A lesson learned from hard experience and unfortunately too late: get your own illness benefit insurance. If you have it through your employer you can't sue the insurance company since you're not a party to the contract. They don't even need to talk to you, only your employer.
I was preparing to possibly have to do this, but it looks like I've narrowly avoided it. My family has a procedure scheduled Dec 4, and my work insurance is changing plans Dec 1. Got pre-approved with previous plan, previous insurance company is exiting health insurance totally. New plan needs 15 business days to approve it, and can't start that until we get group numbers, and there's a holiday in here.
But, the doctor has been able to get us in due to a cancellation, before the insurance expires.
On a related note, in college ca. 1999, when I took a history and philosophy of science course on nuclear weapons, the instructor, a retired Los Alamos physicist, assigned an excerpt from The Sum of All Fears as required reading.
He claimed it was — critical, probably deliberate technical inaccuracies notwithstanding — the best description of the process of detonating a nuclear weapon he was able to find in the open literature.
Amazing class, which also included a field trip to Oak Ridge, TN, where we got a fascinating behind-the-scenes tour of the K-25 gaseous diffusion facility[1] while it was in the process of being decommissioned, and a far less interesting "tour" of the basically nonexistent public areas of the Y-12 weapons plant[2], where the only interesting things on display were the extensive security precautions.
The book is well worth a read too. There are some great bits with John Von Neumann.
On a similar note, Adventures of a Physicist by Luis Alvarez is also a great read. Among many other things, he and his son proposed the theory that the dinosaurs' extinction was caused by a meteor.
The 5.0 client includes an icon that has this information; after starting a meeting, this currently says "You are connected to the Zoom global network via a datacenter in the United States."
I'm interested in your opinion of the citations too. They purport to show persistence beyond standard treatment in mice, dogs, macaques and humans, the latter via xenodiagnosis and PCR. PCR is pretty direct.
I got one shipped to Ireland and it arrived in one beautiful piece. Cliff also sent on a email documenting the process and I replied with an unboxing photo. It was worth ordering just for the lovely interaction.
30000 Lyme cases a year are reported by health services to the CDC so eventually some celebs are going to catch it, and since they make good news you'll hear about it.
On "chronic Lyme", it's been rebranded as post treatment Lyme disorder (PTLDS), it's acknowledged by the CDC [0] and they also acknowledge that some experts hypothesize it may be the result of persistent infection, others an autoimmune disorder. One John Hopkins study [1] found the typical symptoms of PTLDS do persist for some after treatment for Lyme and another[2] found a set of symptoms allowing them to reliabily identify PTLDS.
Any disease that lasts a long time and doesn't have a set treatment is going to attract quackery and plenty people will fall for it, but that doesn't mean there's no disorder there. The fact the symptoms can come and go makes it that much easier to associate their most recent treatment with a cure.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/postlds/index.html
[1] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/news-releases/...
[2] Mentioned here https://www.hopkinslyme.org/lyme-disease/treatment-and-progn...
PTLDS is not entirely a rebrand of "chronic Lyme". It's specific to "people who had Lyme and still have issues". "Chronic Lyme" frequently involves people with no verifiable (or even likely) Lyme exposure.
> In some patients, symptoms, such as fatigue, pain and joint and muscle aches, persist even after treatment, a condition termed “Post Treatment Lyme Disease Syndrome (PTLDS)”.
> The term “chronic Lyme disease” (CLD) has been used to describe people with different illnesses. While the term is sometimes used to describe illness in patients with Lyme disease, it has also been used to describe symptoms in people who have no clinical or diagnostic evidence of a current or past infection with B. burgdorferi . Because of the confusion in how the term CLD is employed, and the lack of a clearly defined clinical definition, many experts in this field do not support its use.
