Skip to main content

Home/ TOK Friends/ Group items tagged valve

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Javier E

Heart-Valve Patients Should Have Earlier Surgery, Study Suggests - The New York Times - 0 views

  • For decades, people with failing heart valves who nevertheless felt all right would walk out of the cardiologist’s office with the same “wait and see” treatment plan: Come back in six or 12 months. No reason to go under the knife just yet
  • The trial, whose results were published this week in The New England Journal of Medicine, could change the way doctors treat severe aortic stenosis, a narrowing of the valve that controls blood flow from the heart.
  • Replacing people’s heart valves, even if they were not yet experiencing any ill effects, appeared to roughly halve their risk of being unexpectedly hospitalized for heart problems over at least two years, the trial found.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Patients who were put on the more conservative treatment plan overwhelmingly ended up needing surgery anyway: Roughly 70 percent of them developed symptoms and needed to have their valves replaced within two years, suggesting that the disease worsens more quickly than previously understood.
  • Cardiologists have long known that patients like those in the trial — people with failing heart valves but no symptoms — could sometimes deteriorate or even die.
  • Cardiologists were wary of replacing valves partly because, until recent decades, that would have required open-heart surgery, a risk that hardly seemed worth taking for patients who were able to go about their lives without trouble.
  • The emergence of a less invasive surgery opened the door to a different approach. In that surgery, called transcatheter aortic valve replacement, or TAVR, cardiologists insert a replacement valve through a patient’s groin and thread it all the way to the heart.
katherineharron

Domestic violence victims, stuck at home, are at risk during coronavirus pandemic - CNN - 0 views

  • Home is the safest place to be while a pandemic rages outside. Health officials have said as much for weeks now.
  • Self-isolation forces victims of domestic violence and their children into uncomfortable and dangerous circumstances: Riding out the Covid-19 crisis, shut in with their abusers.
  • And the deluge of stress and fear -- of unemployment, of sickness, of death -- is only intensifying the abuse they face.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The frequency and severity of domestic abuse will likely increase while Americans stay home for weeks or months during the pandemic, said Katie Ray-Jones, president and CEO of the National Domestic Violence Hotline, a service that connects victims of domestic violence with local resources.
  • The calls National Hotline staff have received since the start of state shutdowns are startling, Ray-Jones said: One woman said when she tried to go to work at an essential business, her abusive partner began to load his firearm to scare her into staying. Another said that her partner threatened to expose her to the virus on purpose and swore he wouldn't pay for treatment if she fell ill.
  • Domestic violence cases spike in times of prolonged stress and disruption, like financial crises and natural disasters.
  • "Many of the options that battered women and their children use as safety valves to get away from violence are no longer available," he told CNN.
  • And once the stay-at-home orders are lifted, Ray-Jones said she expects victims to flood hotlines. They may not know how many victims there are until the coronavirus pandemic is over.
Javier E

How Wittgenstein and Other Thinkers Dealt With a Decade of Crisis - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Cassirer was responding to the same crisis that animated the other three of Eilenberger’s magicians — a sense that the old ways of philosophizing had failed to keep up with the reality of lived experience.
  • Eilenberger quotes Max Scheler, another German philosopher, who put it this way: “Ours is the first period when man has become completely and totally problematical to himself, when he no longer knows what he is, but at the same time knows that he knows nothing.”
  • Language was implicated in this plight, and the responses among the figures in this book were varied and often strange
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Cassirer’s understanding of language was capacious, incorporating not only German and English but also myth, religion, technology and art. Different languages offered different ways of seeing the world. His pluralistic outlook seemed to provide him with an escape valve. As he wrote to his wife, “I can express everything I need without difficulty.”
  • Cassirer was the only one of the four to speak up publicly for the embattled Weimar Republic. He was also the only democrat.
  • In 1929, a debate between Cassirer and Heidegger amid the snowy peaks of Davos clarified the stakes: Reject your distracting anxiety, per Cassirer, and embrace the liberation offered by culture; or reject your distracting culture, per Heidegger, and embrace the liberation offered by your anxiety.
  • Eilenberger is a terrific storyteller, unearthing vivid details that show how the philosophies of these men weren’t the arid products of abstract speculation but vitally connected to their temperaments and experiences.
  • By May 1933, Heidegger would be a member of the Nazi Party, and Cassirer, an assimilated Jew, would leave Germany forever, eventually settling in the United States
  • Cassirer’s unwavering decency made him a stalwart defender of Weimar’s democratic ideals, but it had also kept him imperturbable and optimistic until it was almost too late.
  • “When we first heard of the political myths we found them so absurd and incongruous, so fantastic and ludicrous that we could hardly be prevailed upon to take them seriously,” Cassirer would later write, before his death in 1945. “By now it has become clear to all of us that this was a great mistake.”
1 - 3 of 3
Showing 20 items per page