On my 19th birthday I went out sailing with my girlfriend - well before the cell phone era. A wonderful day only to end when I got home and found out my grandmother had died soon after I picked up my girlfriend and neither my parents nor hers could get ahold of us. While it was a wonderful day, the memory of it is always overshadowed by what I didn't know at the time was going on and I'd have much rather been with my family and gone out sailing one day in the next few weekends.

Several years earlier we were down at the beach, in a cottage and it took the rental manager a good while to find us to tell us about a call about my grandfather having been unexpectedly having to be rushed to the ER. If we had cell phones at the time, we would have been back home to be with my grandmother when he died.

So, yes, we made it through without cell phones, but they certainly would have come in handy and there were things we might have done while family members were sick if we could have been sure we could have been reached quickly if needed. I'm sure it's the same with many other people.

Most of the events where I go, I don't deal with people holding phones up, maybe because I'm often going to other types of events. Glad to know they don't tend to be so hard-and-fast on such issues.

Try spending something like 5-10 years in a situation where you're basically on-call 24/7 due to ill parents. Yes, it happens. I've been there. One parent dying of leukemia, then the other dying of Alzheimer's.

If I took what you were saying as a rule, I'd have spent a decade avoiding such events. If it were before cell phones, there were many things I would not have been doing, but, as it was, being able to go to a concert or play was a major stress relief from having to spend most of my non-work time taking care of dying parents.

Speaking as someone who was "on call" 24/7 for 10 years, due to one parent dying of leukemia, followed immediately by dealing with the other parent with Alzheimer's, people in such high stress situations NEED to be able to get a break and escape even more than people not in such situations. Skipping such concerts and other activities during such times means not taking a break and getting that bit of an escape for a short while that is needed for their sanity and stress relief.

Does that include on-call emergency people, including doctors or police?

Does that include the person with a dying parent who needs to stay reachable at all times and gets a text and needs to check it immediately to see if it's something like, "Not going to last much longer, at the ER now," or, "At hospital, not urgent, room 451."

How would that person know, without using their cell to check, if it was an emergency or not? And how would an usher or someone, in similar cases, be able to clearly determine whether there was a serious, urgent, or emergency need or not?

And how do ushers quickly and, with any sense of accuracy, determine if it's an emergency situation?

When my Father was dying of leukemia, and later my Mother dying of Alzheimer's, there were many times we had to always be reachable, even if it was just to get a text that said, "Had to go to the hospital, in room 451. No need to hurry."

Is that an emergency use? Well, if it said, "Situation severe, need you ASAP," it is, but I'd have to check it to find that out, wouldn't I? And that's how I find out if it's an emergency or not.

Social Fixer would filter that with no issue or problem at all.

Logitech has been the King of Mediocre for years. Average products that, with a bit of effort, could be quality work. For example, wrist pads instead of some products that don't force the wrist to bend back. They destroyed the Squeezebox system by Slim Devices. (When they bought the company, I knew the days it would work were numbered.)

The only reason to buy from them is not doing enough research to find who has a better product that's not necessarily as visible in the marketplace. I won't touch their products anymore.

Not all houses have evenly spaced studs and joists. My current house was built in the 1940s, after WWII and my grandparents moved in after my grandfather was discharged at the end of the war. We did some rewiring on this house (with the help/supervision of an electrician) and in the process found that there were places the studs were not evenly spaced.

About ten years ago I suspended two pieces of angle iron from attic joists, going down through the ceiling, to provide a mount for a plasma HDTV. (Since this was over the fireplace and in front of where the chimney was behind the wall, I didn't have studs there that would be a normal thickness and couldn't depend on them for something as heavy as a plasma HDTV.) Granted, that was around the chimney, which may have required special measurements, but the joists there varied from 12-18" apart. I positioned the angle irons so they were as close to centered on the chimney as possible while in the attic and when I got down into the living room and checked the holes I had made in the ceiling, they were not anywhere close to centered over the fireplace. (In other words, while the fireplace chimney was a straight line, the structure around it shifted - probably to allow room for the chimney for the furnace.)

These dimensions have been industry standards for 60 years or more (just addressing my own lifetime in that). All contractors know it, all architects know it. Anyone who works with lumber knows it. Those qualified to make plans, like architects, allow for the accepted sizes in their plans.

If you are actually expecting a 2x4 to be 2" x 4", then that tells us, right off, you have no idea what you're doing.

"So what are MY qualifications for coming to those conclusions? For one, I can read."

Yeah, that makes you more qualified than someone with 3 years of med school and years as an intern and years or decades in medical practice.

Seriously, that does NOT make you qualified to read the results and draw conclusions. I used to teach in a psych hospital and, later, in other treatment settings. "I can read" was NOT enough to make it possible for me to diagnose illnesses or to second guess the psychiatrists or social workers with degrees and postgraduate degrees in fields I only minored in.

However, that experience and the classes I took did teach me how to spot someone who was willfully blind to seeing when they were a good example of the Dunning Kruger Effect and thought they knew more than the experts because they didn't know enough to know when they were out of their depth.

You can go on, but it's clear you're looking more for justification here and for people to tell you that you're right (which means you have doubt you don't want to admit to) than you are looking for answers. You're being reckless with your own body. It's possible it might work for a short while, then get worse, or might actually work. If it works, it's due to luck, not due to what you perceive as your intelligence being better than the doctor's experience and education.

I'm out of here - but I'm sure, even knowing I won't come back, you'll need to comment with a long list of reasons of why I, and everyone else here, and your doctors, and the world, is wrong and you, for some reason, are the only one who is right.

1) You state, in the original post, "It's only after another doctor ordered additional tests," yet you reply here and say, 'First, there was no "other doctor who recommended higher doses."' Can you clarify this?

2) You spend a lot of time talking about the "Women's Health Initiative." Why don't you answer my other questions? You've had multiple suggestions of trying another doctor. I asked why you didn't. So that comes back to, "Why are you sticking with this doctor if he's a problem?"

3) Sorry, but menopause IS natural. It happens without medication causing it. Maybe it's only three species that experience it, but it is a natural result of aging.

4) You are interpreting results and coming to conclusions and debating with a qualified MD. You are making strong claims, especially now that you're saying there is no other MD in the picture. (Your original post stated there was someone who ordered tests.) So what are your qualifications to make these conclusions?

It would help if you said what his reasoning was for the lower levels. Is there a chance of cancer or other issues developing? Why are you still with him instead of seeing the other doctor who recommended higher doses? And did the other doctor give any reason why the first one might go with lower doses?

Follow the money. Who is spending?

Younger people are more easily influenced by advertising and more likely to buy things based on emotional wants. Also, young people spend more and buy more. Parents tend to buy a lot for their children, which still means the ultimate consumer is youth. After dealing with kids, people tend to slow down their buying. They have the big items, although they'll replace a car occasionally. By the time most people reach 35, they're buying less and buying what they need, not glitzy things that have a high profit margin. Also, by then, brand loyalty is established and people tend to keep buying the brands they have been for years.

It's selling to youth that makes the big bucks.

I guess you missed the entire point of what I said. Parents with terminal diseases - you can't just ignore those calls and if it's an emergency or there's a new caregiver on duty you don't know, the call could be from numbers or area codes you don't recognize. You can't just silence the phone and figure you won't be getting an important call.

I alluded to that before - guess you didn't read that part of the response.