I rented a small boat in Greece and the guy in the harbor showed me a map of the islands I could go to and there was a red line marking how far you were allowed to go. The guy put his hand on my shoulder and very seriously explained that the red like was not visible on the surface of the sea it was just for reference on the map. And told me about this British couple who got on the boat and drove straight on until the fuel ran out. They were lucky they still had phone signal and they called for the guy to come get them. When asked why they did that they said they couldn’t see the red line so they thought it was ok…
It’s incredible that humanity has done this well
I think about that guy very often lately…
Consider the mere fact that Doctors exist, and have been a thing for thousands of years. I think this tells us that for every person that is incapable of keeping themselves alive, there’s at least a hundred more just like that, and just one person smart enough to keep them all going.
I mean, there was a good chunk of that time where the doctors thought that bleeding someone to balance their humors was a valid treatment for a variety of things. Some things were treated with amputation with only alcohol as an anesthetic (and disinfectant, if they happened to splash some on the wound).
The Darwin award ladies and gentlemen
Sadly I don’t think they are eligible. That award is for when you remove yourself from the gene pool or you remove the ability to contribute to the gene pool.
They did give it a good try I give them that!
Seeing this post made me physically cringe. I am “The Public.”
In my late 20s, my ear started hurting. I was utterly convinced it was just a stubborn clump of earwax. I went to the pharmacy and bought one of those bulb syringes for rinsing ears. The pharmacist calmly and explicitly instructed me: “Make sure you only use lukewarm water.” I went home, washed my ear canal, and nothing happened. I figured I’d just give it a few days to loosen up.
Over the next couple of days, the pain escalated to an excruciating level. I’m talking find-chair, put-my-head-in-my-lap kinda pain. And as my son had just been born, I was operating on a good mix of extreme pain and severe sleep deprivation.
Eventually, i came to the conclusion that hotter water = more wax melting, and if lukewarm water didn’t work, maybe it just needs more heat. The hotter the water, the better chance it has of melting the wax, right? So, I boiled some water. And with zero hesitation, I injected boiling hot water directly into my ear canal.
It was not earwax.
I ended up at the doctor, where I learned that the initial agony was actually a severe case of otitis media (a middle ear infection). And thanks to my brilliant home remedy, I had managed to add a scorched ear canal and a secondary outer ear infection right on top of it.
So yeah. When that optometrist said, “Look at me. I want you to understand that I mean water that has been boiled and has since cooled down,” he was talking to me. I am the guy.
Sleep deprivation will make you do some crazy things
Not my proudest moment…
Those bulb syringes can be a nightmare too, read that the cause of someone’s problem was mold growing the bulb and getting sent straight into the ear.
Gross and terrifying. If you can’t see what’s inside, don’t trust it’s clean.
On the bright side, your boiling water probably did a good job of disinfecting it.
I’ve got one of those bulbs but it comes apart so you can see and clean the inside. It’s also transparent so you can see inside it even if you decide to be lazy.
my ear started hurting. I was utterly convinced it was just a stubborn clump of earwax.
I am lucky enough to be one of those people who simply never builds up any serious amounts of ear wax. It’s oily and not crumbly, so a gentle swish of a Q-tip after a shower and it all comes out. my doc checks my ears twice a year and has never had cause to complain.
But IIRC ear wax is soft enough to never be particularly painful unless you pack it down with something like a Q-tip. Like, so long as you know you have one of those ear wax types for whom Q-tips in any usage capacity is a bad idea (it’s usually the crumbly ear wax), the most it will do is accumulate until your hearing is affected.
Now granted, it’ll plug up the ear canal until you have trouble hearing things. But all you need then is some professional irrigation by a doctor a few times a year, and as long as you aren’t in a third-world country like America, that should be 100% free.
Ear wax has never been an issue for me either, I had a friend who had just had their ear canal rinsed by a doctor. And their explanation kinda fit the bill…
So with a new born, new house that I was renovating, and stubbornness that I can handle everything myself, I managed to convince myself that this was the root cause
I suffer from impaction occasionally and used to irrigate with 2% hydrogen peroxide. The H2O2 reacts with the wax and helps break it up. It is one of the strangest sensations though, bubbles forming and popping en masse inside of your ear canal. Eventually I bought an ear cleaning otoscope and scoop out the wax manually every few months.
Story time.
My wife is an optometrist.
One day a patient called the office because he had foreign body in his eye. No big deal. They had equipment for removing a foreign body from the eye safely. The patient asked how much the exam was. They told him (I think it was around $70) and he said he’d think about it.
He called up a little while later and said he got it out. He asked if he still needed to come in, and they explained that he still should have his eye checked to make sure it wasn’t injured.
When he got there, my wife asked him how he got it out.
He said he used the edge of a razor blade to pick it out of his eye. He said he does it all the time.
If the thought of putting the edge of a razor blade against your eye is not horrifying enough, remember that when you’re working on your own eye, you don’t have depth perception.
remember that when you’re working on your own eye, you don’t have depth perception.
Every year or five I’ll get a “sclera blister” that feels like a honking grain of sand in my eye. Sure, I’ve thought about taking a pair of tweezers to tear the dome of that blister off, but I have always been squicked like crazy because I can’t properly judge distances that close to the cornea. Corner of my eye or on the rim of the eye lid itself is difficult enough, but anywhere directly on the sclera that’s close to the cornea is definitely no-go land for me.
I am a dentist and any oddly specific instructions I give are usually because some turd has tried it before:
“Prepare your nightguard by running it under warm water. This means a few seconds under the warm water from your tap - do not boil your nightguard in a pot for half an hour, it will be destroyed”
“Do not place a tiny crab fork in your extraction site to remove food debris”
“If you require an adjustment, please return. Your garage power tools are not safe to use on your teeth”
My dentist asked me how I floss and asked me to do it gently and not yank it with force. I was very confused at the moment, but now it makes sense that someone did that.
“Do not place a tiny crab fork in your extraction site to remove food debris”
I JUST PUT THE BRAIN BLEACH BACK INTO LONG-TERM STORAGE, FFS.
That last one, dear god…
see, the problem with that last statement is that it’s too broad. I can think of a few tools that are definitely safe to use on my teeth, therefore what else are you wrong about?
Well, a dremel can seem like a good idea to many people. However, they have a nasty habit of skipping and chattering off hard enamel. If it rebounds into the soft tissue of the cheek, it doesn’t simply make a cut - it rolls itself into the cheek tissue like it’s twisted up in a sheet and gets stuck.
Now I’m intrigued! What power tools do you have that could be deemed safe?
any low speed (<2000rpm) handheld rotary tool with a buffing wheel ain’t gonna do much. i.e. drills
a palm sander with a soft attachment is basically just an electric toothbrush
compressed air isn’t going to hurt your teeth. and leaf blower low pressure air certainly isn’t. like the other guy said. same for vacuums.
that’s really about it. I was exaggerating a bit for comedic effect when I said “a few”, because tbh I didn’t think much about it.
oh and of course you can always stick your head in a lathe, lathes are like the super safest tool there is
Must be in the US
I used to work in a college computer lab. One night, a girl waved me over and said “the foot pedal isn’t working.” I said “foot pedal?”
Sure enough, she had the mouse on the floor, and was trying to work it with her bare foot.
To be fair, and balanced, and Cody, there are actual foot pedals for computers.
They are mostly used for driving games, but they are pretty useful for other stuff, like push to talk, or additional ctrl alt and shift.
EMN reference in the wild! Don’t forget to tune in to the livestream tonight at 6 PDT!
A man of knowledge, I see.
I figure in the last four billion years or so all water has been previously boiled…
Atoms cannot be easily created or destroyed.
However molecules can and often are easily assembled.
Water is one of those molecules which are easy to create, and easy to break back apart into its constituent atoms. So yes, there is likely plenty of water that has never been boiled because it was created so recently (cosmologically speaking).
There’s a reason that there is a warning on the Preparation H tube that says “Do not take orally”
They’ll have to give you Preparation A through G.
Makes you wonder what happened to them. Like what happened to WD01 through WD39…
That is actually how those ones were named. WD stands for water displacer (or displacement), which is what WD40 does, not a lube but an oil that replaces any water where you spray (which can then act as a lube but it’s not designed to remain there long term). WD40 was the 40th attempt at developing a water displacer and it worked, so they stopped there.
Well TIL…. cool!
The inventor didn’t think they were useful.
Somewhere at Heinz there’s a filing cabinet with recipes for sauces 1-56 in it, and none of them taste very good.
Heinz 42 opened a small wormhole into another universe.
Maybe I’ve been too far up the other long tail of the intelligence bell curve for far too long, but doesn’t “boiled” - the past participle of “to boil” indicate that this should be water in a post-boiled state? As in, water that is no longer even warm, much less hot?
I am struggling to understand how anyone can think that pouring boiling or even still-hot water into their eyes is anything within even ICBM range of “a good idea”.
Have you seen what people do while driving? Do you think they are paying more or less attention to some doctor talking at them than they are operating a large deadly machine?
“my doctor told me to put boiling water in my eye! if im not gonna listen to him why am I paying him?”
I’ve come to realize that most of us are just smart enough to fuck things up.
But boiling water that cooled down to 80°C is also boiled water and has since cooled down, still hurts. So yeah be a bit more specific doc.
I’ve cooled it down to ice, feels refreshing on my eyes, but I don’t think it’s doing much besides it
How about a science experiment. Boil some water and then rinse an eye with it each 10 C as it cools down and compare the short-term, medium-term, and long-term results. You’ll need lots of eyes so recruit your family and friends!
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