I’m sick and came to the doctor to get tested for covid, strep, and flu, since those are going around my work. I asked the doctor if I could get paxlovid if the covid test was positive, and he goes “Oh I don’t think you’d need it”
Motherfucker almost everyone who catches covid should be fucking taking it wtf is wrong with you. Oh I’m young and otherwise healthy? Yeah and I’d like to fucking stay that way thank you very much, and I’ll take any reduction in the chance of becoming permanently disabled.
Also of the medical professionals I saw today, they were only wearing surgical masks, not N95s and I can’t comprehend it. Why in the hell would you go into the room of a likely covid case not wearing an N95 are you insane?
I’m so fucking sick of being the only person in this entire town that’s actually worried about catching this disease, even the fucking doctors don’t care anymore. I work in a research facility attached to a hospital and when I go to the food court and shit at best like 1/25 people are wearing masks. In a hospital.
Thank you Mr Joe Brandon for ending the pandemic, you’ve truly cemented your place among history’s greatest killers.
I've got a friend who is a pulminologist and he strongly disagrees. As he explained it, paxlovid has its own side-effects, there isn't a limitless supply of it, and if you're young and healthy and vaccinated already you're not going to see a meaningful reduction in symptoms. So the value-add of taking it relative to the self-inflicted suffering generally isn't considered worth it unless you're in an at-risk category.
I'm hard pressed to name anyone who hasn't caught it at least once by now, save for my 76 year old mother who was practically a shut-in before the disease started. I got it the first time from a foster kid I was caring for who got it from daycare (which are all basically petri dishes particularly given how understaffed they've become). I got it the second time from my friends' kids, during D&D, because public school is basically just daycare with more standardized tests now. We all came through it without long-term issues, because we were all vax'd, got bed rest during the peak of it, and we took care of one another.
At some point, you've got to trust the guy who writes the pharmaceutical prescriptions or whats the fucking point of doctors at all? This isn't a panacea for the pandemic. Because it doesn't interact well with other medications, it is absolutely NOT for everyone. And its generally not wise to over-prescribe something this new out on the market anyway, for a whole host of reasons.
That does seem dumb as hell.
If it makes you feel any better, other countries have people with more sense. I visited Japan in February, and practically everyone there was masked all the time everywhere.
Frustrating as hell that more people don't. But that's a much different issue than whether your doctor should issue you anti-virals.
Pretty much all of medicine is a balance between risk and reward. This can actually be an issue sometimes with things like screenings or whatever where we pick up things that aren't actually an issue (even if they're scary) and are unlikely to pose a threat by the end of a person's natural life and then put them through an onslaught of medical intervention that hurts their QOL way more than the actual problem was likely to ever do for them.
That's not to say that screening and treating minor issues is bad or anything, just that we need caution to avoid causing unnecessary harm.
I absolutely agree.
It just becomes exhausting to hear people insist "my doctor wasn't wearing a mask at the appointment, so I know better than him on what drugs to take".
Like, do you trust the medication you're taking enough to take it but not enough to listen to the manufacturers on when and how to use it?