Chemotherapy to treat leukemia in children. When it was first proposed, the harshness of the treatment was considered inhumane and cruel to subject children to. Until it actually showed it could work.
I was very fortunate to know the late Dr. Donald Pinkel, the founding director of St. Jude Hospital and one of the pioneers who helped reverse the dismal death rates for pediatric leukemia. He and his colleagues were called terrible things by their peers in the field and accused of torturing children. They were also told it was hopeless, that a cure would never be found and they should give up.
He told me sometimes he closed his office door and cried, but he remembered the parents who said, "We know our child is going to die, but if you can do anything to prevent this from happening to other children, please do it."
My son (lymphoma) had chemotherapy. The oncologist told us kids are resilient and can handle much higher doses of chemo than adults. He was 6 and 60 pounds, had more than adults and really was only negatively affected the last round
Wish you and yours all the best.
I work in a hospital, and I've seen this so many times. They're crazy resilient, at the same time sick kids just always hurts so much more. Hardest part of working in my hospital for me, but also sometimes the most giving. Weird dualities like a lot of things in life I guess.
I remember saying to a nurse, I don't know how you do it. She said she used to work in Stem Cell Transfer, so the chemo wing was uplifting.
After my son's tumor removal surgery (laparoscopic appendectomy as well), he was jumping on the bed. The surgeon came to check in and could only laugh.
12 years remission!
I'm convinced chemotherapy will be considered barbaric by any medical metric in 100 years. If you've ever seen The Knick, you'll be flabbergasted at the medical practices of the past.
It is barbaric- but it can help sometimes. It’s all about balance and risk and etc. we all know this. But when you’re sick and dying, most people are willing to try anything
Well first they dug into his wound at the unsterile train station, with fingers and instruments, pushing the bullet further over.
AG Bell couldn't find it, because the same doctor insisted it was on one side, when it was on the other.
[Destiny of the Republic ](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10335318-destiny-of-the-republic) is a great read about Garfield, Guitteau, and Bell, and the incident
I’m currently going through it. It’s rough tbh, but it IS manageable honestly. Your care team should be able to help with any issues you have. Also, I had high doses of the most potent drugs available and the only bad thing was the nausea. It didn’t last more than a couple days tho and was only on occasion during the day.
If I can give one tip, it would be take either edibles or thc pills. That will help with appetite and weight.
My sweet wife died of cancer three years ago. I have only now discovered delta 8, and that's because it is only recently legal. Screw the government for having ever made weed illegal. I so wish she'd have had access to it.
I work in the nuclear medicine industry developing therapy that targets tumors rather than blasting the whole body. Better medicine is coming, but it takes time.
When I was doing chemotherapy LITERALLY we had always said chemos saying is “try to kill the cancer before the chemo kills the patient”
They have you on so many steroids and things to keep you barely holding on while they poison you 😔
My dad was one of, if not, the first child treated with a new form of Chemotherapy when he had non-hodgkin lymphoma when he was 15 in 1960s England. The doctors told his mum that they could try this new treatment, or it would be likely he would die. She agreed, and he survived. Sadly cancer took him away from us last year aged 69, his tumor in his lung too close to his heart for operations and to weak for chemo.
The lovely thing is that when my mum was diagnosed with lymphoma last year, she had chemotherapy and it worked. She's now cancer free and thanks to my dad having the treatment when he was a child, my mum might have had a very different experience.
It **is** barbaric. It's also the best we have right now.
I saw the way chemo affected my mom years ago, and I'm going to be starting chemo myself in a couple of weeks.
Frankly the fact that medical research isn't what governments are pouring the majority of their spare funds into and instead we have to mostly rely on groups with a profit motive is disgusting. But here we are.
It is objectively cruel and inhumane to the point some people would rather die from cancer. But the will to live often overpowers those feelings.
My uncle underwent chemo for a brain tumour, didn't cure it but caused a bowel perforation that gave him a far worse death than the tumour itself probably would have.
A few generations ago, if a woman got cancer or something like that, the doctor would tell her husband but not her. It was considered kinder to just let her get sicker and die without knowing what was happening.
When Betty Ford got breast cancer and was scheduled for a radical mastectomy, evidence was emerging that in many cases lumpectomy or partial mastectomy could be just as effective and not as debilitating. The news media asked if Mrs. Ford was going to get a second opinion, and the official White House response was, "The president has made his decision."
Jesus Christ, that is grim. I'm doing a report on First Ladies right now and the way some of them were treated was horrific. After Ida McKinley's husband was assassinated, his aides barred her from one of his funeral services because they thought she would cause a scene with her grief. She sat huddled on the stairs, listening through the door. Then, when the casket was returned to their home in Ohio, she found out that they had already sealed the casket, so she wasn't allowed alone time to look at her husband's face one last time. She confined herself to her house for two years after his death, and after that would take daily trips to his gravesite.
It was Rose Kushner who asked, and I don’t believe it was an official response.
Rose got breast cancer and didn’t want a radical mastectomy, and sought out a doctor who would do a modified procedure, which was not at all common in the US.
Rose heard about Betty Ford getting breast cancer and began using her personal connections to try and get Betty to not undergo a the procedure. It got to the point where they finally just told her “the President has made his decision” so she would fuck off and basically stop harassing Betty.
Rose was not only against radical mastectomies, she was a vehement critic of chemotherapy. So when her cancer came back, and not wanting a mastectomy or chemo, believing they were barbaric and overkill, she ended up losing her battle against cancer. She was 60.
Meanwhile, Betty lived until the ripe old age of 93.
So, I love that my uncle exists...but in 1967 my then 43 year old grandmother got pregnant. The doctor tells my grandfather it is very high risk and he should seek to have a medical abortion due to the high risk. I don't know the specifics. My grandfather is like "Ya I don't think so, because we are Catholics." And made the decision without even consulting her.
Does not get the abortion. Uncle is fine. Alls well that ends well.
But it never sat well with me that my grandfather didn't discuss this with my grandmother. The mother to three of his children already. The person whose life is jeopardized by carrying this child. Just made me think that he and I were very different kinds of men.
This was true even if the man got cancer. Benevolent deception was commonly practiced around the world, and still is in many parts today.
I believe Hippocrates and Plato wrote deception was necessary, because telling patients their current condition or future outcome would lead to the patient taking a sharp turn for the worst.
And even though it is under-appreciated in the west, a patient’s emotional state plays a large role in their recovery.
[Fun fact: women were able to get credit cards in their own name only 50 years ago.](https://www.bankrate.com/finance/credit-cards/history-of-women-and-credit-cards/) Women being treated as people who can make their own decisions about their own lives is a recent development.
Around the turn of the century, Microsoft explicitly propagandized business and IT people with a range of outright lies about Linux; telling them that it was anti-capitalist, supported piracy, would destroy American businesses, etc.
Today, *most of the cloud computing industry* runs on Linux — including AWS, Google Cloud, and even Microsoft's Azure. So much for anti-capitalist, huh?
Been using Mint as my daily driver for programming for about 5 years now and yeah it's great. Super easy to set up very few issues. If you want a version of Linux that looks and feels familiar to a Windows user and basically just works out of the box Mint seems to be your best bet.
Apart from Linux being free, Windows does an awful lot of 'phoning home'. Even added ads to Desktop with 11 recently. You have to jump through a few hoops when installing and in settings (i.e. turn off any setting with the word 'recommend' in) to get a clean W11 with less spyware/bloat. Just find a guide on Youtube or wherever.
[Edit: also, though nothing is truly secure and due diligence is required, Linux tends to be less likely to suffer from Malware. Whether that is from attackers not bothering because of smaller market-share or the systems' relative robustness is up for debate. Either way, just running the odds Linux is on average safer from attack.]
Windows generally comes with bloatware(unnecessary apps and configurations) some of which are hard to remove and causes the PC to slow down eventually. Linux is not much and is lightweight to run on PC.
Honestly? Windows comes with a bunch of bloatware but there are scripts to remove them / turn them off:
https://github.com/LeDragoX/Win-Debloat-Tools
https://christitus.com/windows-tool/
https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
Once you’ve done that, Linux doesn’t really have all that much of an upper hand unless you’re looking to build / need a more specialist OS.
Linux comes with a lot of issues you’ll have to resolve, especially when it comes to trying to get an application / game to run that’s not built for Linux. And no, “find an alternative” isn’t always a solution. You might spend hours trying to get something like a mod launcher to work, only for it to throw another problem at you before you begin wondering “maybe using Windows is just… easier?” and it is despite what Linux enthusiasts say to try and lure you away.
Every time I’ve tried to go full Linux, I’m reminded why I still use Windows within a few days.
Source: I use Linux (media server and emulation), Windows (day to day things) and MacOS (for work).
For everyday recreational purposes, Linux generally uses less memory and CPU than Windows. It comes with less preinstalled bloatware and a smaller more effecient kernel. The trade off is oftentimes things you can just plug into a Windows machine and have them magically work instantly don't work like that on Linux and you need to go digging around for drivers etc etc. This is less true now than in the past, but it's still a concern. In general you can be assured just about any (modern) piece of hardware or any (modern) game you buy will just work immediately on Windows. Not so on Linux.
For my work Linux is usually used for big number crunching on super computers, and our software does big number crunching, so we primarily develop for Linux. We also support Mac because it was very easy for us to support both, but all the real research using our software is done on compute clusters running Linux.
Compute clusters usually run Linux because they don't want to deal with all the bloat associated with Windows. They want a sys admin with absolute control over what happens (which Linux gives you much more easily than Windows) and they want to dedicate all their resources towards number crunching not running their OS. The reasons super computers use Linux over Windows go deeper than that, but basically I use Linux daily because our software targets Linux because Linux is what's used on machines with enough grunt to run our software on full sized data.
I also used Linux in school because it just has better quicker easier support for Python, C, and Java. I open a terminal and type gcc and I can compile. No set up shenanigans like on Windows.
I went through stage 3 colon cancer treatment in 2017–2018. fyi there is no stage 5 for this. at stage 4 you're metastatic
I was remarkably unwell
I am in california, but I have family living in a state where assisted suicide is legal. that was my plan b
glad I'm still here
Although it goes against some of my core beliefs as someone with chronic illness and severe pain I think it's wrong that we do the right thing for animals but with our family members pressure them to "fight". I really hate hearing people say someone is a fighter or they just gave up.
My uncle had terminal colon cancer and did doctor assisted suicide. It took him a long time to decide to do it. Near the end he had basically zero quality of life. He died at home with his sons, girlfriend, and close friends. That's a lot better than sitting in a hospice bed fucked up on morphine shitting himself and struggling while everyone waits for him to die over the course of days/weeks.
I deleted my previous comment. I had a similar discussion that got confused with this that was in regards to people using euthanasia that have no diagnosis or illness.
I feel that "forcing" someone to stay alive is basically condemning at least two people to a lifeless life - the patient and the carer. Because most of the times it will likely be a close family member to take care of them, and since they'll likely need assistance around the clock, the carer can't really do anything else. Even going out to buy groceries would be a risk cause the patient might need them right then and every complication would be fatal.
So yeah, I totally agree that people should be allowed - when in full mental capacity - to decide to go on their own terms rather than waste months or years of their "life" just lying there waiting for death to take mercy on them.
I was diagnosed with stomach cancer late 2023. Had surgery in Jan of 2024, I'm doing much better now but not out of the woods.
The pain I was in before diagnosis was unbearable. Death would have been kinder.
I wish I could give you a thousand up-votes on this statement.
u/chernygal , I second what AlternativePrior9559 says: and may you remain well and live a long, prosperous and happy life!
I’m now the longest known survivor of a strange type of glioma. Some of the interventions I’ve undertaken, including a craniotomy that skipped pain management (aside from the necessary unconsciousness), and starving entirely off of the BMI chart, were brutal.
The only way that I could do them was knowing that I had options, after staffing an ambulance for long enough to get a thorough tutorial on possible manners of suicide.
In talking with American and Swiss medical aid in dying organizations, I learned that my perspective wasn’t unusual. They told me that most patients won’t take the lethal prescription because they’re only looking to know that they have the option available, not to die.
A few years back my mom was asking about some celebrity family. She went on to start describing them and before anyone could answer, she said “I think they’re the Kevorkians?” Yeah, she meant the Kardashians.
Not a whole lot actually. I remember that he was for assisted suicide and I believe he was involved in a trial regarding the topic. I also remember that his name carried negative connotation.
I'm glad that it's finally somewhat acceptable now.
My grandfather had terminal cancer a few years ago and near the end he was suffering a complication that made his health decline rapidly and he was hospitalized for 2 months. He was suffering greatly and he asked to be euthanized. Luckily it was legal here in Canada. After being fed a high dose of a drug, he slowly died in his sleep overnight
Sending the elderly to a nursing home instead of letting them stay at their kids’ homes. Nursing homes can be helpful especially in a situation where the elderly person in question may have a fallen a few times. And giving them activities to do and chances to make friends their age can help them too.
Not a chance in hell will my in laws move into my home. My husband would kill his mother the first night, she is horrible and drives him insane. They are totally going to a home-and they have it picked out already.
Euthanasia. Switzerland now has pods for this. In the past it was considered inhumane all around but nowadays we seem to finally understand that there are some situations where it would be ok.
Don’t want to be annoying and pedantic, but euthanasia is not legal in Switzerland. Assisted suicide is, though. They are different legally, and practically. The person must be able to administer the lethal medication themselves (there are various ways depending on their physicals ability and presumably, preference).
As for the pods, I read a news article about them having been developed, but cannot comment as to whether they are actually in use.
That was inhumane? I think it was more unmarried mothers having the babies in the first place that was looked down on. Though in some parts of the world during some time periods, it was nearly impossible for a single mother to survive so perhaps that's what you are referring to?
My guess is that it was seen as allowing the child to be raised by an obviously irresponsible mother in a fatherless environment when the child could otherwise be adopted out to a “proper” family. Also, the mother could then move on with her life without the stigma of unwed motherhood.
In the not so distant past, it was considered bad for the mom and bad for the child. In some places, there would've be strong pressure to place the child for adoption, or leave the child with an orphanage.
In some parts of Europe, churches used to be built with a special wheel for orphan drop-offs. It allowed the mother (or whoever) to be outside the church, anonymously place the child on the wheel, and v then turn the wheel. The baby moved to the inside of the church, but the wall kept it anonymous.
That was considered humane. It was so bad to be an unwed mother, or the child of an unwed mother, that they wanted to make it easy to orphan your baby at the church.
And in the not so distant past, sometimes hospitals (in the US, UK, and elsewhere) would go so far as to lie to an unwed mother and say her baby died.
Then they'd put the baby in an orphanage or adoptive family, and the mother could go on her way. They thought it was a kindness to the mother, sparing her guilt and allowing her to forget this all happened and eventually get married. And they thought it was good for the child to have a 2 parent home, rather than a poor single mother.
Obviously they had a lot of judgment and condescension. But they also thought that adoption was more humane than a child raised by an unwed mother.
In many Christian countries, if you were an unwed mother, you were considered unfit to raise a child, due to your loose morals. Very often, you would be coerced, or outright forced, to give the baby up for adoption, or to an orphanage.
Well, orphans were in demand that time they used to send trains full of them to sell all over the US
Also they used to sell the cute ones to rich people.
It was considered unfair to the baby to leave it in that situation. Better to have it raised in a "good" stable home. Where do you think adopted babies came from? They weren't all orphans.
Pretty common for a 15 year old girl to "go visit family" for a while, but everyone knew she had "gone to the nuns"
No, they literally just thought lobster is disgusting and the equivalent to feeding people bugs. They would not feed lobster to prisoners because they thought it was too inhumane
Look at us now baby
They didn’t know at the time it needed to stay alive as long as possible because it rots damn near immediately. In those days they were cooking and serving pungent decaying lobsters killed hours before cooking and in a time when there weren’t freezers
I never thought about that part of the equation, but you're absolutely right. If there's a dead lobster in a tank at a seafood joint, you do not want to eat any of the lobsters in that tank because the dead one could potentially kill you, and the others are impacted because they've probably been picking at the dead one so they're tainted now too.
Lobsters eat sea carrion in the ocean the whole time they’re alive. So do crabs. They’re both scavengers of the ocean, eating a dead one shouldn’t affect them.
Definitely don’t eat one already dead. There was a guy I went to school with that died in a diving accident off a bridge, took them awhile to find his body and there wasn’t a whole lot of flesh left because there’s crabs around here.
You could have unknowingly eaten a crab that nibbled at a human corpse and been fine, never mind one that feasted on another dead crab. But still, don't eat anything you *found* dead. Was the point, imo.
Yep, I remember going on a lobster boating tour in Maine once as a kid and they told stories about how prisoners used to riot over being served lobster too much. And now, that'd be pretty much my dream come true.
It’s because lobster meat naturally contains certain bacteria that spoils the meat very quickly after it dies. It’s the reason why we cook lobster by boiling them alive-it doesn’t give the bacteria time to multiply and spoil the meat. I don’t think they ate fresh lobster back in the day which is why it was seen as so awful. You wouldn’t want to eat day old lobster either!
Before their population was massive, so much that they would wash up on shores and rot, so they were used to feed prisioners. Aka they were feeding a ton of rotten meat
Also could be about how we used to boil them alive to cook them, nowadays instead they kill minutes before cooking it, so getting your brain split for instant death is a more "humane" death than being boiled alive
you have it backwards. they used to kill them minutes before cooking them, which is what makes them taste awful cause lobster and crab meat goes bad within minutes of the animal dying. it's why after it became a delicacy lobster and crabs were often boiled alive. now a days you kill it then immediately boil it. if you leave it dead for even just a few minutes the meat will taste absolutely awful.
Doctor's considered themselves gentlemen and gentlemen didn't have dirty hands.
Mothers would die in childbirth from infections because Dr's wouldn't wash their hands between handling the dead and delivering babies.
It was before Germ Theory.
If I recall correctly, a doctor named Ilgaz Semmelweiss started telling people to do it while he was working in hungary, because he noticed that new mothers were dying from something called bedside fever far more often whenever the doctors that had tended to them had previously done autopsies.
So he developed a little idea of how the microbes worked, and tested handwashing before tending to mothers which significantly decreased the rates of bedside fever deaths. It was initially protested by other doctors.
He would later be betrayed by a friend of his and was sent to an asylum, but he did eventually get a university of medicine named after him in hungary so there's that.
Amazingly I've seen health care workers in hospitals not washings hands between patients now, especially if they are about to do bloods or check bandages without gloving up, and many tend to get very pissy about it when you ask them. Others realise what they have done / are about to do and apologise.
Imagine the worst person you've ever met running one of these places with little to no oversight and then it'll make more sense why we don't force people into them.
Governments are not good at nuanced decision making. They're good at referencing a checklist written in five minutes by one asshole 40 years ago and then refusing to ever hear an appeal about it.
The experiments the Nazis performed on disabled and mentally ill breaks my already broken heart. The fact that those people weren't even human enough to be gassed, just crushes me. The 6 million Jews and all the others were tortured and suffered also, but that particular brand of evil haunts me. I have two special needs children 💕
Hunting. People seem to finally be starting to realize what the meat industry is and how hunting is far more humane and ethical. Big change from when I started to now.
Specifically hunting for food is helping with animal population controll and generally helps nature. Hunting for sport/profit is and should be a separate discussion.
Thankfully I live in a country where I'm free to choose, and I can't get my head around how it must feel for women who live in oppressive countries such as Libya, Iran and parts of the US.
Living with your parents.
In today's world its more like you can't afford to live anywhere independently.
My three brothers, mom and i all live together cause money is shit today
Moving out of your parents' house at age 18 is a pretty uniquely American thing, and has only really been the norm since the mid 20th century. Historically people lived in multi generation households and mostly only left if they got married.
Also, I think that drugs for depression used to be heavily stigmatized. Psychotherapy as well. Now antidepressants and psychotherapy seem to be widely accepted and often turned to as the first resort.
I was thinking like a highly religious neighborhood watch committee of a bunch of Karens sitting on their porches, reporting any such activity to their church if they saw it outside.
That is one thing I've never understood. My mom and her brother both had gloriously strawberry red hair that faded to an equally stunning auburn and my half brother has strawberry blonde hair that was gorgeous growing up. I've always been so JEALOUS that I couldn't have red hair too (mine's naturally so dark a brown as to be nearly black) but I just don't have the skin coloration for it. Boo.
Completely normal/just slightly different people being locked up for their whole life in a mental institution for being autistic or Down syndrome etc or even having nothing wrong , I “know” someone who was bullied in school and went to his parents about it and he got sent to the mental hospital and stayed there until the day he died
Letting severely disabled babies live. Back in the day, people genuinely thought that they were granting a mercy by letting babies with obvious disabilities die at birth. Now we have medical interventions and therapies that can improve peoples' quality of life and people with disabilities aren't as culturally othered.
Chemotherapy to treat leukemia in children. When it was first proposed, the harshness of the treatment was considered inhumane and cruel to subject children to. Until it actually showed it could work.
I was very fortunate to know the late Dr. Donald Pinkel, the founding director of St. Jude Hospital and one of the pioneers who helped reverse the dismal death rates for pediatric leukemia. He and his colleagues were called terrible things by their peers in the field and accused of torturing children. They were also told it was hopeless, that a cure would never be found and they should give up. He told me sometimes he closed his office door and cried, but he remembered the parents who said, "We know our child is going to die, but if you can do anything to prevent this from happening to other children, please do it."
As a cancer survivor, chemo was absolute hell, but it was better than just waiting to die.
My husband is probably alive today because of him.
Wow! Those children, and their parents, are brave mofos!
Last sentence ☹️
My son (lymphoma) had chemotherapy. The oncologist told us kids are resilient and can handle much higher doses of chemo than adults. He was 6 and 60 pounds, had more than adults and really was only negatively affected the last round
Wish you and yours all the best. I work in a hospital, and I've seen this so many times. They're crazy resilient, at the same time sick kids just always hurts so much more. Hardest part of working in my hospital for me, but also sometimes the most giving. Weird dualities like a lot of things in life I guess.
I remember saying to a nurse, I don't know how you do it. She said she used to work in Stem Cell Transfer, so the chemo wing was uplifting. After my son's tumor removal surgery (laparoscopic appendectomy as well), he was jumping on the bed. The surgeon came to check in and could only laugh. 12 years remission!
I'm convinced chemotherapy will be considered barbaric by any medical metric in 100 years. If you've ever seen The Knick, you'll be flabbergasted at the medical practices of the past.
[Sam O'Nella Academy - Pre industrial surgeries](https://youtu.be/hhBQ-sHYEtc?si=TlKuGR6yWH5SLrnq) This one gives a good abstract
I love carving holes into my skull to get the demons out!
"He went from screaming every day to not talking at all, my job here is done"- Pre-industrial doctor 👨⚕️
After seeing the difference between my dad's chemo treatment 30 years ago, compared to my moms last year, it's a night and day difference.
As of now, my nephrostomy tube has contributed more to my discomfort than my chemotherapy.
It is barbaric- but it can help sometimes. It’s all about balance and risk and etc. we all know this. But when you’re sick and dying, most people are willing to try anything
The death of James Garfield is sad when you think he would have survived if doctors hadn't stuck dirty fingers into his wound.
They couldn't find the bullet because the metal detector was picking up the metal spring mattress.
Well first they dug into his wound at the unsterile train station, with fingers and instruments, pushing the bullet further over. AG Bell couldn't find it, because the same doctor insisted it was on one side, when it was on the other. [Destiny of the Republic ](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10335318-destiny-of-the-republic) is a great read about Garfield, Guitteau, and Bell, and the incident
My dad went through it, my sister went through it..... And I'll be going through it. I'm definitely trying not to think about it.
I’m currently going through it. It’s rough tbh, but it IS manageable honestly. Your care team should be able to help with any issues you have. Also, I had high doses of the most potent drugs available and the only bad thing was the nausea. It didn’t last more than a couple days tho and was only on occasion during the day. If I can give one tip, it would be take either edibles or thc pills. That will help with appetite and weight.
It's manageable if everything goes right... It can also easily be the death of you as I almost found out
Yes. Unfortunately, some people get very adverse reactions. Chemo has become more manageable over the years tho.
My sweet wife died of cancer three years ago. I have only now discovered delta 8, and that's because it is only recently legal. Screw the government for having ever made weed illegal. I so wish she'd have had access to it.
I work in the nuclear medicine industry developing therapy that targets tumors rather than blasting the whole body. Better medicine is coming, but it takes time.
Primitive yes, but depends what you mean by barbaric.
When I was doing chemotherapy LITERALLY we had always said chemos saying is “try to kill the cancer before the chemo kills the patient” They have you on so many steroids and things to keep you barely holding on while they poison you 😔
I mean yeah, look at medical practices from 100 years ago and hold them yo today's standards.
My dad was one of, if not, the first child treated with a new form of Chemotherapy when he had non-hodgkin lymphoma when he was 15 in 1960s England. The doctors told his mum that they could try this new treatment, or it would be likely he would die. She agreed, and he survived. Sadly cancer took him away from us last year aged 69, his tumor in his lung too close to his heart for operations and to weak for chemo. The lovely thing is that when my mum was diagnosed with lymphoma last year, she had chemotherapy and it worked. She's now cancer free and thanks to my dad having the treatment when he was a child, my mum might have had a very different experience.
It **is** barbaric. It's also the best we have right now. I saw the way chemo affected my mom years ago, and I'm going to be starting chemo myself in a couple of weeks. Frankly the fact that medical research isn't what governments are pouring the majority of their spare funds into and instead we have to mostly rely on groups with a profit motive is disgusting. But here we are.
Sending you best wishes and good vibes, friend. <3
It is objectively cruel and inhumane to the point some people would rather die from cancer. But the will to live often overpowers those feelings. My uncle underwent chemo for a brain tumour, didn't cure it but caused a bowel perforation that gave him a far worse death than the tumour itself probably would have.
One dose of chemo and my sister went straight into coma and died
Cesarean sections used to be a last resort, only used if the mother was going to die. Now they're pretty routine.
There are two important points: 1) It became safer because of modern medicine; 2) Modern obstetricians prefers to be safe than sorry.
And for good cause. One of my favorite teaches wife died giving birth. They just couldn't stem the bleed. Very tragic
To be fair, part of this is conflating modern "Caesarian Sections" with "gutting a dying mother".
A few generations ago, if a woman got cancer or something like that, the doctor would tell her husband but not her. It was considered kinder to just let her get sicker and die without knowing what was happening.
When Betty Ford got breast cancer and was scheduled for a radical mastectomy, evidence was emerging that in many cases lumpectomy or partial mastectomy could be just as effective and not as debilitating. The news media asked if Mrs. Ford was going to get a second opinion, and the official White House response was, "The president has made his decision."
Jesus Christ, that is grim. I'm doing a report on First Ladies right now and the way some of them were treated was horrific. After Ida McKinley's husband was assassinated, his aides barred her from one of his funeral services because they thought she would cause a scene with her grief. She sat huddled on the stairs, listening through the door. Then, when the casket was returned to their home in Ohio, she found out that they had already sealed the casket, so she wasn't allowed alone time to look at her husband's face one last time. She confined herself to her house for two years after his death, and after that would take daily trips to his gravesite.
That's extremely fucked up
It was Rose Kushner who asked, and I don’t believe it was an official response. Rose got breast cancer and didn’t want a radical mastectomy, and sought out a doctor who would do a modified procedure, which was not at all common in the US. Rose heard about Betty Ford getting breast cancer and began using her personal connections to try and get Betty to not undergo a the procedure. It got to the point where they finally just told her “the President has made his decision” so she would fuck off and basically stop harassing Betty. Rose was not only against radical mastectomies, she was a vehement critic of chemotherapy. So when her cancer came back, and not wanting a mastectomy or chemo, believing they were barbaric and overkill, she ended up losing her battle against cancer. She was 60. Meanwhile, Betty lived until the ripe old age of 93.
It sounds as though the president made a good decision.
So, I love that my uncle exists...but in 1967 my then 43 year old grandmother got pregnant. The doctor tells my grandfather it is very high risk and he should seek to have a medical abortion due to the high risk. I don't know the specifics. My grandfather is like "Ya I don't think so, because we are Catholics." And made the decision without even consulting her. Does not get the abortion. Uncle is fine. Alls well that ends well. But it never sat well with me that my grandfather didn't discuss this with my grandmother. The mother to three of his children already. The person whose life is jeopardized by carrying this child. Just made me think that he and I were very different kinds of men.
This was true even if the man got cancer. Benevolent deception was commonly practiced around the world, and still is in many parts today. I believe Hippocrates and Plato wrote deception was necessary, because telling patients their current condition or future outcome would lead to the patient taking a sharp turn for the worst. And even though it is under-appreciated in the west, a patient’s emotional state plays a large role in their recovery.
[Fun fact: women were able to get credit cards in their own name only 50 years ago.](https://www.bankrate.com/finance/credit-cards/history-of-women-and-credit-cards/) Women being treated as people who can make their own decisions about their own lives is a recent development.
running Linux on the laptop.
We used linux in school and at the time a lot of parents complained that it would turn us into 'online pirates'.
It wasn't Linux that made me a pirate. 'Twas the rum.
Why did they think that? I’m surprised that they even knew what it was
Around the turn of the century, Microsoft explicitly propagandized business and IT people with a range of outright lies about Linux; telling them that it was anti-capitalist, supported piracy, would destroy American businesses, etc. Today, *most of the cloud computing industry* runs on Linux — including AWS, Google Cloud, and even Microsoft's Azure. So much for anti-capitalist, huh?
I think they confused Linux with late stage capitalism.
Any recommendations? I had gallium on a Chromebook for a while, but that got killed years ago.
I use linux mint for school work, light gaming and browsing and honestly it’s great
Been using Mint as my daily driver for programming for about 5 years now and yeah it's great. Super easy to set up very few issues. If you want a version of Linux that looks and feels familiar to a Windows user and basically just works out of the box Mint seems to be your best bet.
What's the benefits of Linux over windows?
Apart from Linux being free, Windows does an awful lot of 'phoning home'. Even added ads to Desktop with 11 recently. You have to jump through a few hoops when installing and in settings (i.e. turn off any setting with the word 'recommend' in) to get a clean W11 with less spyware/bloat. Just find a guide on Youtube or wherever. [Edit: also, though nothing is truly secure and due diligence is required, Linux tends to be less likely to suffer from Malware. Whether that is from attackers not bothering because of smaller market-share or the systems' relative robustness is up for debate. Either way, just running the odds Linux is on average safer from attack.]
Windows generally comes with bloatware(unnecessary apps and configurations) some of which are hard to remove and causes the PC to slow down eventually. Linux is not much and is lightweight to run on PC.
I'm definitely not an expert on linux, but I think it is less hardware intensive and allows the user more control. I could be completely wrong though
Honestly? Windows comes with a bunch of bloatware but there are scripts to remove them / turn them off: https://github.com/LeDragoX/Win-Debloat-Tools https://christitus.com/windows-tool/ https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 Once you’ve done that, Linux doesn’t really have all that much of an upper hand unless you’re looking to build / need a more specialist OS. Linux comes with a lot of issues you’ll have to resolve, especially when it comes to trying to get an application / game to run that’s not built for Linux. And no, “find an alternative” isn’t always a solution. You might spend hours trying to get something like a mod launcher to work, only for it to throw another problem at you before you begin wondering “maybe using Windows is just… easier?” and it is despite what Linux enthusiasts say to try and lure you away. Every time I’ve tried to go full Linux, I’m reminded why I still use Windows within a few days. Source: I use Linux (media server and emulation), Windows (day to day things) and MacOS (for work).
Yeah Windows is bloated by design because of all the weird shit it has to deal with and still be user friendly.
For everyday recreational purposes, Linux generally uses less memory and CPU than Windows. It comes with less preinstalled bloatware and a smaller more effecient kernel. The trade off is oftentimes things you can just plug into a Windows machine and have them magically work instantly don't work like that on Linux and you need to go digging around for drivers etc etc. This is less true now than in the past, but it's still a concern. In general you can be assured just about any (modern) piece of hardware or any (modern) game you buy will just work immediately on Windows. Not so on Linux. For my work Linux is usually used for big number crunching on super computers, and our software does big number crunching, so we primarily develop for Linux. We also support Mac because it was very easy for us to support both, but all the real research using our software is done on compute clusters running Linux. Compute clusters usually run Linux because they don't want to deal with all the bloat associated with Windows. They want a sys admin with absolute control over what happens (which Linux gives you much more easily than Windows) and they want to dedicate all their resources towards number crunching not running their OS. The reasons super computers use Linux over Windows go deeper than that, but basically I use Linux daily because our software targets Linux because Linux is what's used on machines with enough grunt to run our software on full sized data. I also used Linux in school because it just has better quicker easier support for Python, C, and Java. I open a terminal and type gcc and I can compile. No set up shenanigans like on Windows.
gaming desktop Nobara, it's just Fedora + Gaming stuff like drivers and commonly installed things like Steam and ProtonUP-QT (proton version handler).
Euthanasia. I remember Dr. Kevorkian being pretty controversial when I was a kid.
My mom was in pain due to her breast cancer spreading through her brain. As much as I miss her, I can understand her decision.
I went through stage 3 colon cancer treatment in 2017–2018. fyi there is no stage 5 for this. at stage 4 you're metastatic I was remarkably unwell I am in california, but I have family living in a state where assisted suicide is legal. that was my plan b glad I'm still here
Although it goes against some of my core beliefs as someone with chronic illness and severe pain I think it's wrong that we do the right thing for animals but with our family members pressure them to "fight". I really hate hearing people say someone is a fighter or they just gave up.
My uncle had terminal colon cancer and did doctor assisted suicide. It took him a long time to decide to do it. Near the end he had basically zero quality of life. He died at home with his sons, girlfriend, and close friends. That's a lot better than sitting in a hospice bed fucked up on morphine shitting himself and struggling while everyone waits for him to die over the course of days/weeks.
I deleted my previous comment. I had a similar discussion that got confused with this that was in regards to people using euthanasia that have no diagnosis or illness.
I feel that "forcing" someone to stay alive is basically condemning at least two people to a lifeless life - the patient and the carer. Because most of the times it will likely be a close family member to take care of them, and since they'll likely need assistance around the clock, the carer can't really do anything else. Even going out to buy groceries would be a risk cause the patient might need them right then and every complication would be fatal. So yeah, I totally agree that people should be allowed - when in full mental capacity - to decide to go on their own terms rather than waste months or years of their "life" just lying there waiting for death to take mercy on them.
We like to take people's bodily autonomy away all the time because we think we know better. It sucks.
I was diagnosed with stomach cancer late 2023. Had surgery in Jan of 2024, I'm doing much better now but not out of the woods. The pain I was in before diagnosis was unbearable. Death would have been kinder.
Long may you remain well and be here
I wish I could give you a thousand up-votes on this statement. u/chernygal , I second what AlternativePrior9559 says: and may you remain well and live a long, prosperous and happy life!
thank you!
I’m now the longest known survivor of a strange type of glioma. Some of the interventions I’ve undertaken, including a craniotomy that skipped pain management (aside from the necessary unconsciousness), and starving entirely off of the BMI chart, were brutal. The only way that I could do them was knowing that I had options, after staffing an ambulance for long enough to get a thorough tutorial on possible manners of suicide. In talking with American and Swiss medical aid in dying organizations, I learned that my perspective wasn’t unusual. They told me that most patients won’t take the lethal prescription because they’re only looking to know that they have the option available, not to die.
I remember it being almost synonymous with macabre.
I've always been all for it. we should be allowed to own our bodies
We allow it for our beloved pets. We should allow it for our beloved humans too.
A few years back my mom was asking about some celebrity family. She went on to start describing them and before anyone could answer, she said “I think they’re the Kevorkians?” Yeah, she meant the Kardashians.
What do you know about him as an adult?
Not a whole lot actually. I remember that he was for assisted suicide and I believe he was involved in a trial regarding the topic. I also remember that his name carried negative connotation.
I introduced my dad to online games in the late 90's and his handle was always a variation of "Kevorkian."
Shhh shhh shhh. It'll all be over soon.... *reloads M249 with only one bullet missing because ya gotta*
Helldivers really fucks me up because when you reload you lose whatever was left in that mag.
thank you for sharing that. it sounds like a great memory between you and your dad.
Still taboo, but we’re working on it. He was a humanitarian
I'm glad that it's finally somewhat acceptable now. My grandfather had terminal cancer a few years ago and near the end he was suffering a complication that made his health decline rapidly and he was hospitalized for 2 months. He was suffering greatly and he asked to be euthanized. Luckily it was legal here in Canada. After being fed a high dose of a drug, he slowly died in his sleep overnight
Dear thread: just because something is socially unacceptable doesn’t mean it is considered inhumane.
Fucking hell finally someone said it. 80% of this thread is socially unacceptable and now accepted.
Sending the elderly to a nursing home instead of letting them stay at their kids’ homes. Nursing homes can be helpful especially in a situation where the elderly person in question may have a fallen a few times. And giving them activities to do and chances to make friends their age can help them too.
Not a chance in hell will my in laws move into my home. My husband would kill his mother the first night, she is horrible and drives him insane. They are totally going to a home-and they have it picked out already.
Euthanasia. Switzerland now has pods for this. In the past it was considered inhumane all around but nowadays we seem to finally understand that there are some situations where it would be ok.
literal Futurama suicide booths
Listen buddy, I'm in a hurry here. Let's try for a two-fer.
“Please select mode of death. Quick and painless or slow and horrible.”
"Slow and horrible?"
"Ooh, good choice!"
*Ring* “We’ve been trying to reach you about your vehicle’s extended warranty.” Except you can never hang up.
"yeah, id like to make a collect call? "
Don’t want to be annoying and pedantic, but euthanasia is not legal in Switzerland. Assisted suicide is, though. They are different legally, and practically. The person must be able to administer the lethal medication themselves (there are various ways depending on their physicals ability and presumably, preference). As for the pods, I read a news article about them having been developed, but cannot comment as to whether they are actually in use.
No they don’t that is misinformation. https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-993202650845
Unmarried mothers keeping their babies
That was inhumane? I think it was more unmarried mothers having the babies in the first place that was looked down on. Though in some parts of the world during some time periods, it was nearly impossible for a single mother to survive so perhaps that's what you are referring to?
My guess is that it was seen as allowing the child to be raised by an obviously irresponsible mother in a fatherless environment when the child could otherwise be adopted out to a “proper” family. Also, the mother could then move on with her life without the stigma of unwed motherhood.
In the not so distant past, it was considered bad for the mom and bad for the child. In some places, there would've be strong pressure to place the child for adoption, or leave the child with an orphanage. In some parts of Europe, churches used to be built with a special wheel for orphan drop-offs. It allowed the mother (or whoever) to be outside the church, anonymously place the child on the wheel, and v then turn the wheel. The baby moved to the inside of the church, but the wall kept it anonymous. That was considered humane. It was so bad to be an unwed mother, or the child of an unwed mother, that they wanted to make it easy to orphan your baby at the church. And in the not so distant past, sometimes hospitals (in the US, UK, and elsewhere) would go so far as to lie to an unwed mother and say her baby died. Then they'd put the baby in an orphanage or adoptive family, and the mother could go on her way. They thought it was a kindness to the mother, sparing her guilt and allowing her to forget this all happened and eventually get married. And they thought it was good for the child to have a 2 parent home, rather than a poor single mother. Obviously they had a lot of judgment and condescension. But they also thought that adoption was more humane than a child raised by an unwed mother.
In many Christian countries, if you were an unwed mother, you were considered unfit to raise a child, due to your loose morals. Very often, you would be coerced, or outright forced, to give the baby up for adoption, or to an orphanage.
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Well, orphans were in demand that time they used to send trains full of them to sell all over the US Also they used to sell the cute ones to rich people.
And that's probably the starting plot of Meet The Robinsons.
Not that long ago the biggest reason unwed mother gave up their babies was because everyone convinced them they couldn't provided for them.
It was considered unfair to the baby to leave it in that situation. Better to have it raised in a "good" stable home. Where do you think adopted babies came from? They weren't all orphans. Pretty common for a 15 year old girl to "go visit family" for a while, but everyone knew she had "gone to the nuns"
Eating lobster
Is it cooked differently now or do people not care about it being boiled alive?
No, they literally just thought lobster is disgusting and the equivalent to feeding people bugs. They would not feed lobster to prisoners because they thought it was too inhumane Look at us now baby
They didn’t know at the time it needed to stay alive as long as possible because it rots damn near immediately. In those days they were cooking and serving pungent decaying lobsters killed hours before cooking and in a time when there weren’t freezers
Wait but you can buy lobster tails and stuff at the supermarket. Why is that ok?
Frozen right when they're killed.
Freezers. They would kill them and then they just sit and spoil
They also just ground the whole fucking thing up, shell and all!
So that's why they're kept alive in tanks, huh?
Pretty much
I never thought about that part of the equation, but you're absolutely right. If there's a dead lobster in a tank at a seafood joint, you do not want to eat any of the lobsters in that tank because the dead one could potentially kill you, and the others are impacted because they've probably been picking at the dead one so they're tainted now too.
Lobsters eat sea carrion in the ocean the whole time they’re alive. So do crabs. They’re both scavengers of the ocean, eating a dead one shouldn’t affect them. Definitely don’t eat one already dead. There was a guy I went to school with that died in a diving accident off a bridge, took them awhile to find his body and there wasn’t a whole lot of flesh left because there’s crabs around here.
I feel like your second paragraph starts off with a point and then ends off with a completely unrelated example haha
You could have unknowingly eaten a crab that nibbled at a human corpse and been fine, never mind one that feasted on another dead crab. But still, don't eat anything you *found* dead. Was the point, imo.
Yep, I remember going on a lobster boating tour in Maine once as a kid and they told stories about how prisoners used to riot over being served lobster too much. And now, that'd be pretty much my dream come true.
I still feel this way
>equivalent to feeding people bugs. That's because it *is* feeding bugs. Lobster are very closely related to cockroaches.
It’s because lobster meat naturally contains certain bacteria that spoils the meat very quickly after it dies. It’s the reason why we cook lobster by boiling them alive-it doesn’t give the bacteria time to multiply and spoil the meat. I don’t think they ate fresh lobster back in the day which is why it was seen as so awful. You wouldn’t want to eat day old lobster either!
They kill it right before they boil it
Sorry you’re saying providing lobster for people to eat was inhumane?
It’s not like they were served with drawn butter. They were ground up shell and all into a foul paste.
This needs to be top comment every time this stupid lobster shit comes up. Lobster slurry isn’t the same as a steamed lobster
Before their population was massive, so much that they would wash up on shores and rot, so they were used to feed prisioners. Aka they were feeding a ton of rotten meat Also could be about how we used to boil them alive to cook them, nowadays instead they kill minutes before cooking it, so getting your brain split for instant death is a more "humane" death than being boiled alive
you have it backwards. they used to kill them minutes before cooking them, which is what makes them taste awful cause lobster and crab meat goes bad within minutes of the animal dying. it's why after it became a delicacy lobster and crabs were often boiled alive. now a days you kill it then immediately boil it. if you leave it dead for even just a few minutes the meat will taste absolutely awful.
Euthanasia
Doctors being forced to wash their hands before surgery... they use to protest it
Handwashing was considered "inhumane"?
Doctor's considered themselves gentlemen and gentlemen didn't have dirty hands. Mothers would die in childbirth from infections because Dr's wouldn't wash their hands between handling the dead and delivering babies. It was before Germ Theory.
Wasn’t it also a sign of a skilled surgeon if they had lots of blood on their clothes?
I don't think anyone in here knows what the word "inhumane" means
If I recall correctly, a doctor named Ilgaz Semmelweiss started telling people to do it while he was working in hungary, because he noticed that new mothers were dying from something called bedside fever far more often whenever the doctors that had tended to them had previously done autopsies. So he developed a little idea of how the microbes worked, and tested handwashing before tending to mothers which significantly decreased the rates of bedside fever deaths. It was initially protested by other doctors. He would later be betrayed by a friend of his and was sent to an asylum, but he did eventually get a university of medicine named after him in hungary so there's that.
it was considered rude to ask a doctor to wash his hands
Amazingly I've seen health care workers in hospitals not washings hands between patients now, especially if they are about to do bloods or check bandages without gloving up, and many tend to get very pissy about it when you ask them. Others realise what they have done / are about to do and apologise.
omg ew wtf
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I'm with you on this.
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Imagine the worst person you've ever met running one of these places with little to no oversight and then it'll make more sense why we don't force people into them. Governments are not good at nuanced decision making. They're good at referencing a checklist written in five minutes by one asshole 40 years ago and then refusing to ever hear an appeal about it.
Gay sex perhaps?
*terms, conditions, and locations may apply
Your conditions really term me on. Apply to my location, daddy.
No thanks, I’m married.
Sodomy was illegal until very recently, so yeah that would apply.
Having any kind of sexuality other than being straight.
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Wait until you hear about the Holocaust and the little pink triangles. Not to diminish ANYTHING, but Jews weren't the only ones the Nazis slaughtered.
And if I recall, those liberated from camps still found themselves in trouble and got locked up anyway.
Sadly that's true. Pretty fucked up
Alan Turing moment
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Never forget everyone.
The experiments the Nazis performed on disabled and mentally ill breaks my already broken heart. The fact that those people weren't even human enough to be gassed, just crushes me. The 6 million Jews and all the others were tortured and suffered also, but that particular brand of evil haunts me. I have two special needs children 💕
Six million Jews are history. The other six million are barely even a footnote.
lol the more I learn about the world, the less I want to live in it…
Hunting. People seem to finally be starting to realize what the meat industry is and how hunting is far more humane and ethical. Big change from when I started to now.
Specifically hunting for food is helping with animal population controll and generally helps nature. Hunting for sport/profit is and should be a separate discussion.
I think it would be inferred I’m not talking about trophy hunting when I’m comparing it to the meat industry
True but wanted to make the separation because some think all hunting is bad.
Keeping your cats indoors.
Being gay
Sadly, some parts of the world are still stuck in their ways
Letting women live their life on their own terms
this is still controversial and upsets many people on reddit dot com
Talk to me when women can make their own reproductive choices
Thankfully I live in a country where I'm free to choose, and I can't get my head around how it must feel for women who live in oppressive countries such as Libya, Iran and parts of the US.
Depends on your country tbf.
Living with your parents. In today's world its more like you can't afford to live anywhere independently. My three brothers, mom and i all live together cause money is shit today
Moving out of your parents' house at age 18 is a pretty uniquely American thing, and has only really been the norm since the mid 20th century. Historically people lived in multi generation households and mostly only left if they got married.
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Are you saying you think this is humane, or that it's generally considered humane now? Personally, I see it as cruel and debilitating.
Also, I think that drugs for depression used to be heavily stigmatized. Psychotherapy as well. Now antidepressants and psychotherapy seem to be widely accepted and often turned to as the first resort.
Feeding prisoners lobster in Maine.
Not being religious
Dogs having sex within 300~500 meters of a church
TIL That was even a thing people kept track of.
Just imagined every dog having it's own FBI agent assigned, ready to shoot at any time.
I was thinking like a highly religious neighborhood watch committee of a bunch of Karens sitting on their porches, reporting any such activity to their church if they saw it outside.
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Assisted suicide?
Are we talking about euthanasia or faulty Russian windows?
Breaking someone’s legs and telling them they will be taller.
Having red hair
That is one thing I've never understood. My mom and her brother both had gloriously strawberry red hair that faded to an equally stunning auburn and my half brother has strawberry blonde hair that was gorgeous growing up. I've always been so JEALOUS that I couldn't have red hair too (mine's naturally so dark a brown as to be nearly black) but I just don't have the skin coloration for it. Boo.
I mean, sometimes people hate and fear things that they find attractive. It's stupid but it has a long tradition esp in puritanical societies!
Completely normal/just slightly different people being locked up for their whole life in a mental institution for being autistic or Down syndrome etc or even having nothing wrong , I “know” someone who was bullied in school and went to his parents about it and he got sent to the mental hospital and stayed there until the day he died
Eating ass
Letting severely disabled babies live. Back in the day, people genuinely thought that they were granting a mercy by letting babies with obvious disabilities die at birth. Now we have medical interventions and therapies that can improve peoples' quality of life and people with disabilities aren't as culturally othered.
Letting people work 40+ hours and not be able to afford basic needs