Great! I am also about to donate my other kidney. The difference in the long term outcome of the patient between living and dead donation is significant enough for me to go through this. My total kidney function will drop to 50% and I will be sick for 2-3 weeks but if everything goes well I will be up to 70% after few months if the remaining kidney accomodates and back to work in about 4 weeks. Of course there are some other long term risks to consider. However, I probably would not agree on this if there was an abundant supply of working pig kidneys…
It is easier to agree to donate your lungs because ethically they're only going to take your lungs if you die. So then you don't care anyway. If you agree to donate a kidney they may ask when you're alive, because you have two kidneys and you can survive (though with some reduction in capability) with just one. This is called Living Kidney Donation, you don't have to offer to do this, and even if you offer, and it's a match you don't have to go through with the donation but obviously there are huge psychological impacts from deciding to perhaps save somebody's life as a conscious choice at a non-negligible risk to your own.
Note that you're not "saving somebody's life" by donating a kidney. What you are doing, at best, is increasing their quality of life and even that is hard to quantify:
Having a kidney transplant does not “cure” kidney disease. There are also risks, including the risks of surgery. After the transplant, you will need to take anti-rejection medicines, also called immunosuppressants, for as long as your new kidney is working, which can have side effects. You will have a higher risk for infections and certain types of cancer.
Although most transplants are successful and last for many years, how long they last can vary from one person to the next. Depending on your age, many people will need more than one kidney transplant during a lifetime.
The majority of kidney patients with end-stage kidney disease do not simply die: they can survive several years on dialysis. As far as I can tell, most indeed do: only a minority of kidney patients ever get transplants.
Source: relative with kidney disease who would not accept a living donour kidney because of ethical concerns.
A friend had kidney failure and now has one of her husband's kidneys. It's really striking how much the immunosuppression sucks (a lot!) versus how much dialysis sucked (far more) for the period between her diagnosis and them being able to perform a transplant.
The US has a problem where there are a bunch of outfits whose income is derived specifically from dialysis, so for them transplants are bad business. Sure, the patient will (statistically) have a longer life and enjoy higher quality of life, but their income will be reduced so...
This results in a rather... muted endorsement of qualitatively better outcomes and where there's obviously also going to be an ethical component I'd say that's undesirable.
We all die. People with kidney disease die significantly sooner statistically if they do not receive a transplant, so this is the sense in which I mean saving a life.
But that's not "saving someone's life". Try it like this:
"I decided to donate one of my kidneys to make someone's life a little bit easier for a little while".
And note that while dialysis is big business and I have no doubt that the people who are in it care far more about their profits than their patients, so are transplants. In fact transplants cost a lot more and make people a lot more money than dialysis and the only reason they're not as big business as dialysis is that there's just not enough donours, which makes a big honking red financial incentive to keep pushing for everyone to become a donour.
Meanwhile, like the National Kidney Foundation says, in my quote above, 'Having a kidney transplant does not “cure” kidney disease' and neither does dialysis. And because both treatments keep patients alive for longer than the typical five-year horizon of medical follow-up studies, they, both together, reduce the incentive to work on real "cures" of kidney disease (which, like cancer, is not one condition but many) which would make the sucking of dialysis and transplant both things of the past.
And I know this last one because I personally asked my relative's nephrologist and transplant surgeon about it and they were vague and hand-wavy, like "oh, sure, there's people working on that sort of thing somewhere".
But nobody's really trying because we can make millions keeping people tied up to machines or on immunosuppression until they give up the spirit and so who cares?
"Oh I didn't actually save the little old ladies when their nursing home burned down. I just made their life a bit easier for a little while, they still all died because they were human"
Nobody talks like this. It is understood that humans are mortal.
Yes, necessarily kidney disease cure research gets you fewer QALYs than figuring out a way to cure something we have no treatment for. But given we haven't eradicated polio it's not as though humans are very good at this whole cost-benefit analysis when it comes to medicine.
"Oh I didn't actually save the little old ladies when their nursing home burned down. I just made their life a bit easier for a little while, they still all died because they were human"
Is not analogous to this:
"I decided to donate one of my kidneys to make someone's life a little bit easier for a little while".
Are you implying that this makes the host sick or dead or that this somehow leads to pathogens jumping to humans that otherwise wouldn’t have? This is a last resort so I’m not sure how it matters in the former case, and the latter seems like a stretch to me as a lay person.
If you’re struggling with exercise and with getting it into a routine, I can’t recommend standalone, wireless VR enough. It was fun and engaging enough to keep me coming back without feeling that I was doing a boring chore, and nearly every game has you moving, with the exception of the flying and driving sims.
Imagine fighting ninjas and dodging bullets as your workout. You can literally get that and more with VR.
Can you recommend any specific games that meet these requirements? I don't have VR, but I remember playing "Super hot VR" and getting a surprisingly good workout from that game.
If I can promote one myself, Synth Riders can be a hell of a workout. People like comparing it to beat saber. Unlike beat saber, there's no swords, so there's a lot less wrist movement and a lot more arm/full-body movement. It feels a lot like dancing while you're doing it. I'm no great fan of exercise, but if I'm not careful I can exercise myself deep past exhaustion in this one -- especially on the harder difficulty charts.
And beyond that there's a mode where you punch the notes instead of trying to catch them. I haven't tried it, but that sounds even more demanding.
But aside from anything else, it's just fun! Great option for training cardio, it really works out the arms.
Whoa! You’re one of the people behind Synth Riders?!! That’s a great game with great music. I like the immersive add-ons and the fact that it looks like you’re actually dancing to onlookers instead of moving weird like in Beat Saber.
My only criticism is that I’m not a fan of the Swing EDM music.
Holotfit (paid subscription) works with rowing machines
Racket Club
Until you fall
Blade and Sorcery
Dragon Fist Kung fu (if you want to go all the way with Pc and don’t mind wires, this one supports foot tracking)
Blast on!
Stride
Battle talent
Space pirate trainer
Racket NX
Gorilla tag
Stride
Blacktop Hoops
Masters of Light
Mothergunship forge
There’s so many other games that I missed listing.
Really any action VR game where you’re the first person hero will get you moving enough as a habit. You are now the character instead of a puppet master controlling one via buttons. Need to duck or crouch? You will feel it and sweat sooner or later.
If walking had enough intensity to count as actual exercise, no one would have a problem with working out. The only time it works as exercise is if you don’t use a car to commute and you walk everywhere.
This just hammers the opinion that the GDPR was mainly just an EU economic protectionist policy and not actually about protecting privacy of citizens as promised.
GDPR passed, Chat Control didn't (already rejected about 4-5 times but the evil people keep proposing it because re-proposing the same failed law has no cost).
The chat control laws in the UK and USA also passed.
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