Function

As far as I'm aware of, basically every stimulant, drug, medicine, acting on receptors, is prone to tolerance and addiction ... We wouldn't be calling certain doses "overdoses" if they were not harmful.

In Belgium, you can combine your (in case of neurology, 5-year lasting) specialisation with a PhD ... 2 years of research may replace 1 year of specialisation here; I'm planning on doing that: combining my specialisation (not sure which one yet, either neurology or neurosurgery) with a PhD, favourably in a fundamental neuroscientific setting, e.g. epilepsy, consciousness, ... Think this is possible where you live?

If ever I'd encounter a situation as described above, and I notice someone else experiencing discomfort from the smoke, or when there's a pregnant woman (or, the hell with it, someone with asthma, COPD, ...), boy you better run

People smoking in the vicinity (or even in) a bus stop shelter thing while it's raining makes me quite furious. Inside, alas. I don't have the guts to tell them to stop smoking.

I meant on the streets etc.

If it were up to me, smoking in public would be indisputably prohibited, for the sake of the well-being of all non-smokers inhaling that crap passively.

I back up DrKrettin; the hell kind of nonsense is that? I wasn't born prematurely, I don't have major health problems. Now fill in the blanks. I don't like your causation either, btw: 'therefore' implies the certainty of not having children when being gay. Which is not the case.

I am consciously awaiting the day that Professor Steven Laureys and his Coma Science Group (or the hell, any neuroscientist) gives the great breakthrough in the understanding of our consciousness and conscience, and our understanding of our existance.

Emerson Pugh said: "If the brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't."

But be careful in selecting good pharmacists. They're still merchants in medications.

Don't forget the lack of immunocompatibility as a major problem in allotransplantation. I don't think that immunosuppressants are as deadly as a septic shock due to cytokin storm in a potentially incompatible transplant: if you don't have anything else going on, you could miss your immune system for a while. Lots of patients with lymphomas get immunosuppressants, suppressing the development/function of e.g. B-cells (in case of a B-cell lymphoma); they can do fine with it, but when they get a slightest fever, they better rush to emergency asap, since they don't have a functioning immune system against the threat. What I mentioned about cytokin storm is a really nasty matter: when in a cytokin storm, dying isn't rare. Do some research on MHC, HLA, immunocompatibility etc. --- Your comment on diabetes mellitus type 1 is interesting. But easily answered: the problem with DM-I is that your patient produces auto-antibodies against the pancreatic beta cells in the langerhans islets producing insulin. So whether it's your own pancreas or another pancreas you were to transplant, you're screwed and your beta cells will be destroyed (you could ask about the mediation of the destruction and immune response against the beta cells, but that is irrelevant: if you have your own autoreactive t cells reacting against your own pancreatic HLA-presenting beta cells, then you could ask yourself: transplanting someone else's pancreas doesn't express the same HLA; CAVE: this is immuno-incompatibility and - indifferent from the type of tissue (pancreatic) and its cells - will result in organ rejection. I don't have the time to look up articles so you'll have to take my word for it - for what it's even worth. Pancreas transplantations are not done. In case of DM-I, it's useless. In case of acute pancreatitis, you just have to watch 'n wait until it's over. In case of chronic pancreatitis, you could drain it and perform some surgical procedures (if interested, I know the next procedures: Partington-Rochelle drainage, Wirsung's procedure, Baker's procedure, Puestow's procedure; Puestow and Wirsung are not indicated anymore, however, in chronic pancreatitis; the drainage of Partington and Rochelle is the most commonly performed surgery in chronic pancreatitis).

I don't know how, but with a lot of messing around with my computer, installing several anti-shit software and having fun in the crypts of the register, I managed to get asymptomatic. Don't know whether it's still there or doing something, but I'm not feeling any side effects of it anymore.

Hope this works for studiot - didn't work for my Super Deluxe Chinese Computer Virus Level Expert Plus

You could google it Then again, what's the point of a forum ... No, we don't have "cellulases". If you eat a lot of e.g. red berries, which have cellulose in their peel, you'd excrete them again - as such. If you don't bite them, don't expect anything of the berry to be absorbed by your intestines. Bacteria might have cellulase, I guess ... But I'm not sure. I'm only certain that we don't. Excessive cellulose ingestion might thus cause an osmotic diarrhoea (I'm not sure if that's written correctly; I find the spelling of that word disturbingly odd).

In my branch (medicine) it's quite irregular to just walk by someone you know or you've spoken with even one time - at least that's how I perceive it. When I encounter someone I've had a small talk with once, I'd surely say "hi" or indeed greet them with a polite nod. On our campus, it's quite easy to get to know anyone and you're known by a lot of people rather quickly without even having spoken to them. Which you notice when random people you've never ever encountered before start to greet you and you begin to question your memory. It's not uncommon to even greet your professors whom you've never really had a talk with, they surely do appreciate that. Just a polite nod saying only "prof" is enough. But ... uni wouldn't be uni if you wouldn't have your classical year jerks hated by most of the year. Whom I do not greet at all and I just walk by without even looking at them. Long story.

Hanu? Sounds like something that might very well resemble some Chinese and Russian hybrid computer virus like the one I got few weeks/months ago. Hope for you it isn't something that bad.

I'm quite okay with the lines of thought of the liberalists here; but then again, let's not compare political systems of different nations in this thread.

America's view on psychology and psychiatry - in organisation of healthcare, that is; I'm sure there are researchers who've published a lot of valuable information - is indeed, imo, enormously narrow-minded and egocentric. Liberalism would do fine. Just a bunch o' bollocks.

Suicidal patients aren't locked up in an asylum ... At least not in Belgium. But there is a certain stigma on having a clinical depression/major depressive disorder, and there's a certain treshold you have to overcome to make the first step to a healthcare worker. Without consent, no one can be 'locked up' in an asylum. In Belgium, that is.

Great list of countries. You can kind of expect what kind of countries make suicide attempts "illegal". I'm actually quite surprised that assisted suicide is legal, baffled that it's legal in Belgium: I always thought helping someone committing suicide was illegal. Guess it's different from helping someone in making the decision of committing suicide? But seriously ... Looking at some penalties they give people who failed a suicide attempt just gives an idea of the primitivity of that country: these patients are mostly locked up in prison ... Only a matter of encourageing them to try again after they are released. They ought to get psychiatric help, no jailtime. I find the term "legal" quite misleading, actually, thinking about it ... An impending suicide, for example, gives doctors an exception to the patient-physician duty of confidentiality: whenever an emergency situation is imminent, a physician can overrule the duty of confidentiality for the sake of the well-being of his patient(s) and/or society (also e.g. when a physician has strong suspicions of ongoing child abuse; but when someone who killed another person consults his doctor confessing the crime, and not apparent of committing any other crime henceforth, a physician is still bound to duty of confidentiality, in Belgium ... beautiful, isn't it?)

Legalising? No law will stop you from doing it; it isn't illegal, as far as I'm aware of ... Imagine being locked up for committing suicide. Lol Everyone in such world and life will become extremely bored. But far from everyone will have the 'guts' to perform the act of suicide: no way back. What if something amazing happens when I'd be dead? Am I prepared to miss that? ...

No need to go that far: just imagine yourself to be immortal. The hell would you keep doing after you've done everything. Can't imagine of something more boring than being immortal.

+1 for the extensive and clear points of view. Thank you.

Thank you! About your comment on (non-)normality of distribution: from when can a QQ-plot which "in your eyes" seems as if the data surely do approach a certain normal distribution according to Gauss, overrule a significant Kolmogorov-Smirnov (n > 50) or Shapiro-Wilk (n < 50)? If K-S or S-W report difference from the distribution with a Gaussian distribution with a p < 0.0001, are you bound to reporting it as such, or can a QQ-plot still save your data by calling it 'normal enough' for use of a parametric test (with higher power than nonparametric)?

Hello I was wondering: when you use a parametric test on data (e.g. unpaired Student's t-test), you may report a certain t(df), and p value, and you may report mean and a certain confidence interval to give an idea of the direction of the (in)significance or the trend of the result. But what when you get to use a nonparametric test? Let's say you use the nonparametric equivalent of the Student's t-test mentioned above: the Mann-Whitney U test. What will you report? I may recall incorrectly that nonparametric tests are based on the median and IQR, rather than on means and CIs. Then again, I might recall correctly that they are based on (mean) ranks ... So let's say you have a certain U = 1,183.00, z = -3.488 and p < 0.001 (statistics that I would all report). How will you give your readers an idea of the direction of the significance? Will you still report means and CI? Or will you report medians and IQRs? Thank you very much for your insights. Regards Function