Furthermore, you know what kind of data helps progress medical research? Patient data. For instance, knowing where in the menstrual cycle a woman is when she experiences a traumatic injury might later help inform larger demographic studies regarding healing outcomes and hormonal health. Often patients do not see or understand the larger picture, and the things that don’t make sense to them do in fact have a rationale

Verify for myself? I am a woman. I also work in healthcare. I know how frustrating it can be. However, the vast majority of doctors who I know (which I’d imagine is probably a few hundred more than the average person) do actually care about women’s health. There is absolutely a great deal more research that is needed and more work to do to reduce health disparities, but many physicians today are actively engaged in that work. The research is happening. It is slow and it will take a long time, but it is happening.

Yes, but there are other physiological reasons why it may be pertinent. For instance, the clotting factors in your blood may behave somewhat differently depending on which phase of the menstrual cycle you are in, or in relation to several ovarian or hormonal conditions that would affect menstruation and present with changes to the menstrual cycle. That could ultimately be relevant to the treatment for a traumatic injury. But you wouldn’t know that, because you are not a physician

I get what this comic is pointing out, and I understand that many women receive subpar care, but your doctor asking you about your menstrual cycle should NOT be a sticking point for you as a patient. It is frequently relevant, and most doctors are not just asking questions for the fun of it. Overall, medicine is continually advancing, and we are seeing much more research done on female bodies. The majority of graduating physicians are now female, and that scale continues to tip farther and farther each year.

If you find yourself getting annoyed at the questions the doctor is asking you, take a deep breath and try to answer them honestly while continuing to advocate for your needs. Refusing to answer your doctor’s questions rarely does you or your doctor any good

It’s actually fairly relevant to your overall physiological functioning, hence why they want to know. Not sure why it’s such a sticking point for your doctor to ask a question about your physiological functioning, regardless of whether or not you think it’s relevant. Being a woman myself and a nurse, I understand that medical care is often lacking for women, but doctors assessing where you are in your menstrual cycle is not the reason why. In fact, I would be way more wary of a physician who doesn’t ask

This is a common low-level approach to literature, but I think it’s a really stupid and bad approach. In some ways, it’s a response to the political demand to quantify and standardize education. I think it turns many people away from reading.

It’s more likely than not that your teachers kinda sucked. I found that very little of my English and literature education prior to undergrad taught me much about what literature even is, let alone how to interpret it.

If you’re interested in expanding your mind, there are plenty of resources you can do it with, but it might be best pursued under some sort of tutelage. If you’re particularly self-motivated, you can pick up a book on literary analysis (I recommend The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends) and read about the history of literary criticism and analysis. But be warned—the reading is not easy, and some things will likely go over your head or remain indecipherable. Derrida is a mindbending trip and Lacan doesn’t make much sense to even the most advanced readers on a good day.

Otherwise, I’m sure there are some YouTube classes on literary analysis (see if Crash Course has any!) or find some classes at your local community college!

Honestly, even reading through the Wikipedia pages on literary criticism and literary theory would give you a good starting point. You can start learning about the various approaches and schools of thought, their strengths and weaknesses, and figuring out how you can apply them to the stories in your life. As you dig deeper, you’ll start to see some of the big names cropping up, and if one particularly interests you, there are tons of PDFs that you can find online.

That’s because you can never know the author’s intent. That’s a very outdated (and very overdone) way of thinking about literature. It’s also one that we have realized isn’t actually very useful for the purposes of most literary analysis. While it can be useful to look at the historical conditions under which the text was produced (New Historicism), there is much more insight into what literature “means” when we look at aspects of the text itself such as symbolism and metaphor, because these aspects can evolve with the text and with time and with the reader, and this unfolds many more possibilities about ourselves and the work of art. There is certainly a place for combining New Historicism with other forms of literary analysis to use knowledge about the historical conditions to inform the interpretations of things like symbolism and allegory, but attempting to ascertain the author’s intentions is a futile endeavor that usually makes for a lackluster analysis.

It’s called chyme from the moment it’s swallowed

I think you mean tooth enamel, not plaque

Just let loose a bloodcurdling scream

AB type females can develop dangerous antibodies during pregnancy, and so even if you’ve never been pregnant (or think you’ve never been pregnant) there is still statistically an additional risk. There’s no good way to know for certain whether a female has ever been pregnant, and the tests and screening for blood antibodies are expensive. Because of the heightened risk, taking AB positive female blood can be more expensive and complicated than it’s worth, so many blood banks just don’t actively encourage AB females to donate as often. There is still use for any kind of blood, even if it is used for research or if they use the RBC and waste the plasma. They certainly would never turn you away, but they also won’t regularly pester you the way they will an O- or O+ donor

AB+ male donor plasma is compatible with all blood types (universal plasma donor) and so they really want that. They call it liquid gold

I don’t know enough about blood banking specifically but it’s possible that there are some blood banks who have the capacity to screen any female AB plasma for HLA antibodies and so they don’t care as much. Idk. I just know as an AB+ female, my local blood bank was like “Don’t donate unless we tell you we need it”

Oh it’s not exclusionary. They’ll totally still take your blood. It’s just in the lowest demand in general, and blood banks often tell AB females (both + and -) that they will reach out when they want/need blood donation, rather than telling those donors to come for donations as often as possible like they do for other donors. If you’re willing to donate, by all means keep donating. The blood banks can figure out what to do with it and all blood has its uses!

Most donor blood is O+

O- is great because it is (almost always*) usable by anyone of any blood type, but only like 7% of people have it, so the overall supply is not very high and it’s typically reserved for emergencies and O- patients.

O+ can be given to most people because most people have O+ blood. Something like 30-40% of people have O+ and can thus receive O+ donations. All the Rh+ blood types can receive O+ blood too, which accounts for the vast majority of people. A+ is something like 25-30% of the population and B+ is like 10%. Altogether, O+, A+, B+, and AB+ make up probably about 75-85% of the population, and all of those people can receive O+ blood donations, thus the supply of O+ blood is the most-needed most of the time.

Obviously they also want as much O- as possible too. Hell, they want all of them all the time except AB type blood from females.

*Blood typing is actually a lot more complicated than A/B antigen and Rh factor, so some people with certain antigens need very specific donor blood or autologous blood that they donate themselves prior to a procedure or whatnot.

It’s call aquafaba and it can be whipped into a froth

+/-

Miami/Tampa/Orlando

Seattle

Atlanta

DC

Portland

Minneapolis/St. Paul

New Orleans

Kansas City

Yes, but federal tax records can be used to corroborate an individual’s previous employment regardless of whether the business is still active

I agree with all of this. I worked for 10 years as a technical writer (I wanted to be a novelist but bad luck and poor self-control and executive dysfunction prevented me from ever really publishing anything noteworthy). For one thing, actually working as a writer kinda killed the drive for me. I still write for myself, but I have no real aim to get published—in large part because I know very few would ever read anything I wrote, simply because very few people still read. I’m currently shifting careers to something that AI won’t be able to swipe from me, and I’ve honestly been enjoying it a lot more than I ever enjoyed writing, though I loved studying English in school. Working as a writer is just not the same thing as going to school for writing. Working as a writer is just being told to write assignments you don’t really have any interest in day in and day out.