I was following along with some of your other comments and whatnot, but this diatribe tells me a lot about your intentions behind this post.

I have ADHD, and I’m a medical student. I suppose in your mind that makes me one of the “dumbest motherfuckers” in training, but I will speak from the education and authority that I do have. There are many health conditions and comorbidities that can make stimulants a bigger risk than they’re worth. Personally, I have idiopathic sinus tachycardia, so my psychiatrist had me get a consultation with Cardiology before she would prescribe a stimulant because one of the major risks of stimulant medications is Sudden Cardiac Death Syndrome (which is exactly what it sounds like) and if you have a high heart rate or other cardiac or electrophysiological abnormalities, it drastically increases your risk.

I get that getting by without medication is extremely difficult for some people. I had to do my first semester of medical school on hard mode while I got my official diagnosis and medical clearance for treatment sorted out. Healthcare access, particularly mental healthcare access in America (and pretty much everywhere else for mental health) is criminally abysmal, but that is not an excuse to encourage people to ignore medical advice and consensus regarding medication safety.

(And as a side note: Surgeons are really good…at anatomy. Most of the surgeons I have worked with would really prefer it if the primary care/family med/internal med/literally-anyone-else doctors did the pre- and post-op medication management. Anesthesiologists are the ones that are intimately acquainted with pharmacology when considering physicians in the OR)

Alternating the paracetamol and ibuprofen on a schedule is the best recommendation I can give. Severe pain, especially post-operative pain, is best managed by taking the pain meds before the pain sets in. The ibuprofen is also an NSAID and the swelling and inflammation are big contributors to pain.

The schedule that I always recommend is:

• 0800: 650-1000mg paracetamol (acetaminophen)
• 1200: 600-800mg ibuprofen
• 1600: 650-1000mg paracetamol (acetaminophen)
• 2000: 600-800mg ibuprofen
• (and in the first day or two after surgery, set alarms to wake up and take pain meds at 0000 and 0400 on the same pattern if the pain is really bad.)

This pattern keeps you covered on pain control, and you can shorten the intervals to every 3 hours if this isn’t enough without exceeding daily dose limits on either medication. If you are an American reading this and you’re also taking something like Norco, make sure to account for the acetaminophen/tylenol/paracetamol that’s in those because exceeding the recommended dose on that one is bad news for your liver.

Like some other folks have said, warm saline (salt water) rinses and soft or liquid foods are going to help as well.

Personally, I prefer soy milk to cow or oat milk because it has a better nutritional profile. It has less sugar and fat, and more protein, as well as having fiber. (Some oat milk brands do have fiber in them, but most of the ones I’ve found are very high in fat, sugar, and calories.)

Edit: And I like the not-overpowering vanilla flavored ones because I pretty much only use it for cereal or to accompany cookies.

I’m repeating my reply to someone else in the thread so hopefully more people can see it:

I looked it up and read through the NIH paper that did a review of available information about it. It’s essentially a recreational drug that can be formed in your body when you take methylphenidate and alcohol at the same time.

I will put out this caution though: there were a lot of reports of bad trips, worsened focus/cognition, dangerous side effects like increased heart rate and body temperature, and there was a very high rate of addictive responses. So it may sound like fun, but you’re running the risk of causing yourself a lot of problems and using Ethylphenidate (or methylphenidate plus alcohol) may make your regular ADHD meds less effective and lead into addiction problems.

TL;DR: This is a dangerous, bad idea and as a medical student with a decent understanding of pharmacology, I do NOT recommend doing this.

I looked it up and read through the NIH paper that did a review of available information about it. It’s essentially a recreational drug that can be formed in your body when you take methylphenidate and alcohol at the same time.

I will put out this caution though: there were a lot of reports of bad trips, worsened focus/cognition, dangerous side effects like increased heart rate and body temperature, and there was a very high rate of addictive responses. So it may sound like fun, but you’re running the risk of causing yourself a lot of problems and using Ethylphenidate (or methylphenidate plus alcohol) may make your regular ADHD meds less effective and lead into addiction problems.

As a woman and a DO medical student, I have been pushing back on this stuff when I see it and have been challenging my classmates and professors if they are being assholes about anything.

We weren’t graded on the quality of our dissections, but the exams were based on how good the dissection was. We would have a set of assigned anatomical structures to expose and/or dissect in a given unit, and then the practical exam used our dissections. They would stick a pin in something and you had to write in the name of the structure, what nerve/nerve root innervated that structure, what was it’s blood supply, or what structures should be above or below it, etc. The year before mine got absolutely screwed on one exam because almost no one finished all the assigned dissections, so the professor just stuck a pin on the outside of the cadaver with one of the questions above.

Personally, I was obsessively meticulous about my dissections and when my tankmates (other students assigned to the same cadaver) messed something up, I would get very frustrated with them. I would come in on weekends to carefully expose and clean individual arteries and nerves for hours at a time. The main anatomy professor kept asking me what kind of surgeon I wanted to be, but I’m a horrid little gremlin that likes night shift and hanging out in hospital basements, so I want to go into emergency medicine.

She did get Nobel prizes in Physics and Chemistry, so you’re both right!

Thankfully, the extent of the religion in the education is in the ethics discussions and strong recommendations to discuss spirituality and religion with your patients because faith communities are “very important”. The religion does not make it into any of the actual medicine or science.

It’s not dirt as much as it’s surprise pocket sand/glitter that sticks to absolutely everything and is impossible to get rid of.

I accidentally ended up at a religious university for medical school and you better believe I’ve gotten in numerous fights with the law and ethics professor (who, to be fair, is actually a MD/JD) regarding the prescribed conservative religious approach to the ethics discussions. I absolutely did not change his mind, but I did get a bunch of my classmates to start asking questions by putting myself out there and challenging the professor on their BS.

Edit: I should clarify that these fights were on mic in the recorded lectures, so there’s a hard record of my arguing with him.

Pray tell…what are these “normal” things you think suburban women worry about? I suppose it is abnormal on a global scale for them (us) to have to worry about it because it’s a non-issue in actually civilized countries.

That’s part of the problem. Obesity and malnutrition go hand-in-hand in this country because healthy foods are more expensive and more difficult to procure and prepare for people who are just scraping by. People will rant and holler about how poor people are so stupid for buying and eating fast food when buying ingredients and cooking can be cheaper and is definitely healthier, but that does not account for the people who are working 2 or 3 jobs to make ends meet and they simply do not have time for grocery shopping and cooking. There’s also the astonishingly dystopian reality of “food deserts” where there are people who don’t have access to actual grocery stores that sell fresh produce and meat. There are plenty of neighborhoods and even entire towns in America that do not have a store where they can buy fresh food, and even more where they don’t have access to affordable fresh food. It’s abominable.

As a medical professional, I see patients with tons of health problems including obesity, diabetes, hypertension, metabolic syndrome…the list goes on…and they simply do not have reliable, functional access to the healthier diet that would go a long way towards fixing those health problems. There are morbidly obese children with diseases like pellagra because of vitamin deficiencies, or obese people with muscle wasting because the food they have access to is mostly carbs and fat with very little protein. It is so frustrating and appalling to me that people on the outside of these situations look down on people struggling with obesity and diabetes and whatnot as if those people had any meaningful control over their situations.

One of my attending physicians in the family medicine clinic described it as “regular, small-town Midwest problems”. Often, the best we can do is recommend that they try to get more fruits and vegetables, whole grains, fish or chicken instead of red meat…but we also prescribe multivitamins and weight loss, diabetes, and hypertension medications because insurance will at least help pay for those. Honestly, health insurance companies could save literal billions of dollars if they offered rebate programs for healthy food and supported local farmers’ markets or something. Diet and exercise will lower someone’s high blood pressure 5 times as much as most of the medications will.

Oh yah, that’s a good excuse for a Fargo re-watch.

I’m a transplant to the Midwest, and I catch myself using it as a “get someone’s attention” noise sometimes.

Well, we are the North Star State.

And they are not mutually exclusive.

In Minnesota at least, it’s more of an expression noise like “oh!” in terms of use and definition.

No. It is very specifically pronounced “Ope”, like “hope” without the “h”, and it has it’s own distinct meaning.

I mean, I’m partial to the Tang dynasty in part due to Wu Zeitan. Her history and time as empress are absolutely fascinating and the relative prosperity of her reign is really impressive.