Nick Semenkovich, MD PhD

I think tech folks are overrating the degree to which tech philanthropy will replace federal dollars. The science funding piece isn’t crazy — there’s huge money flowing that way, and more coming — but it’s still an OOM off federal funding.

Do USMLE scores accurately reflect eligibility for residency? Today's students have easy access to test questions. Multiple websites like this one from Nepal market to foreign students. FSMB and NBME have been alerted, but the sites are still up. Using "recall questions" to study is considered cheating. The average USMLE test score has risen 24% since 1994.

Med students may be interested to know that physician compensation varies by specialty, as does time worked per year (based on weeks time off a year and hours worked per week on).

The are a function of health insurance plans. The insurance companies create plans with deductibles that most people can’t afford. So to get to the insurance money from their plan, they will loan the patient money to cover their deductible. That turns the hospital into a sub prime lender. Then the insurer will under pay, late pay and claw back in the contract. Costing the hospital more cash. And costing them in administrative costs even more Then the insurer will delay approvals and deny care, earning interest on the premiums. So then the hospitals. Non profit or not, have to compensate for the issue with insurance companies. So they create ridiculous shit like facilities fees, abuse 340b programs , abuse site neutrality and more. And of course non profits don’t pay taxes And then the biggest provider systems will say they can’t make money on Medicare. Which is a function of them spending like drunken sailors on everything they can. From buildings to consultants. There are more administrators than doctors and in aggregate they make more. It makes no sense that hospitals spend so much money on consultants. It’s a waste. It’s like them want them to give the CEO cover , so they can try to buy more hospitals which leads to more pay for the ceo Break em all up

this makes no mathematical sense. it's the same number of people

Here you go. Cleveland Clinic study. Vaccination makes you more likely to get the flu, not less likely.

This is a really interesting thread. If we literally already have a cure for (some kinds of) cancer, but can't *prove* it's "safe and effective", should terminally ill patients have an option to use it anyway?

this is actually insane > be tech guy in australia > adopt cancer riddled rescue dog, months to live > not_going_to_give_you_up.mp4 > pay $3,000 to sequence her tumor DNA > feed it to ChatGPT and AlphaFold > zero background in biology > identify mutated proteins, match them to drug targets > design a custom mRNA cancer vaccine from scratch > genomics professor is “gobsmacked” that some puppy lover did this on his own > need ethics approval to administer it > red tape takes longer than designing the vaccine > 3 months, finally approved > drive 10 hours to get rosie her first injection > tumor halves > coat gets glossy again > dog is alive and happy > professor: “if we can do this for a dog, why aren’t we rolling this out to humans?” one man with a chatbot, and $3,000 just outperformed the entire pharmaceutical discovery pipeline. we are going to cure so many diseases. I dont think people realize how good things are going to get