becausechemistry

“Yeah, his brains aren’t scrambled eggs today. Over easy, maybe. Good enough to go get another concussion in two weeks probably. Then he can eat through a tube and then maybe kill someone or himself.”

• doctors, apparently

I’ve heard Rodgers referred to as “Throw Rogan,” so I think I’m just gonna call him that from now on. Not so much a new wave hippie. Just an “I’m just asking the questions” guy who presents himself as a radical thinker but just ends up supporting the status quo of conservatism.

I hope he doesn’t rely on modern medicine to help him heal or anything. I hear doctors believe in vaccines and other gub’ment fairy tales.

I think it would be just as viable as Monk up in the front lines. As a lvl 4 monk, you’ve probably got 18 Dex and 14ish Wis. That’s AC 16. Dance Bard will have 14ish Dex and 18 Cha, so also AC 16. Same d8 hit die as Monk, too.

That “I intercepted it, better lateral it” thing goes badly more often than not

I’m a Colts fan who was supremely bummed out when Luck retired. And really, we haven’t been very good since. It sucks.

But he’s a good guy, and he was getting absolutely obliterated out there. I don’t begrudge his decision for a second. I’m glad he’s going to be able to live the rest of his life with intact ribs and ankles and stuff.

I think Tua should do the same. It’s one thing to have your bones hurt forever. It’s another to have your brain turned to scrambled eggs and either eat from a straw for the rest of your life or end up going all Hernandez and killing someone and then yourself. It’s not worth it.

The industry standard is HPLC (high performance liquid chromatography). Those things go for tens of thousands of dollars up front, plus maintenance and consumables.

If there was a less costly way of doing it, you bet companies would have settled on that by now.

make the best decisions they can

I would recommend an HPLC and a competent analytical chemist to gather data and decide whether or not a batch is safe to consume.

This has been posted to a bunch of different communities, and I’m gonna be a stick in the mud each time.

I’m a process chemist. I do this for a living. I’ve made kilo-scale batches of pharmaceuticals at work that have gone through the regulatory process and made it into people. I went to school for ten years to do this.

This is a colossally dangerous thing.

Every time you run a chemical synthesis, you generate impurities. Slightly different temperatures, concentrations, reagent quality, and a million other things will vary the identities and concentrations of those impurities in your product.

The nature of biochemistry is that most compounds, even at very small concentrations, can have effects. Usually bad ones. So drugs have tight specs on how much of each potential impurity can be present. Usually it’s in the 0.1% range, but sometimes a lot lower.

Detection of impurities at that level cannot be done with ‘hacker’ gear in your garage. So if you do this, you’re going to be taking unknown quantities of unknown impurities.

There are trade-offs. If you’re definitely gonna die without the medicine, then the worst that can happen is you die faster, or more painfully. If it’s medicine to maintain quality of life, then you might die fast and painfully.

I’m not saying the current system is good at all. Medicine is too expensive. It shouldn’t be limited by right wing nutjobs. Those things are true. Those things require a solution.

This is not a good solution.

No. Never. It takes whole teams of people to get it right. (Even then, they sometimes get it wrong.)

That’s a false dichotomy if I’ve ever heard one, dude.

No, just follow the money. It’s all going into marketing. Ban marketing (like the rest of the world!) and prices drop overnight.