Emily’s Reviews > The Merck Manual of Medical Information > Status Update

If my doctor ever recommends psychological counseling for my sprained ankle, I'm getting a new doctor, that's all I'm gonna say.

Sorry, but if I had an expected lifespan of 28 years and somebody said I'd spend half of those attending school and generally being bored and miserable, I'd be like "Fuck you, no." They're like "good news, people with this condition can usually attend school and go to work like normal people." And I'm just like... yeah, fuck that. If I know my life's gonna be that short, I'm not wasting my time on that shit.

Oral contraceptives seem to come up A LOT as possible causes of things that are heart and lung related. I wonder if that trend will continue throughout this book.

IDK, I think talking about my feelings with a social worker would be stressful as heck. So maybe not after a heart attack, yeah?

Careful, your politics are showing with that incredibly imprecise "several times more" for blacks and people of low socioeconomic status. Gimme a number, a medical cause (oh wait, you can't, you don't know what causes this in most cases), or something real. Don't give me vagueness. You're not the kind of book that can get away with that.

Love how we basically created a heart disease by being like "Okay, but what if we injected people with stuff or cut them open and replaced their parts with other parts?" That's just funny to me. Obviously not to the people that get it, that's very sad, but... just... we made our own problem. Fun.

Heart stopping. Now called a side effect. That's not as reassuring as you guys think it is.

Wow, critics of generic drugs sound insane. I wonder if these are actual arguments they make or the fantasy version. If these are the actual opposing arguments, they're a bunch of nutters who belong in a home.

There it is in black and white: New drugs are usually not approved until almost a decade after being discovered. Ten. Years.
And that's just approval for use in the first place. It takes even longer before the drug is in common usage, and sometimes its approval is subsequently pulled as bad reactions manifest.

Let that sink in.