I never said it was or that I did. All I did was originally point out how fructose was absorbed by the alimentary tract. I probably should have been more specific when I offhandedly remarked that it is metabolized similarly to sugar, regardless of where that metabolism occurs, it follows similar pathways and utilizes similar enzymes to result in identical metabolites. In any case, fructolysis in the liver yields glycolysis intermediates, which in a normal meal from a person not suffering from starvation would then be likely to undergo gluconeogensis and be either stored as glycogen or released into circulation as glucose, or incorporated into fatty acid synthesis.

The point is that glycolysis and fructolysis both yield a relatively insignificant amount of ATP, not enough to provide enough for normal cell function. Their metabolites are basically the same though, and enter the TCA cycle and then undergo electron transport in the mitochondria, in an identical manner, yielding 16 times as much ATP as the original 6 carbon sugar hydrolysis. Their breakdown pathways, while slightly different (and if you want to be REALLY technical, hexokinase CAN phosphorylate fructose in the same way it acts on glucose, and then it does follow the glycolytic pathway, identically from that step forward), are very, very similar, involving many of the same enzymes, as opposed to protein or fatty acid metabolism.

Without going into the specific pathway, I was referring to the fact that its hydrolysis products are easily utilized in either gluconeogenesis or further metabolized and enter the TCA cycle.

I am a (stressed out) med student studying for a GI physiology exam. Sugars must be broken down in the small intestine to monosaccharides to be absorbed, so sucrose becomes glucose and fructose, lactose (if you're not lactose intolerant) breaks down to glucose and galactose. Glucose and galactose are absorbed via co-transport with sodium via transport proteins. This requires a standing Na+ gradient in the cell, maintained by the Na-K pump, which requires the expenditure of energy. Fructose on the other hand enters the cell by simple facilitated diffusion through the GLUT-5 protein, meaning its transport out of the intestinal lumen requires no energy expenditure. Biochemically it it can enter the glycolytic cycle and is rapidly metabolized in much the same way as glucose.

None of those cited criticisms is at all recent. 1975 was 35 years ago. Litigation against D.O.s ended in the 60s.

Wait times vary considerably from practice to practice. Emergency care will usually pre-empt patients coming in for routine visits, just like triage at a hospital will code someone having a myocardial infarct before someone who crushed their hand in a hydraulic press. Please, find me a citation saying 1/2 of all us docs are millionaires. Dermatologists and radiologists are near the top of the pay scale, and their average salary is quite good, when they finish the 4 years of medical school and 3 years of residency where you make less than minimum wage. These are the most competitive specialties to get into, and they in no way constitute anything close to even 10% of doctors, let alone half. But internists, family medicine and pediatrics are at the bottom of the pay scale, making on average about 165,000 a year. Which is nothing to sneeze at, but hardly millionaire status, especially considering the fact that if you only look at the cost of medical education, not undergrad, they are finishing school with an average debt load of about $150,000. Personally, if you are a pediatric neurosurgeon, who has completed 4 years of medical school, followed 5 years of surgery residency, and an additional 2-3 years of fellowship where you make around $50,000 annually and work about 80 hours per week, I don't a salary of upwards of $350,000 a year is out of line. Then again, ask the parents of the kid who had a life threatening brain tumor removed if they feel differently.

The number of physicians in the United States has bugger-all to do with the AMA. The AMA is a lobbying body that any med student or physician can join if they choose. They have absolutely nothing to do with medical school admission numbers, residency matching, or anything else that would affect the number of physicians in the country. The fact is, there are a LOT of people who would like to be physicians. Providing a medical education requires considerable resources, you need to get AAMC approval of your curriculum, extensive faculty, labs for histology, anatomy, and microbiology. There are about 150 medical schools in the US, with about a dozen more set to open in the next few years. Class sizes range from about 40 to around 250. If anything, many schools have faced some over-enrollment in the past few years, as more people have taken acceptances as the number of applicants has risen. There is no artificial supply shortage. There may be a shortage but it is due to lack of an adequate number of schools to meet demand (although one could argue that it is intentionally difficult to get in to medical school, as they do want only the best and brightest). Matching rates in US residency programs are still high. I have no idea why you think the AMA has anything to do with the physician supply. I am a medical student, by the way.

Not at all. Anything smaller than 70,000 kD (except proteins carrying a negative charge) is filtered at the glomerulus.

Not really. The method of damage here is due to filtration of the active antibiotic from the blood at the glomerulus. In order to spare the kidneys here, you'd need to bypass the renal arteries, which receive about 20% of the body's blood flow. Thats not even getting into the fact that you need kidney perfusion to maintain proper blood volume. I am a med student studying on renal physiology (test on friday...)

I didn't mean I am a doctor, I meant taking the perspective of a doctor; in response to a poster above one of the first things we learned was actually medical ethics, which involves a lot of putting yourself in the perspective of the doctor.

One of the things I have learned though is that just because a patient tells you something, does not always mean that it's true. I have had clinic patients tell me one thing while taking a history, and then twenty minutes later, during the physical exam, say something contradictory. I admit that for many cases, the physical exam may not necessarily be germane to the diagnosis, and may reveal nothing more than what the patient has already explained. However, it does serve as a useful source of confirmation as well as new information about the patient.

One of the most common presentations you see in medicine is a headache. Oftentimes, it's harmless. But when you can physically examine a patient for papilledma, or cranial nerve dysfunction, you might miss a life-threatening diagnosis. For the subclinical, non-emergent cases, yes this can be useful. But the problem here is that the patient is now expected to determine whether the tele-visit or a physical visit is the more appropriate course of action.

This is a bad idea. No, this is a TERRIBLE idea. With a virtual doctors visit you are missing out on a very important component of data collection leading to a diagnosis; the physical exam. Without ascultation, you are missing out on a ton of information about a patient's cardiovascular, gastrointestinal and pulmonary systems. Without physical contact, you cannot perform any kind of neurological or musculor skeletal exam, or even really determine a patient's mental status, especially if you are using just a instant messenger style window for communication. I think it is highly irresponsible and certainly opens up a practitioner to a lot of liability to be diagnosing and prescribing meds in such a manner. As a doctor, I'd say this is not for me. And as a patient, moreso.

You basically beat me to what I was going to say, but I will also add that the OP neglected to mention that glycolysis, which certainly produces ATP, occurs in the cytoplasm of every animal and plant cell...how that would make them "not alive" I haven't the faintest idea.

Having done neuroscience research, (if only on a master's degree level), I can say that the cat brain is particularly well studied, mapped out, and understood by neuroscientists. It is used as a model organism by many neuroscientists, and has a number of similarities with the human brain in its layout and function, much moreso than the mouse or rat brain.

You are so utterly off base here. The rotation of the earth is due ENTIRELY to the conservation of its momentum from the protoplanetary cloud it condensed from. As the nascent Earth coalesced, its radius decreased; conservation of momentum dictates that for a smaller radius, the mass must rotate at a higher velocity; think spinning on an office chair with your arms and legs splayed out, then bringing them in; you will being spinning faster. That is why the earth rotates. The only forces that are currently acting on the earth that could affect its rotation in any meaningful way is that of gravity; the earth-moon system being the main culprit. As the moon exerts a gravitational force upon the earth, the resultant movement of the oceans (in the form of tides) causes a "bulge" of water on the surface of the earth. The bulge however is not perfectly aligned with the moon due to the relative rotation of the earth. The offset causes a torque (rotational force) slowing the rotation of the earth as well as increasing the distance the moon orbits at.

Wind on the other hand is a result of a heat gradient between two locations on the planet's surface. Seeing as this force originates and terminates on the surface of the earth, there can be absolutely no net impulse given to the earth, let alone its rotational momentum.

Killing birds, disrupting the landscape, and even maintenance are all at least somewhat reasonable critiques of wind power. Claiming it will result in draining the Earth's rotational momentum is just ridiculous and totally incorrect.

The atomic radii don't progress in a nice orderly linear increase in size with increasing element number; in fact each period overlaps part of the period that comes before it...

Oh I am aware of that as well, I was just using Chernobyl as a point of comparison to make a point. If TMI showed anything it's that the containment design of the then-current reactors works as designed. The point being that pebble bed reactors are designed such that a runaway reaction and increased temperatures improve the moderator's effectiveness, thus reducing the reaction rate. It literally is a fool-proof design inasmuch as a nuclear reactor can be "fool proof"