Hey, guess what? Just because you get away with going 100 mph on the highway for the first few months doesn't mean you get to avoid the speeding ticket when the cop does pull you over later.

"Well, gee, officer, I've been doing this for months now, and no one's bothered to stop me before!! It must be OK then, right?"

As an object lesson in expected social etiquette, you should hold up your cell phone the next time you're in a movie theater (preferably on opening night), leave it pointed at the screen with the camera/camcorder app on without actually taking pictures, and see what happens.

Fine, how about this? I'm not the original poster, but I'll amend what he said. It boggles the mind that an idiot wore a wearable videocamera to a movie theater and pointed it at the screen, and some people are beyond themselves that the idiot got into trouble for it. There, no need for the word "apologist".

Is there anything more arbitrary than the line drawn between "animal" and "plant"?

See, I can do this too!

Drawing a line between humans and everything else is easy. Are you a member of homo sapiens, or not?

I rarely encounter an on-ramp slow-down that wasn't due to multiple lanes of busy traffic converging into a single lane, as opposed to panicky driver hitting the brakes too much. 2 flows merging into a single flow of the same size will result in a slowdown, no matter how perfect the computers are at scheduling.

Yes, because nothing else, like pedestrians, needs a traffic break to cross the street, ever.

I don't think "optimal" means what you think it means. If every car can read the traffic and select routes, there will be no "optimal" route, since traffic will be evenly congested everywhere. It may be faster than taking Highway 555 now at rush hour, but all your shortcuts of taking little traveled street X or trying to save on time by using a more roundabout route will disappear.

...I will Do No Evil(tm).

Laws and pledges will inevitably be broken inversely proportional to the enforcement and proportional to the benefits of breaking your word and how many people are involved. So Bitcoin is good, no one involved is trying to make money for nothing.

Which is a valid point, too. But the response to that is complicated. It may have been an incomplete story given to us - when I ask a social history on substance use, I usually ask a variation of, "Are you using any illegal or street drugs? Have you done so in the past?"

Most people who are steadfastly lying about current use will say no to both. People who have fallen off the wagon may lie about the first question in the beginning and tell the truth on the second, but if you come around again the patient will usually admit to it when directly asked and they know it's pertinent to treatment. If this patient had lied to the doctor about using before, I wouldn't blame them for thinking they're lying about both the past and now.

So, what then? Usually it comes down to conversations with the patient and his/her family or caretakers, and talking with adult protective services. If you aren't satisfied with the patient's safety at home, you tell them you're locking them in the hospital as a matter of patient safety until you're done investigating. The drug abusers will usually confess after this, because they want to get out of the hospital, after they're feeling better, to go back to using.

Further examples of HIPAA violations and nonviolations and why.

Doctor X discusses Patient Y's case with Doctor Z, also involved in the case, at the supermarket. This is a HIPAA violation, as long as there are bystanders and he used specific identifying information. The Doctor intended to have the conversation in a place where he could have reasonably assumed there were unrelated people overhearing.

Now, Doctor X discussing Patient Y as a generic stroke case in public that could be one of a million just like it, with no identifying information, and debating the best ways to treat it? Not a HIPAA violation. Happens all the time during teaching rounds and medical conferences.

Doctor X leaving Patient Y's information up on a public console in a hospital? HIPAA violation. Doctor X could reasonably know that other people are going to walk by and either incidentally or purposefully look at the information he left up.

Doctor X looking up Patient Y's information on a public console in the hospital, and then taking it down before leaving. If an investigator or spy comes by with a USB drive of cracking tools and reconstructs Patient Y's information? Not a HIPAA violation. Doctor X took reasonable precautions with intent to protect Patient Y's privacy.

Doctor X opening Patient Y's chart to write a note and orders, and unrelated person sneaking behind him and sneaking a quick peek over the shoulder at Patient Y's information without anyone seeing? Not a HIPAA violation on the Doctor's part. No intent to share. Reasonable protection. Doctors shouldn't have to hire armed security guards to watch their back while they're focusing on treating patients.

I am a doctor.

No.

Violating HIPAA takes intent. And you're taking the doctor's responsibility to protect patient information way too far.

For example, Doctor X discusses Patient Y's case with Friend Z, with specific identifying information. HIPAA violation.

Doctor X discusses Patient Y's case with consulting Doctor A in a suitably private conversation over the telephone. Unknown to the parties, the NSA / and/or the phone company is wiretapping the line, and just learned all about Patient Y. Not a HIPAA violation on either Doctor's part. Doctors have to take reasonable precautions to protect their patient's privacy. Guarding against every possible outlet that snooping intelligence agencies and snooping internet companies could use is too much, and we'd never get anything productive done.

This would be an incredibly bad idea on Google's part to try to gather accurate information this way on patients. Because I assure you, doctors are neither linear nor subject related in their internet searching. Just because I google "gstoddart" and then a few minutes later "UpToDate: complications of inserting foreign objects in anus" does not mean the two are anywhere related, despite what you're thinking. I may have 20 different patients on my service at any given time, and I frequently have to be thinking about multiple cases at any given time during a workday. Hell, just to make things more confusing for google, maybe I googled "best place to order roses nearby" in between those two google searches, because I'm taking my girlfriend out to dinner after work.

Sorry, while I hate it, no one, not me, not you, has privacy anymore online or electronically. While we can fight against it, get used to it.

I replied about this above this thread, too.

The doctor responded the way that they did, because the rest of the medical picture falls into place once it becomes known that the patient is still abusing cocaine. The doctor didn't dismiss the possibility, treating cocaine addicts for their health issues is commonplace.

The question that was nagging the doctor was, how did the drugs get into the patient's system in the first place? Elder abuse takes many different forms.

Let me give you some insight as a doctor.

Patient comes in, lies, is actually abusing cocaine. Cocaine is a stimulant, and can cause overexertion of the heart through either chronic use or acute overdose, leading to shortness of breath and weakness, which the patient came in with. Additionally, smoking cocaine and all its impurities can damage the lungs.

It had everything to do with the "current stuff", as the patient lying and abusing cocaine as an elderly person ties everything together logically. Medical mystery solved, the doctor goes about his day. Seeing gramps come into the hospital after shooting up or smoking some dope is uncommon, but not unheard of.

Now, elderly person comes in, unknown care situation at home or what passes for home. Tests positive for drugs in their system. This explains why they came in with their symptoms, but not how it got there. That possibility requires further investigation, and may be cause for a call to adult protective services.

TL,DR: Not a red herring. The doctor reacting as they did was because they got the answers they needed, not because it wasn't relevant.

Not exactly the right analogy.

What the Americans are doing with state and local government and sports franchises comes down to scarcity of supply. There are only a finite number sports franchises within any given professional sports league, and beyond a certain point the talent level is diluted and the overall entertainment value and ticket sales goes down. There are any number of American cities and states that would love to host X sports franchise. A successful pro sports team can bring millions of dollars tax revenue or more to a locale directly, and provide a much bigger indirect boost to the city in business growth and prestige. (See: Oklahoma City after they wooed the NBA SuperSonics / now the Thunder away from Seattle.)

The sports teams realize the benefits they provide just by being there. And they trade those benefits for sports arenas, tax breaks, and other concessions from the locale. If a city gets bitter or bored of supporting the team, they can and will pack up and move elsewhere.

Thank you, Ra's al Ghul!

Data can be made anonymous without losing its usefulness; however, data cannot be made anonymous without losing the ability to check its veracity.

If there is no real person connected to data in aggregate in a scientific study, then there is no way to prevent a scientist from making up data wholesale and padding the results to favor one outcome or another. Conversely, if a skeptical competitor levels charges of this against you, being unable to point to the real people that you derived the results from looks bad.

It's a horrible question. Treating the HIV infection with anti-HIV medications can for the most part prevent or regress the syndrome of AIDS. If it was just a "great diagnostic for immune problems that it does not actually cause", treating and suppressing the HIV infection should be 100% ineffective in helping the patient.

Hi! Your comments are a sterling example of the dangers that having just a little knowledge in a certain field poses. As a doctor who has worked in an HIV clinic, let me give you the best practical proof for your reinventing of the wheel. Take an AIDS patient who is sick with an opportunistic infection. Cure the infection, and start the patient on a good regimen of anti-HIV medications. In most patients who aren't too far gone, their immune systems will rebound, and as long as they're compliant with taking their meds, the odds are they will never reexperience the practical consequences of an AIDS diagnosis.

Testing positive for HIV used to be a death sentence. Now with current anti-HIV meds, HIV can be relegated to a chronic illness less burdensome, and less deadly, than type 2 diabetes mellitus. Do you understand that? Treatment of an HIV infection can prevent the onset of AIDS, a clinical syndrome.

If you want a better proof, have a scientist inject you with HIV virus. Make a journal, and see what happens in 5 years.

Why do I even bother responding to this nonsense.

Please, do show us the stats. I get tired of the false meme that "oh, we would have cured disease X already if the results weren't being suppressed in a big conspiracy"! Medical research is hard work, and frustrating. Not only do you have to cure the disease in the test tube, but then you have to cure the disease in a living patient, and make sure it doesn't do something equally or more horrible to the patient in the process.

On top of that, the public has been oblivious to the fact that real progress in cancer treatment, and yes, even cures, are being made. Many leukemias and lymphomas are now curable through chemotherapy and radiation. This boy in the article is in the small minority that standard treatment did not work. Solid tumor cancers are getting better early detection and treatment. Mortality from many cancers has been dropping over the last 2 decades. What was once usually a consistent death sentence doesn't have to be.

Most of us physicians try to live up to our creed: "First, do no harm." This includes not jumping to try every crazy-ass, untested treatment that some would-be genius cooked up and put in a syringe on the patients under our charge, if there are other treatment options that are still available. And here's a crazy thought: some diseases are better off untreated. I have an 85 year-old with dementia that was recently diagnosed with a lung tumor, likely malignant cancer but slow growing. Am I going to recommend putting her under general anesthesia, the knife, follow-up chemotherapy and possible radiation? Hell no.

If you truly think the standard of care in medicine is the same as 1952, I invite you, when you get sick, to turn down any or all recommendations for an MRI or a CAT scan. No heart catheterizations. No minimally invasive or laparoscopic surgery. No joint replacements. Very few blood pressure, cardiac, or autoimmune treatments. None of the advances for asthma and other lung diseases. If you're infected and allergic to penicillins and sulfa medications, good luck! I certainly wouldn't want the alternatives: veritable bleach in the veins or antibiotics toxic to the kidneys and ears.

tl,dr: You're full of it.