such a short visit (hence CVS only allowing certain complaints).

I think this is something to do with the concept of “uncomplicated” vs “complicated” uti. Complicated utis are when there’s an increased danger of serious complications from a uti or increased likelihood of failing a typical antibiotic therapy. Utis in men are much much rarer than women, and are considered to be an automatic “complicated” uti by many. The greater length of the urethra in men helps prevent bacteria from being able to travel up to the bladder, whereas in women the short distance allows for this to happen much more frequently. So when a male has a UTI there is a much greater chance there will be complicating factors like prostate issues, structural problems, kidney stones, kidney infection, catheter use, atypical bacteria, etc. If you look more into their info on utis, they also state if they suspect any of those things, even in women, they won’t treat it and will just refer you to someone else, probably the Ed or a real urgent care clinic. Since the odds of that are much greater in men, they probably aren’t allowed to have longer appointments in minute clinic based on what insurance will pay for what they’re providing, they just decided to not see that at all in minute clinic. Looks like they do see men for sexually transmitted infections though, which are actually the most common cause of utis in young men, so if that’s a concern looks like they would be able to see people for that.

But I totally agree with you, fuck insurance companies in general.

I think as an end user of a platform like reddit, it’s easy to just want to browse a site and look at some interesting content when you have a few minutes downtime and not think much of it. The vast majority of people on the site aren’t even really contributing to content in any way. I barely ever did until hearing about the fedverse.

What got me to care and take the effort to start up here wasn’t even really the recent reddit move specifically, like sure this was a crappy thing to do on their part and they’ve done a lot of bad stuff before too. But it was seeing all these social media platforms and web services in general go one after the other becoming worse and worse for the users and ever more invasive. I think it’s just clear now that a centralized social media isn’t sustainable and going to work, and will always have that end result.

What’s so appealing about the fedverse is I think it’s a model for how these problems can be avoided and services can still go forward. I think the best we can do is be active on the fedverse, make it an appealing place to be by contributing, with programming skills if we have them or fresh content if we don’t, and continue to point out how these big web companies continue to fail us.

Yes, it’s a medical emergency that can be very dangerous or even deadly. It can lead to seizures or a devestating condition called osmotic demyelination syndrome, which can cause a “locked in syndrome” or total body paralysis. There are certain medications that can make it more likely to happen. Severe psychiatric conditions make it more likely. It tends to happen pretty frequently to people with alcoholism too. It’s pretty rare for it to happen to people without risk factors for it because your kidneys are pretty good at keeping everything balanced even if you’re drinking a decent amount of water. Though one infamous example of that is the wee for a wii radio contest where people deliberately drank tons of water and were not allowed to pee to try and win a Nintendo wii. I believe someone died from the contest, and the organizers hadn’t realized how dangerous this was. In short, drink water when you’re thirsty, and pee when you need to pee.

Yeah not sure what that headline is about, I enjoyed splatoon and thought it was a pretty unique game. More games in the genre is good, spurs innovation and new ideas. No sleep lost unless someone has some toxic brand loyalty. I hope this game does well.

Well I did use sync, now using jerboa of course. Would be neat if sync or other apps could be remade for the fedverse. An app that could bridge different fedverse apps more easily like lemmy and mastadon for instance but keep everything easily readable and sortable would be cool.