8 Comments

Love telehealth!

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If a clinician remains 100% telehealth (or additionally uses serious air cleaning and mask use in-office), that is a signal they aren't in c0v*d denial - and there's a better chance they won't be dismissive or gaslight-y.

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Mental health access is pretty bad these days, restricting telehealth is not going to help the situation.

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Another question for Vivek Murthy : What is the government doing to accelerate research into solutions for the problem of decreasing sleep quality - particularly with aging? Getting too little high quality sleep is an almost (?) universal fact of life for seniors. This degrades both mental and physical health as well as life satisfaction, optimism and happiness.

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RSV vaccine for pregnant women... Would your recommendation based on the info presented, that these women should receive Pfizer vaccine post 32 wk's or either GSK/Pfizer post 32 wk's.

Warm regards, John

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Once a year I spend all day driving to a Harvard hospital to see a specialist for 10 minutes. I want to maintain a relationship with him, but the carbon footprint alone makes telehealth far superior.

But the Brigham is resistant to telehealth services along with masks in immune compromised clinics.

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Thanks for this! A few comments, if I may, on your bar chart.

Having a "broken" bar to indicate a really large number is about as bad as not starting the y-axis at 0. There is no way to visually compare the "15" with the "1" and "2" values.

And in this case, that datum is not even relevant to your main point, that second-hand vaping results in 1/6 the exposure of second-hand smoke. In fact, I think the way you've presented it here, the "direct use" bar _distracts_ the reader from your intended takeaway.

Your data visualizations maintain a high standard of excellence, and I hope you don't mind my suggestions when I think you could have done even better.

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I see your point. I will say that I disagree on broken Y axes being in the same ballpark as not having zero. By definition, the broken axis is meant to call attention to the sleight of hand that otherwise would be in place with the X intercept being anything but zero. The major journals allow broken Y axes, but they don't allow nonzero Y axis (unless it's a relative risk in which case, 1.0 can replace it). I think if it's sufficiently highlighted, it has negated what you're worried about (i.e., fooling the eye). But I agree, I could have omitted the direct use bar, as they did in the original article. I just found it amazing how little secondhand exposure makes it over to the kid compared to direct exposure (a point I didn't accentuate in the piece, but is worth pondering. I'm sure that over time the risks are real, but it's nothing like using directly)

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