Archive for Medicine

Almost going to the movies

Kam and I almost went to see Everything Everywhere All at Once last night. We’ve been hearing great things about the movie—in fact, such extremely great things that I’m having to discount them to set my expectations lower, because if I go into a movie with too-high expectations, I generally enjoy it less than I […]

At-home COVID tests

For the past few months, I’ve been using the at-home COVID test that my workplace provided to employees. It’s called Cue Health. It’s not a PCR test, but it’s apparently roughly as accurate as PCR; like PCR, this is a NAAT (Nucleic Acid Amplification Test), which looks for and amplifies the virus’s RNA. It therefore […]

What does 95% vaccine efficacy mean?

I’ve seen several web pages that explain how to calculate vaccine efficacy, but most of them explain it in terms of a formula rather than explaining what the formula means. Here’s the simplest conceptual explanation I’ve seen: a VE of 90% indicates […] a 90% reduction from the number of cases you would expect if […]

Alex and testosterone

At some point in the early 1990s, I spoke with my college friend Alex on the phone, and was surprised that his voice had dropped in pitch by at least an octave since I had last talked with him. I think he told me something about having belatedly gone through puberty. It turned out that […]

The anniversary that I missed

(Content warning for discussion of a suicide.) A little under two weeks ago, around the start of Labor Day Weekend, I had an anxiety spike, which was made worse a couple days later by various things around the statement from the Tiptree Motherboard about the award’s name. At the time, I couldn’t figure out why […]