Real world experience doesn't count on HN health articles. If it wasn't documented by a researcher paid via funding from his industry leaders, or a government official trying to fast track his hiring in the public sector for $800k a year, it basically didn't happen.

Not everyone.

We hope.

I don't think most people worry about the huge amounts of time after they have died. They worry about the 1-120 seconds while they are really dying and aware.

My college gfs dad died after trying to accompany her on a hike, because I was too busy to go and he didn't want her to go alone. So he drove down on the weekend and went with her. He was an overweight man that never moved.

~24 hours after the hike, which he skipped most of and waited mid trail, he started having a heart attack in his home office. I have spent a lot of time thinking about what he was thinking those last minutes or seconds.

And I wish I just went on that hike with her.

It's not your fault.

Its obviously not my 'fault'. But it's pretty close to a death I could have prevented for a while if I wasnt pretending to be busy probably.

I remember when she said her dad was going to go instead and I thought "uhh, I don't think that's going to work.. I should just go" but I didn't really like her that much at that point and figured it would just be a lame wasted hike, not that the dude would die.

Life is full of moments like that. For example on your way to work that same morning, had you left your house 30 seconds later than you did, someone might have had to wait at an intersection longer than they otherwise would have, causing them to narrowly miss being in an accident further down the road instead of being hit. Butterfly effect and all that. You can’t predict the future.

I don't worry too much about the butterfly effect because it goes both ways. Sure one stoplight here makes a guy die, but another stoplight over there saves a guys life.

But in this case, when it's a clear "either I put off changing my oil and washing my car, or this 250 lb senior citizen with gout tries going on a hike", it's a lot more clear.

Perhap he shouldn't have gone with her. Perhaps your gf shouldn't have let him go with her. Perhaps you face marriage into a family that has hereditary bad judgment!

Changing your oil and washing your car may be the luckiest decision you've made in your life!

I once did not marry a (beautiful) daughter of a family with an overweight heart-diseased patron. Turned out to be one of the best accidents of life for me. Saw her years later and she was almost as big as her Daddy was when he had his second heart bypass! Glad I missed that "iceberg in the night"!

You do have a little fault here, but it’s marginal vs his lifetime choices, and his lack of understanding of his limits. There should be enough room for forgiveness in all of that.

I get it, I got friends and family that have completed suicide and it’s hard to not think about what I could have done differently.

That's how I see it. Ive always felt a lot worse for the daughter too.

I have gone to the gym multiple times per week for many many years so that I can remain a physically capable parent to my children, and not inflict upon them my premature disablement or death.

Not your fault your girlfriends dad was so out of shape a hike (potentially) killed him.

He should have hiked more often.

Not his fault that he couldn't predict his daughter deciding to go on a hike alone, which triggered his parental protective mode.

It is his fault that he made choices which resulted in him being unable to perform basic tasks in life that he would reasonably be expected to sometimes do, such as walking outside.

> Is it my fault that I've resulted in being unable to perform "basic tasks" such as walking outside? Have I somehow manifested osteoarthritis by my bad choices?

I don't know, maybe. But I wasn't commenting about your knee. I was commenting about the father's congestive heart failure which is usually, and sounds like in this case, caused by sloth. There are plenty of fit people even in wheelchairs.

The part of this that really makes me think is when you thought "I don't think that's going to work" about him going on the hike. That's really tough. In the past there have been times I didn't speak up about a concern I had, then found out that a warning would have been warranted. This is something I think about a lot since becoming a father. There has never been anything in my life before where 99% safe wasn't enough. When you're a parent, 99% safe is a nightmare. Risky situations happen every day. Like staying close enough to the kid on the sidewalk to grab her if the she sees a ball and wants to run into the street for the first time ever. As a parent you have to get comfortable just being a total square all the time, and speaking up about safety even if everyone in the room rolls their eyes. So yeah. It's not your fault, and this person's choice wasn't your responsibility. But you're right, if you were a square and spoke up about safety maybe it would have saved a life. That is a valuable lesson to hold on to.

>There has never been anything in my life before where 99% safe wasn't enough

Have there been about 75 where it was? If so, congrats on beating the odds.

I default to statistics a lot more now, even if ballparked and made up in my head.. and it all stemmed from a different gf asking me "how dangerous do you think that was???!!?!" while giggling and high off adrenaline after taking her to around 155 mph on a Yamaha R1.

I thought for a second and said "idk, probably like 1 in 100 we would have died... Maybe even worse than that.. I don't think I could pull that off 100 times"

And that weird realization made something click and I've stopped doing stupid things.

The new me would have thought "hey, if 100 65 year old obese men with gout go hiking, at least one of them isn't making it back". 22 year old me thought "eh, he's just going to be slow".

Ha. That was more a play off the fact that most times "busy" is just relative.

I wasn't THAT busy, maybe I just had things to do that I wanted to get done more than go on a hike.

I feel it's kind of a moot point. GP's intention or train of thought doesn't change the downstream effects. Busy or not, they didn't go, and that's the bool the universe went with.

As others have already stated though it's really not GP's fault and they're not responsible for managing other's decisions. Could they have saved a person? Maybe. Or maybe the late father would have died a week later anyways.

You wouldn’t have prevented it. You would have maybe unknowingly created a condition that would have postponed it. And then you would never have known that you had done so.

In any case, obesity is the result of a lifestyle and going on the hike was a choice that he made and that his daughter accepted when she chose to go on the hike with her father knowing his condition.

Tragic, but there it is. The clock is ticking for us all. Any day now.

My father has a high rate PSA change a few years ago so I learned everything I could about prostate cancer for about 4 weeks.

I then talked to several doctors I know (family practice and two internal medicine).

It was embarrassing how little they knew. And even more shocking actually, is how wrong they were about things.

Two of them told me the risk of infection from a prostate biopsy was basically zero. I asked for clarification with actual numbers, and even led them with "for what kind? Like 1 in 100 or 1 in 1000?"

One said basically zero, the other said 1 in a million.

Neither knew to mention the two common types, and to make sure we go with the one type that carries less risk of infection.

Even then, the less risky one is about 1 in 1000. If you have bad insurance you might go with the older type which is about 1 in 100. And that's with them giving you antibiotics beforehand....

Basically they got everything I asked about wrong compared to specialists you can read online.

Ps, my dad got an MRI with two 1cm growths.

He changed his diet and added fasts, and did nothing else. His doctor basically writing him off in anger.

5 years later, PSA lower than before the incident. Paid for a scan last year, zero growth.

Internet/YouTube experts/doctors really do beat most general doctors. The odds of you having someone in the top 10% of their field, let alone top 1-2% in your local town is pretty low. Even my bay area doctor friends work at pretty basic general bay area hospitals. Imagine who's left in Modesto, CA.

I'm glad your dad got better, it had nothing to do with his diet and fasting. It's no different than Steve Jobs stubbornly becoming a fruititarian to treat his cancer. If his immune system had fought it off, then fruit would be a cancer cure and all his doctors would be idiots.

Youtube/Internet experts are one of the largest propagators of medical misinformation and are actively harming people every day, and if I've ever been in favor of restricting free speech, it's giving out medical advice without a license. If we can restrict giving legal advice, and everyone understands how painfully stupid you'd have to be to represent yourself in court without a law degree, then we can restrict giving medical advice, and hopefully people can realize how painfully stupid you'd have to be to manage your own medical treatments without a medical degree.

Regarding Steve Jobs, that's unfortunate for him because even my grandmother in Poland used to say "sugar causes/feeds cancer" when she tried to get us to stop sweetening our tea back in the 80s before we left.

Somehow she knew what several doctors and researchers are now documenting, that cancer cells have a much harder time growing without ample amounts of glucose.

Oh great, another expert. Except without the 30 years of research and experience.

One guy wins the nobel prize for detailing a function of fasting and its effects on the immune system and cell repair/death... But fasting doesn't help! We know this, because a guy on hacker news said so.

99% of your problem can be solved by studying statistics for your area, and having a plan... So that you aren't just at the whims of the moment when it's actually happening.

Op seemed to be freaked out about unknowns.

So my solution would be to look at historical data for earth quakes in his area so he knows basically what to expect.. that way when it starts shaking, he doesn't think "omg how big will this be?" And instead can know "ok this will be between 2.9 and 3.5 like the last 500 quakes in this area for 50+ years. Thank God no one has ever died in this area from an earthquake"

And then he can also know that he is prepared for even a much bigger quake in his area before... Because he prepared something.

This is obvious stuff. In case the guy I wrote to didn't know, now he does. If he wants to dwell in his neuroticism he can.

Maybe it's a herd immunity thing or something and others are keeping me safe, but I'm 41 and Ive never taken an antibiotic and neither has anyone else in my family to my knowledge. I still can't figure out if it's the chicken or the egg.. have I never been sick because I don't take part in the medical system, or do I not take part because I've never been sick.. Then again last time my cuticle got infected I sterilized a knife and drained it myself. My friend said he had something similar and they gave him an antibiotic yet DIDNT drain it until it got worse and then they just did what I did. But at least they got to sell some antibiotics.

Antibiotics should IMO be reserved for life threatening situations, or likely upcoming life threatening situations. In the 80s as a toddler I was given antibiotics for measles (they can’t possibly work on viruses), and had half a year of diarrhea afterwards.

Antibiotics do one thing, and one thing only - kill bacteria. They don't do anything for viruses, fungal infection, inflammation, chemical irritants or pain relief.

In the case of poison ivy, all antibiotics would do is lower the already slim odds of a secondary infection. They wouldn't prevent the contact dermatitis/inflammation from urishiol.

No. I had broken skin barrier. Pus coming out and dripping. The use of antibiotics was definitely warranted. Again, who do you want to decide whether the use of antibiotics is ok and under what conditions?

Should I be dying before you grant me antibiotics? What kind of nonsense is this?

I personally think you were given antibiotics needlessly just for the sake of it..

But yes, I think you should have developed some kind of infection, and being showing trouble of fighting it off, before you're given antibiotics.

For topical use, maybe an iodine spray would have been better suited. Iodine kills way more pathogens than antibiotics, and it's very good at that, and has no reported cases of resistance development.

Antibiotics don’t stop you suffering from poison ivy. At all. In other posts you say you had a broken skin barrier that’s vulnerable to infection, so you presumably know that this is not the same as actually having a bacterial infection, and that antibiotics are only a prophylactic, not a treatment. So stop making out that people are dying to deny you treatment.

Poison ivy is a plant that causes a topical rash, antibiotics can't help in any way with this. Maybe you've mistyped something?

When poison ivy spreads on skin, you have broken skin barrier with yellow liquid coming out. Then the places this yellow liquid touched also gets itchy and you now have multiple broken skin barrier everywhere.

When skin barrier gets broken like this, you are now vulnerable to bacterial infection.

> At this point I genuinely consider the medical system about as bad as the service department at a car dealership. They'll sell you anything technically legal just to keep their stats high.

No, the service department has a bad reputation for a reason. They tried to tell me a wiper blade would cost me USD 80 with a straight face. Not even the whole set, a single wiper blade. It costs under USD 15 anywhere else other than the dealership.

My guess is they are counting on people not looking at the itemized bill.

I hope this is satire.

You have absolutely been sick, but your immune system fought it off. You have a permanent low level of opportunistic infections because everyone does.

You may not have had symptoms, but that's a very different thing.

And I assume you've been vaccinated against all the usuals.

Sorry, yes, I've had colds and a cough or two for sure. I don't think I've thrown up in 35 years though since I was a child.

When I meant sick, I meant like a longer sustained thing that needs treatment of some kind. I didn't mean I never stayed in bed watching the price is right for two days.

Im 41 and haven't been to a doctor since I was 10. I have had insurance coverage my whole life. So technically I (my employer on my behalf I guess) have paid for many other people's services. I have been a huge net positive for insurance companies. Other people get way more services than they ever paid.

I was on some kind of local BBS in 1995 from my local ISP. I found a guy selling a gamepad of some kind. Agreed to buy it. Talked to him for a decent amount of time. Finally set time to meet at local Kmart near my house.

The look on his face when a 10 year old rode up on a bicycle to buy his gamepad. I don't have a good memory but I still remember that scene ha.

This is what I always loved about the early scene. All that mattered was how you presented yourself in the text you typed.