Lab coats must be cheap.

Well of course - part of "responsible medicine" is not to use vivisection just because it's cheaper - especially when the results aren't as good as using computer models, lab work and training dummies or actual human cadavers - since they're not training doctors to be vets.

I suspect that person is a new vegan, hence the passion, but surely you're not for unnecessary animal suffering? Let alone if it's going to make your doctor less capable when it's your turn to be treated.

Regardless you can't take a random comment and decide that it's a spokes person for the PCRM. That to me suggests you're looking for reasons to dismiss the good advice, that benefits you and the greater world.

I understand how you've come to your conclusion, but let me clear it up:

The word 'vegan' in medicine is exchangeable with plant-based diet. If you look at the PCRM.org they recommend a whole-foods plant-based diet. They simply call it vegan, as that's what other organisations know it as, such as the British/American Dietetics Association. Clearly not recommending vegan icecream and hotdogs :-)

When it comes to prevention of cruelty to animals, the PCRM do it from a medical training/testing stand point. They're not saying don't eat animals because it's cruel, they're saying don't test drugs on animals when there are computer models and lab work that yield more accurate results (although animals costs less....). They're also against surgeons performing vivisection as part of their training. E.g. when my cousin did her training she had to put a perfectly healthy dog to sleep, chop of some of it's legs and re-attach them, as well as causing massive internal wounds to simulate gunshots.... it's messed up, but it's hard for young doctors to say anything because they've trained for a decade at that point, and they're not going to throw it away (and the next person will come along and do it anyway, since it's such a highly competitive industry). This where the PCRM come in, they lobby medical institutions to stop this kind of stuff.


If you're still thinking that they have some kind of vegan agenda / bias, the PCRM is an organisation of 12,000 doctors. If it was just one or two quacks preaching veganism, I'd be suspicious too, but that's clearly not the case here.

Everything they do is based on data. And they're also not the only medical organisation to do it. The Australian Medical Association is also urging hospitals to give patients plant-based diets because of how much faster they recover (and don't return). The President of the American College of Cardiology is 'vegan', and is know for his phrase "Meat kills, processed meat kills you quicker". The World Cancer Research Fund, recommends beans with every meal, no processed meat, and maximum of 350g of red meat a week. That's basically a plant-based diet.

There are now something like 400 studies being published every single year showing how bad animal products are for us. There's a nice graph here actually showing how much more evidence is coming out all the time: https://youtu.be/C5qRXPDNw1E?t=4190 (nevermind the tacky channel, the speakers at this conference are all legitimate medical professionals)

So yes, your doctors are right, eat your fruit and veg, but also whole grains, beans, nuts and seeds. Bean burrito is a perfect combination of these, followed by a banana and berry smoothie

You also have to consider the amount of financial loss various food and pharmacological industries would suffer if most people ate plant-based. So when you look for opinions about the PCRM people are very quick to make PCRM appear as a bunch of hippies in order to protect their earnings. America spends something like 50 billion dollars a year on statins, and 35 billion on stent surgeries, which would pretty much go away overnight if everyone ate plant-based diets. They're not going to let that money go without a fight, which is why there's a lot of opinions about PCRM around. Needless to say though, they don't have any good evidence to back their reasoning, which makes it quite easy to see which ones are likely opinions funded by certain industries.

Dude! Watch your back. I think you know too much.

I'm willing to bet you wear a lab coat and can play the piano really well.

*wondering how much of my life I've squandered*

I think it's fair for the dairy industry to lobby for this. It's an argument of definition.

You make almond milk basically by taking almonds and blending them up with water then straining.


They could call it "milk-substitute" perhaps. Point being, it's not the same thing as milk from a cow.

Peanut butter went through a similar episode in history when Jif added a bunch of crap that wasn't peanuts to its mix.

"Jif, in an effort to overtake Skippy and Peter Pan, added sweeteners and reduced their actual peanut content to improve the flavor and increase the profit margin. According to a lab study (granted, by a lab run by Skippy’s parent company, Best Foods), Jif peanut butter contained 25 percent hydrogenated oil and only 75 percent actual peanuts. This greatly concerned the FDA and other consumer groups."

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/12/food-labels-peanut-butter-hearings/

Today, you can't call a product "peanut butter" unless it's made of at least 90 percent ground up peanuts. Otherwise it has to be labeled "peanut-spread."

See also: Pringles are not "chips" they are "potato-crisps" http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/04/the-inventor-of-the-pringles-can-was-buried-in-one/

I don't trust Uber Drivers to be properly insured - I can't see myself Flying Uber.

So fun fact, you all know Uber is owned by Jeff Bezos

You may know him as the owner of Amazon.
Well he owns Uber and he also owns Twitter, The Washington Post, Linden Labs (AKA Second Life), and more tech companies than I can list.

As of March 14, 2018, he has an estimated net worth of $130.5 billion.

He is creator of the Amazon Echo which is designed to sit in your home and monitor your every word. It databases everything you say in exchange for on-demand music and news, similar to Siri on your iPhone.

"Bezos recently disclosed that the company’s Web-services business is building a “private cloud” for the CIA to use for its data needs." For $6 Billion, he will be supplying the data for use by the CIA.


Just some information for everyone to play around with in their heads

I'd like to see a comparison between this and Rocket Lab's Electron in size and ability...

Me too! Diamond Monster 3D. I remember GLquake and QuakeWorld. Wow. And then a Creative Labs 3D Blaster and on. http://zimage.com/~ant/antfarm/about/toys.html for my history.

The mass in the neighborhood of 1800 lbs.

I've always thought of it as a VW spinning around one body.
You have the Xray tube on 1 side and its detector on the other along with a heat ex-changer for the tube and then other assemblies.

Ive worked on Cath labs and have few times helped replacing tubes and installing these systems. Fun stuff.

Ha!
Yeah...if I was more creative and less lazy, I would put together a newt in a Dutch boy paint outfit or something.
What I use is my sweet (now deceased) golden retriever/lab puppy getting blown back by my neighbor's huge dog's hurricane bark.
Maybe someday I'll get off my ass and change it.

Well, unless you've got quick access to a toxicology lab, this can be something of a challenge. It's one of the biggest problems with the prohibition approach...you can't ever be sure about what you're taking when it comes to street drugs.

But personally, I have doubts this "trip" ever really happened, or at least it was vastly exaggerated to make for a better story.

Another thing to keep in mind is that different forms of elements and chemicals have very different properties.

Pure elemental liquid mercury is pretty cool stuff. Lots of people (myself included) can remember playing with elemental mercury in their bare hands in chemistry classes, etc., and even that sort of cavalier use basically never resulted in cases of mercury poisoning.

In sheer statistical terms, I gather that it is relatively safe to have pure liquid mercury directly on your skin -- cupped in your hands, say -- for short to medium periods of time. Open wounds, even small ones, can make that significantly worse. Even ingesting elemental mercury generally doesn't result in too much absorption into the body, but it remains a terrible idea. Evaporation of elemental mercury even at room temperature can lead to inhalation of mercury vapor, which is drastically more dangerous. So, ventilation and environmental controls are quite important.

This organic mercury sounds like terribly nasty stuff, but fortunately people are very unlikely to be exposed to it outside of a lab or if you are a scientist who is intentionally synthesizing it.

I think it is kind of a shame that those high school chemistry type sessions of messing around with elemental mercury are pretty much gone today. On the other hand, even though the risks are lower with elemental mercury like that, the rewards aren't really all that high either. I have fun memories of messing around with the stuff, but it wasn't by any means necessary or important outside of pure academic curiosity. Better safe that sorry I guess, particularly when the extreme end of "sorry" results in horror stories like this.

We used to have LAN parties in the computer lab at my school playing Doom, Duke 3d, Hexen, Descent, ROTT, etc. That was a little later, but still ancient history. Gaming isn't the same anymore and I'm not sure if that's good or bad.

“Girl strength beauty lab”
Experiment 1
Breast weight
Do you know how much boobs weigh?
A cup = 2 parrots
B cup = 2 rats
C cup = 2 hedgehogs
D cup = 2 rabbits
E cup = 2 hens
Experiment 2
Breast movement/sports
Do you know how boobs move while moving/doing sports?
Running, Jumping rope, tennis, volleyball, boxing.
The results might not be what you expect.
That’s why you need Wacoal 5 star sports clothes.
Brought to you by Wacoal.
With its 5 band support technology yadda yadda. Bra.

That's what I was saying... sorry if it wasn't clear. Because the insurance companies wanted a single billing for each test, the labs had to set their rates for each test to include the prep... even when a sample had already been prepared for another test that had been ordered.

They could have billed separately for prep, and for the test. But they hadn't been doing that before, so they didn't change it.