Sound like you've never worked in paediatrics. Palpation is almost useless for children under 8, just go for what you can see, transilluminate or in this case pick up with infra-red.

I disagree. Certainly in paediatrics transilluminators work on all skin colours. To my knowledge, they don't use 'near-infrared' but use visible light, usually from red LEDs. This technology does use infra-red, and again skin pigmentation shouldn't matter. The projection-based devices I've used (e.g. Vein Viewer) worked fine on black african and asian skin pigments.

They did, just not head-mounted: http://www.christiedigital.com/en-us/projection-solutions/medical-innovations/pages/default.aspx

You don't know what you're talking about.

Yep, and this will help with those patients in no way at all. In fact, it's likely to make you try for a tiny mobile vein that looks good through the glasses but isn't any good in practice. This would certainly be a helpful tool in the toolkit, but in now way a complete answer.

Actually this sort of tech is available now, it uses a compact video projector rather than glasses. It works well, although it does have a tendency to make even tiny veins appear viable for cannulation. http://www.christiedigital.com/en-us/projection-solutions/medical-innovations/pages/default.aspx I can see the potential of using glasses, the good thing about the projection version is that other people can also see what you're doing, which is helpful for a difficult procedure (e.g. PICC lines) where a couple of people might be involved. I could also imagine it reducing litigation potential compared to a single person looking through glasses.

No, it's not. You inject in a site where you're unlikely to hit a vein, and before pushing the plunger you withdraw a little to ensure there's no flashback (of blood) which would indicate you're in a vein. Not difficult.

That's because of the inexperience/inability of the person doing the marking. When I did maths coursework assignments at school, they gave my work to the only Cambridge graduate maths teacher who had a proper maths degree. At the time, I didn't realise the significance, but in retrospect I'm grateful as he could give me marks for using a legitimate method, whereas the other teachers would call it the "wrong" method. Really, all exams should cater for people to use any legitimate method and markers should have the experience to recognise that they need to pass the paper on to someone who understands it properly.

I took maths exams before equation solving calculators were commonplace. I had the quadratic equation formula programmed into my graphing calculator permanently taking up one of its 10 memories. And, yes, I can still regurgitate the equation at will 20 years later.

I'm not sure why they say these things are hard to understand as it seems like even an idiot could.

They're hard to understand because there isn't a direct one-one relationship between intake and serum levels, and different substances have complex interactions that can take years of experience to properly understand. As a simple example, if you're low on sodium - take salt, right? Well if you eat table salt or inject sodium chloride your sodium will go up, but so will your chloride, which causes acidosis if it gets too high. The purest form of dietary management is parenteral (intravenous) nutrition, which is what people get in ICU/ITU when they can't eat or take gastric feeds. It's incredibly complex and very easy to get wrong.

You can oversimplify a situation to make the evidence mean whatever you want. A guitarist will talk about "muscle memory" and how their hands just do what they need to do. That doesn't mean they lack free will when playing a guitar solo. Our brains are complex, and behaviours become instinctive and responsive over time in order to react quickly; free will can then override the instinctive decision. For example, when driving your car you might find yourself braking because you've seen something out of the corner of your eye, you then decide that the car in the side road isn't about to pull out on you, so you make a conscious decision to put your foot on the gas. It doesn't mean you lack free will, it means you've trained your instincts to respond before higher reasoning kicks in, but your higher reasoning can still override that response - and it was your decision to train yourself that gave you the instinct in the first place.

I think you mean intuition.

I was talking about vaccines. But irradiated or superheated food is sterile - e.g. freeze dried and some canned goods. They're not unsafe but they are sterile as they don't contain microorganisms.

So it didn't do video over Micro USB then.

I would also like to point out that cases of SIDS rise around the same age as mandatory vaccination. --- there it is, your post immediately disqualified from proper discussion.