Divemedic

How Do Viral Infections Work?

Every cell in your body contains a mechanism for manufacturing the proteins and other substances that the cell needs to manufacture during its interphase. Review yesterday’s post for an explanation of interphase. Again, for those who know the details, please excuse the fact that I am simplifying a terribly complex system. This is years of schooling condensed down into a blog post. I can’t be comprehensive here.

There are different types of infections, and a virus is but one of them. What is a virus? It’s a segment of genetic material that enters its target cell, takes over that manufacturing center, and instructs that cell to begin manufacturing copies of the virus. The cell will do that until the interior of the cell is filled with copies of the virus, then the cell bursts open and releases them. Since a virus can’t reproduce by itself, it is not technically alive. Since viruses aren’t alive, antibiotics don’t work on viral infections.

When a person gets a viral infection, there are no magic treatments. The way that these infections have been treated is to suppress symptoms and support the patient until their own immune system can rally and defeat the infection. For example, when you get a cold or the flu, we give you Tylenol for fever, cough medicine to suppress a cough, decongestants, etc.

So how does your immune system work to do this? There are two parts to your immune system: the innate, and the adaptive. The innate system is a number of general responses that fight the infection until the adaptive system can analyze the infection, develop a counter to it, and manufacture that counter. Once the adaptive immune system develops a counter to a particular illness, it will remember that, and you won’t get sick from it again (with some exceptions).

All of those symptoms that you get from an infection (fever, congestion, etc) are caused by your immune system creating what’s called inflammation. The inflammatory response (inflammation) occurs when tissues are injured by infections, trauma, toxins, heat, or any other cause. The damaged cells (that broke open when filled by viruses) release chemicals including histamine, bradykinin, chemokines, interferons, interleukins, lymphokines, tumor necrosis factor, and prostaglandins. Many of these chemicals are referred to as cytokines. When released, they signal the immune system to do its job.

Cytokines are responsible for all sorts of things- runny nose, mucous in the airway, fever, cough, fatigue, all of the symptoms we normally associate with symptoms of being sick. Some infections, and COVID is among them, cause too many cytokines to be released in some people, and the result is caused a cytokine storm. A cytokine storm causes an extreme overreaction of the body to the infection. The immune system actually begins to attack the patient’s own body. This appears to happen to as many as 15% of the patients infected by the original version of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. In some of these patients, and no one yet knows why, the cytokine storm is enough to cause a deadly pneumonia. The only thing that IS known is that having certain preexisting conditions that are already creating inflammation increases the risk of this happening. Things that create inflammation are numerous and varied: diabetes, obesity, asthma, smoking, etc. That’s why there are so many risk factors for COVID being serious.

In these patients, it is cytokines called Interleukins, such as interleukin-6 (1L-6), interleukin-1 (IL-1), interleukin-17 (IL-17), and tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α) that play a significant role in lung damage in ARDS patients through attacking the tissues of the lungs. A pneumonia develops which requires hospitalization.

Normally, if a patient’s immune system is attacking them, we just give them antihistamines and steroids, which combine to shut down the immune system. That’s what we do to asthmatics, for example. We can’t do that in the presence of an infection, because the immune system is what we are expecting to fight the infection and shutting it down would be a bad idea.

When a patient comes into the emergency room with a suspected infection, there are things that we look for that indicate that the patient has too much inflammation going on. They are called SIRS criteria. (Systemic Inflammatory Response Syndrome). When a patient meets those criteria, there are a set of orders that the nurse implements without consulting the doctor. IV Fluids, chest Xray, drawing blood cultures and other labs, etc. Testing for a host of respiratory viruses is done (Influenza, RSV, COVID, and others). Urine is tested for signs of a UTI. We then give Ofirmev (IV Tylenol) and oxygen as needed. We also give precautionary antibiotics. All of this must be done within 90 minutes of the patient arriving at the ED door, per hospital policy. I average about 55 minutes for getting it all done if I am uninterrupted. It’s a lot of work.

If the patient comes back positive for COVID, they are usually sent home with instructions to return if the symptoms get worse, but if they are one of the unlucky ones who have ARDS, they get admitted. This means that about 90% or so of our COVID patients are discharged home.

The ones who do get admitted are usually fairly sick. I wasn’t here during the early days of COVID in 2020, but I did work in the COVID units in 2021. Many of them were in septic shock, had coagulopathies, and were in pretty bad shape. About one in ten of the patients admitted for COVID died. I really do think that the disease is less lethal than it once was, because in the past two years I can count on the fingers of one hand the patients I have seen die from COVID, with at least two of them having cancer and one of them refusing all treatment because he didn’t believe that COVID was real. Right up until he died, he insisted that we were making it up and purposely making him sick so we could make more money. Just two weeks ago, I had a patient telling me that COVID wasn’t real, and it was all a conspiracy that the doctors were using to make more money. I told him, “OK, well, you have COVID and we are discharging you home. If you feel worse, come back in. Other than that, drink lots of fluids and get some rest. Here are your discharge papers. I hope you get better soon.”

To be honest, that’s all you can say to people who won’t listen to reason.

As a related note, I want to take a minute to describe and explain Remdesivir.

I already said that viral replication uses the cell’s own manufacturing system to make copies of the virus. The virus in this case is a segment of RNA. How Remdesivir works is that it terminates the RNA transcription that SARS-CoV-2 requires in order to replicate itself.

In late August of 2020, patients who received Remdesivir made a high number of reports of liver and kidney problems. This was due to the government not testing this drug in clinical trials, upending decades of precedent in approving medications. For that reason, many hospitals required patients to sign a statement of informed consent following a full disclosure of the risks and benefits of receiving Remdesivir. At least at my hospital, all patients who received the drug after October of 2020 or so had to sign this consent form.

Now you know.

By Divemedic, ago

Figures Don’t Lie, but Liars Figure

Interesting article in the Guardian on FBI crime statistics. The left is pissed because crime is going down, and this will make it harder for them to pass laws that are soft on criminals while still allowing them to outlaw guns. They can’t have that, so they are going to blame Ron DeSantis.

“The issue of crime is deeply weaponized and politicized and we see that come up especially during election cycles. Florida has very incomplete data but Governor Desantis’s campaign is stating they’ve made Florida the safest state.”

In Florida, only 8% of the police departments are represented in the 2022 data, according to the Marshall Project.

The real money quotes are located towards the end of the piece.

  • Black Americans, who make up 13.6% of the population, accounted for 56% of the more than 16,000 homicide victims in the US.
  • of the 19,200 weapons used to kill someone in 2022, 15,000 – or 77% – of them were a firearms, usually a handgun.

Let’s take a look at the FBI Report and see the data for ourselves. The FBI numbers themselves seem to have some confusion in them that isn’t due to spotty data.

First, race. There were 8,694 homicides committed by blacks in 2022, out of a total of 16,724 homicides.

Let’s look at just homicides. Of the 16,724 homicides, 5,803 (34%) of them had handguns listed as the means. That’s on the “crime” page with homicide selected as the crime.

Now look at the “expanded homicide data” page, and you see that 7,937 homicides were committed by handguns out of a total of 19,200 homicides (41% of homicides). Why the discrepancy? Why are there 19,200 homicides on one page, but the same dataset on a different page says there are 16,724? How can we trust these numbers?

Even so, looking at the data. There were 542 rifles (<3%) of all types and 186 shotguns (<1%) used as homicide weapons. More people were killed by “unarmed” assailants than were killed by assailants with rifles.

The obvious answer here is to make it illegal for black people to own guns. That would have prevented far more homicides than banning concealed carry or banning “assault weapons.” Wait, you say that’s ridiculous? I agree. Gun bans won’t stop evil people from doing evil things.

By Divemedic, ago

What is Cancer?

Since many of you don’t seem to understand my problem with Somers and her cancer plan, perhaps a bit of a lesson in what cancer is will help. This is simplified for ease of understanding and for brevity, but you will get the point. Even though simplified for brevity, this is still a much longer post than I usually make. Cancer is a complicated subject.

Normally, your cells do their job. Each cell has a job to do, and they sit there and happily carry out their cellular business 90-96% of the time. During this time, a cell is very busy synthesizing proteins, copying DNA into RNA, engulfing extracellular material, processing signals, whatever its job is. The rest of the time, 4-10% of the time, the cell is busy copying its DNA and dividing to create its own replacement in a process called mitosis. Mitosis happens about once every 24 hours, on average. Some cells like hair follicles do it more often, while other cells like nerve cells, less so.

Your DNA is like a novel contained in the nucleus of your cell. It contains all of the information that your cells need to do their jobs, live their lives, and carry out everything that your body does- from your intelligence, to your looks, your health, and even your behavior. It’s all programmed in there using “words” spelled with chemicals called base pairs. These base pairs are made of four “letters”- G, C, A, and T. There are 3.2 billion of these letters in human DNA. They each must get copied when the cell undergoes mitosis, and they must be copied with complete accuracy.

The process of copying their DNA so the cell can carry out mitosis is incredibly accurate. The error rate during DNA replication is as low as 10^−9 to 10^−11 errors per base pair. Errors can be caused by exposure to chemicals that alter the DNA, by certain viruses, by ionizing radiation, or simply a bad chemical reaction. There are “checkpoints” built into the process that detect and correct errors in the DNA replication and will halt the process or even cause the cell to die if correction can’t be done. Cells are programmed through their DNA to only copy themselves a limited number of times before they die off in a process called apoptosis. They will also undergo apoptosis if errors in this DNA copying process happen.

Sometimes, there are errors that slip through. Most of the time, these errors aren’t a big deal. Sometimes they are, and that is what causes cancer. When this happens, there are processes in your body’s immune system that are supposed to locate and destroy these out of control cells, because cells damaged by cancer release a chemical called tumor necrosis factor (TNF). More on that in a future post.

Cancer cells flip the whole mitosis process on its head. They not only fail to undergo apoptosis, they also spend most of their time in mitotic division- making copies of themselves. They multiply out of control, creating tissue that is using more and more of the bodies resources as they multiply out of control.

So cancer is a failure of two parts of the body: the cancerous cells that have lost the ability to undergo apoptosis through a transcription error that appears in their DNA, and the immune system whose job it is to find and eliminate cancerous cells.

There are no magic foods that halt this process, because it is an error in the DNA of the cancerous cells that are causing the problem, and once there is a “spelling” error, there is no way to correct this spelling error in a cancer cell’s DNA. The best you can do is kill off the cancer cell. The “daughter” cells, being an exact copy of the cancerous cell, will also be cancer cells.

The tumors eventually grow large and numerous enough that they use up all of the organism’s resources. This is why cancer patients begin losing weight and looking so sickly. The tumors are spending so much time and energy replicating that there aren’t enough resources remaining.

There are a few ways to get rid of cancer. The main ones are:

Surgery. We use surgery to literally cut tumors out of the body. This doesn’t cure the cancer, it merely lowers the size of the tumor, and thus the energy requirements being used up by the cancer. The issue is that surgery can’t possibly get every cancer cell, so all this does is buy time.

These multiplying cells create their own environment- they cause the body to create new blood vessels to feed the growing tumor in a process called angiogenesis. There are drugs that prevent angiogenesis, and taking these causes the tumors to be starved out.

The growing cells also have one exploitable flaw- they are spending so much time multiplying that they don’t have time to repair damage to themselves. This can be used to our advantage. That’s what chemotherapy and radiation therapy do- they damage all of the cells in your body. The healthy cells then repair themselves in between sessions, the cancer cells do not. The more sessions of chemo or radiation that you undergo, the more unrepaired damage is done to the cancer cells, and the cancer can eventually be killed off this way.

No treatment is 100% effective at eliminating cancer, because no matter how effective, there will always be a cell or two left that the treatment didn’t eliminate. The earlier that a cancer gets detected and treatment begins, the better the results. Although there are no curable cancers, melanoma, Hodgkin lymphoma, and breast, prostate, testicular, cervical, and thyroid cancer have some of the highest 5-year relative survival rates. The 6 cancers with the lowest survival rates are lung cancer, liver cancer, brain cancer, esophageal cancer, stomach cancer, colon and rectal cancer.

Since everyone is different, and so is the DNA error that causes the cancer, each person and each cancer will respond differently to treatment. That’s why one person can get breast cancer and survive, while another does not. This is why people like Suzanne Somers live for twenty years, while someone else doesn’t. Writing a book about how your special diet is the reason why you aren’t dead yet is a complete scam. You are alive because of the random chances of fate and the simple mathematical variances of chance, not because you have the cure for cancer by eating beet roots.

What makes her claims of a cure so despicable is that the people who forego medical advice to try her cure frequently discover the truth that it doesn’t work months or even years down the road, and it is then too late for them to be treated for what may have been a cancer that was easily treatable.

By Divemedic, ago

Government Screws Things Up

When government gets involved in anything, they screw it up. Maybe on purpose, maybe not.

Do you run around and scream that gun stores can’t be trusted? Or do you place the blame where it lies: with that individual, or with the government that made the law that caused the policy? Do you recognize that it is unfair to ask someone to forgo their livelihood so you can circumvent a law with which you disagree?

Do you then blame the pharmacist for not giving you drugs without a prescription?

There are plenty of laws with which I disagree. Some of them even dictate my behavior at work. We all have that happen. A friend who works at the county health department recently had a guy throw used needles at her because she wouldn’t accept them for disposal unless they were in an approved Sharps container. (Even though I happen to agree with that law)

When I was a paramedic and posted on a now defunct gun board, I was accused of being a “jackbooted thug” because I disarmed a patient who had sustained a head injury in a motorcycle accident and was carrying a pistol. I transported him to the hospital with his gun in his backpack, which I put in the cab of the ambulance. Why? Because people with head injuries aren’t in their right mind, and will often get violent because of the “fight or flight” response. It was for everyone’s safety. If I had gotten the cops to take that gun, he likely wouldn’t have seen it again. Believe it or not, I did the guy a favor.

The same accusation was made against me when I said that we occasionally take people to the hospital against their will, for example people who are threatening suicide or who have had a head injury or stroke. Why? The law says that they aren’t in their right mind and don’t have the capacity to make informed decisions. I did a post on that back in 2010. I am a firm believer in patients making their own decisions after being presented with the facts. The only thing that we truly own is our bodies, and we have every right to control them. However, a person who is not able to make an informed decision still has a moral right to receive care.

So why do I bring that up? Because the job that I work in is FAR more regulated than the firearms industry. I don’t make the rules, and neither does anyone else in the hospital. We are dictated to by a lot of agencies: CMS, AHCA, the Joint Commission, state nursing board, DOH, tons of agencies. They run everything from what medications we give to how much we can charge for what we do. If you don’t follow the rules, you lose your license and can be barred from ever working in this field again.

So I disagree when people blame the medical field for what happened in 2020 with COVID. The lockdowns, the vax mandates, all of that nonsense came from the government. Don’t think I am just defending myself and my actions here, because if you will recall, I didn’t return to the health care profession until 2021.

The TikTok dance videos? They were stupid and damaging to the reputation of the medical field, but when you understand that the videos were coming from the outpatient surgery centers that were shut down as a result of COVID mandates, that makes it a bit less shocking. Then consider that surgical nurses aren’t the same as ED or ICU nurses. It takes a year at minimum to train an RN to a basic level of competency in emergency medicine, and that’s a year after licensure, on top of nursing school. It’s a complicated subject that takes years to master. So those nurses who weren’t in fields like the ED, ICU, or ECMO were left with nothing to do and made stupid videos. Still not a damning indictment of all medical professionals.

No, what the people who comment on here about how COVID was the fault of doctors and nurses don’t seem to grasp, is that the lockdowns, the mandates, all of that were the fault of government wannabe dictators getting their tyranny on.

Crying about the way COVID was treated shows a complete lack of understanding of respiratory illness and its treatment. Health professionals were doing what had always worked for respiratory illnesses in the past.

Those treatments worked until COVID came along. Scientists have found that a section of the genetic material that makes up the COVID virus genetic sequence was patented by Moderna for cancer research purposes in February of 2016. The sequence is 19 base pairs long, meaning that there is only a one in three trillion chance that the virus happened naturally. It just so happens that this engineered sequence gave the virus a special affinity for human lung tissue. That makes COVID fall firmly into the category of a biological warfare agent.

Then the shutdown and the turmoil that followed was an engineered crisis that in my opinion was designed to put Joe Biden in the Whitehouse. I have posted on that as well.

So don’t come on here and disparage what the medical professionals did for the COVID outbreak. It isn’t them that caused the problems- it was the people that YOU elected and put in charge. Government receives power with the consent of the governed. What have you done to change what is happening?

Have a problem with it? Get the law changed. You say that you can’t? What makes you think that I can?

By Divemedic, ago

Same Guy?

Look at these two pictures.

The nose and chin are different. The earlobes are attached to his head in one, but not in the other. Even odder is that the eyes of the guy in the top picture are blue, but are dark green in the middle one.

I know that I have posted about this before. There are those (including Tim Poole) who claim that this can’t be an imposter Joe for the simple reason that, if you were going to pick someone to be a double, you wouldn’t pick a demented retard.

I keep seeing stuff like this, and the photos appear to point at there being at least one doppelganger.

By Divemedic, ago

Deal Alert

500 round can of Lake City 62 grain Greentip $300

The disclaimer: I don’t advertise, and receive nothing for my reviews or articles. I have no relationship with any products, companies, or vendors that I review here, other than being a customer. If I ever *DO* have a financial interest, I will disclose it. Otherwise, I pay what you would pay. No discounts or other incentives here. I only post these things because I think that my readers would be interested.

By Divemedic, ago

Comments

Here we go with having to point out the rules again, just as we have to do every few months. We discuss controversial topics here. Disagreement and debate is encouraged. Disagree with me all you like. Starting your post by claiming to be able to avoid a ban by saying?

I’m in the US using a VPN. Yo may have heard of them?

Before going on to pile on personal attacks? Your comment won’t make it out of moderation, nor will I even read most of it. Let me remind you of blog rules for posting:

I know that you can pull tricks like IP spoofing, changing your name, etc. So don’t think doing that is going to earn you “I’m so clever” points. It doesn’t make you clever, it makes you an ass.

If you don’t already know: The owner of this blog (me) has the final say on what you can and cannot post. It’s my house, I make the rules. Content here is moderated, and I will not be approving any comments that I find, in my sole judgement, to be unworthy.

Deliberately posting statements that are aimed at insulting the blog owner (me) will get your comment tossed in the trash. Feel free to disagree with me, just don’t think that i will allow you to call names or impugn anyone’s character.

By Divemedic, ago

Sudafed

The Federal government forced drug companies to restrict drugs that contain pseudoephedrine because people are using it to make meth. People still have no problems making meth, but now I can’t get decent decongestants.

Then they listed phenylephrine as the new hotness for congestion, but it doesnt work for shit. The only way to get real Sudafed is to show ID and be tracked.

Now the FDA is questioning the effectiveness of the new drug that they are forcing you to buy, so CVS is pulling it from the shelves. This is what government does.

By Divemedic, ago