As the contrarian, can you at least enlighten us to what, in your opinion, would be the best strategy to proactively address potential bottlenecks? I think we can all agree, career shaming aside, that medical professionals and engineers of all varieties actively participate in mindsets geared towards problem solving.

So in a hypothetical situation, where existing permanent healthcare infrastructure is at capacity, field hospitals are setup and existing medical professional staff need to be divided amongst the existing and newly supplemented infrastructure, what is your suggestion to save the most lives?

This exercise of sharing ideas, informing, critiquing is what this forum is for. Disagree and casting shame for a lack of first-hand professional experience is not educational and it’s not what this forum embodies.

I want to be as informed as possible so I can call BS when politicians say “nothing at all could have been done.”

I fail to see how explaining that, "Yes, you need to know medicine to practice medicine, or people will die" is considered being contrarian. Would you rather just revel in ignorance?

So here's my idea: stop treating invasive medical procedures as something that can be trivially learned in a short amount of time. In short, drop the God complex. You're out of your depth here.

The need for action doesn't mean acting foolish. Irrational behavior in the name of "just doing something" will needlessly deplete more resources.

> The need for action doesn't mean acting foolish. Irrational behavior in the name of "just doing something" will needlessly deplete more resources.

I am genuinely interested in what your suggestion would be though. This is me asking. What would you do to address in the hypothetical I proposed?

For one, if I were hypothetically responsible for addressing this crisis, I would be talking to the nurses and doctors to figure out what level of training is actually necessary to operate these ventilators. I'd also ask what else they actually need: if we get them ventilators but nothing else they're short on, we're still in trouble. In other words, I would recognize that I'm out of my league here and ask the actual professionals on the front lines of this crisis.

As I mentioned above, cross-training medical professionals in adjacent fields sounds more practical. Allowing nurses to do more of what the doctors typically do is another. Even just offloading some of the administrative paperwork for clinicians to admin staff might make a significant dent. Relaxing any bottle-neck non-essential bureaucratic requirements slowing down access to treatment or acquisition of new equipment and supplies.

Having said that, I also recognize that the ideas I just came up with in the last 30 seconds are just that: ideas off the top of my head, coming from someone with no actual experience in healthcare management.

Basically, my first priority would be to make an informed decision, and that starts with figuring out what I don't know, and filling in those gaps. Rather than uncritically insisting, quite emphatically, that medicine can be solved with a 30-day boot camp. Because, hey, if it worked for tech then it must work for medicine!

You seem like you're not making real arguments, so I'll leave the conversation at this.

They asked for evidence. I did as much, explaining a very, very basic concept in medicine, "sterile technique," and how even that can take years to get right. And was told, in response, that I'm just imagining reasons to object. Evidentally, keeping tools sterile in medicine is something I just conjured up!

Perhaps you should take your own advice, rather than responding with personal vitriol directed at the users countering your point.

Maybe it's because you always immediately change the subject from the one other people posted, so you have no right to whine when somebody does it to you.

I'm still waiting for you to reply to the questions I asked in the thread that you kept trying to change the subject away from. When I wouldn't let you do that, and kept bringing you back on topic, you ran away because you'd painted yourself into a corner with glaring contradictions in the things you said, and there was no way you could resolve the contradictions except by admitting you didn't really mean what you said.

Because you're making a point of singling out every single reply in this thread that you disagree with, and making your objection about the user posting the comment rather than the comment yourself. Or broadly asserting that the parent comment never claimed points that were plainly written, and insisting on textual support. Your actual contrarianism is rather distracting.

No.

Good answer!

No, as in you are unable to provide evidence, or no as in your are unwilling?

Poor answer. Your postings are being flagged, downvoted, and you're on your way to getting banned. Keep answering like that, and you will be gone. And it will be easy for us to recognize you next time you make another troll account, so don't try it again.

Once again, your description of the conversation is quite inconsistent with the words written on the page, but I think there's not much hope in making any progress.

I'll share a piece of advice that a good friend of mine told me a few years ago: The mind is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master.

I didn't really understand what he was talking about at the time, I thought it was just another one of those silly platitudes that people who've smoked a bit too much drugs say. But after pondering it over the years, it has become one of my very favorite sayings.

No.

Good answer!