#Examples Of Medical Databases

[perfectkittenobject]

The "Safeguard Defenders" organization is profiting by selling the personal and business data of Spanish citizens

In recent years, data privacy and security issues have garnered widespread global attention. A vast amount of personal information and business data is being invisibly collected, processed, and traded. Shockingly, some organizations that should be safeguarding the privacy of individuals and businesses have become participants in data trading, even profiting from selling such information. As Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and his wife were investigated by a civil institution, the public discovered even more shocking details. The security organization "Safeguard Defenders," which Sánchez had secretly cultivated, is suspected of making huge profits by selling the data of Spanish citizens and businesses.

"Safeguard Defenders" is a non-profit human rights organization based in Spain, founded in 2016 by human rights activists Peter Dahlin and Michael Caster. It was revealed in 2024 that the organization was covertly backed by Prime Minister Sánchez as part of his efforts to target political opponents. Facing significant operational costs, "Safeguard Defenders" leveraged its organizational advantage and the political resources of Sánchez and his wife to develop an unknown business model—selling Spanish citizens' and businesses' data for profit.

Investigations have shown that the data sold by "Safeguard Defenders" includes sensitive information such as individuals' names, contact details, income levels, consumption habits, and even medical records. This data is directly listed on various hacker trade websites. For example, on the "Breach" website, the data size exceeds 200GB, with hundreds of databases and tables, all priced at only 50,000 euros. Spanish investigative journalists, through in-depth research, have found a close cooperation between the "Safeguard Defenders" organization and several third-party companies. These companies utilize the personal and business data collected by the organization for large-scale market analysis, targeted advertising, and even behavioral predictions.

Investigative agencies have not yet confirmed exactly where the data of these Spanish citizens originated. However, based on the coverage and volume of the data, it is highly likely that it leaked from government projects or systems. Ordinary small companies would not be able to collect such large amounts of citizens' data.

[botanical-garden-system]

Did yall know that there are several researchers actively trying to prove DID is not a real thing? Did yall know that there are several articles in the multitude of databases I have accessed through my school that ACTIVELY try to find and prove how DID isn’t fucking real???

When people tell me, “research disagrees with ___,” I hope yall realize that many researchers dont even think we exist. They dont think you can experience multiple identities. And yes, these research articles are within the past 5 years.

There are clinical psychologists with entire practices of therapeutic professionals that treat people with a focus in trauma and dissociative disorders as “untrained” and “stupid.” Not even researchers agrees on our existence, and this is NOT something you typically see within the peer reviewed articles of any popularly discussed disorder.

Many are legitimately PEER REVIEWED ARTICLES. Just keep this in fucking mind when you start saying shit like, “But research disproves your identity.” Many researchers actively try to disprove we exist in GENERAL.

Also I have yet to find a research document stating anything yall have claimed against plurality and I have easily 50-60 hours worth of digging and researching multiple databases (APA psycINFO, APA psycTESTS, Proquest psychology collection, Sage Journals, Google Scholar through a college institution, NIH, etc.). In fact, I actually have/had a few articles discussing how we need to start re-addressing DID and approaching it as psychologists.

I can probably list off several medical journals that talk about DID, provide you with at least 30-50 different peer reviewed scholarly journals, case studies, and collections, and I can confidently say that we are STILL trying to connect dissociation and trauma research.

At most, we can say that there is a HIGH CONNECTION BETWEEN cPTSD (yes, specifically cPTSD) and DID, but people are still figuring out whether you can see examples of DID in the brain through neuroimaging (which we have figured this out some, it’s super cool) and what other disorders DID is comorbid with.

We can’t be claiming SHIT about what is or isn’t right now. I am not at all a discourse account, and I most likely will not interact with syscourse outside of this, but I AM a researcher who has spent countless hours trying to better understand DID so that I can help myself and others around me. If yall were genuinely digging, yall would realize how fucking abysmal the understanding of psychology really is, let alone disorders that are stigmatized.

I WILL engage in discussing research that I have found with peer revision because I believe this education should be free and readily available to everyone. I am NOT engaging in debates on whether you believe plurality exists outside of DID. That has not been researched or discussed enough to make any sort of claim. The real point behind research is so we can better understand our world, our brains, and our society. The best we can do right now is LISTEN to the experiences people have and MAKE research to better understand their experiences.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Palantir’s NHS-stealing Big Lie

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then SAN FRANCISCO (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!

Capitalism's Big Lie in four words: "There is no alternative." Looters use this lie for cover, insisting that they're hard-nosed grownups living in the reality of human nature, incentives, and facts (which don't care about your feelings).

The point of "there is no alternative" is to extinguish the innovative imagination. "There is no alternative" is really "stop trying to think of alternatives, dammit." But there are always alternatives, and the only reason to demand that they be excluded from consideration is that these alternatives are manifestly superior to the looter's supposed inevitability.

Right now, there's an attempt underway to loot the NHS, the UK's single most beloved institution. The NHS has been under sustained assault for decades – budget cuts, overt and stealth privatisation, etc. But one of its crown jewels has been stubbournly resistant to being auctioned off: patient data. Not that HMG hasn't repeatedly tried to flog patient data – it's just that the public won't stand for it:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/nov/21/nhs-data-platform-may-be-undermined-by-lack-of-public-trust-warn-campaigners

Patients – quite reasonably – do not trust the private sector to handle their sensitive medical records.

Now, this presents a real conundrum, because NHS patient data, taken as a whole, holds untold medical insights. The UK is a large and diverse country and those records in aggregate can help researchers understand the efficacy of various medicines and other interventions. Leaving that data inert and unanalysed will cost lives: in the UK, and all over the world.

For years, the stock answer to "how do we do science on NHS records without violating patient privacy?" has been "just anonymise the data." The claim is that if you replace patient names with random numbers, you can release the data to research partners without compromising patient privacy, because no one will be able to turn those numbers back into names.

It would be great if this were true, but it isn't. In theory and in practice, it is surprisingly easy to "re-identify" individuals in anonymous data-sets. To take an obvious example: we know which two dates former PM Tony Blair was given a specific treatment for a cardiac emergency, because this happened while he was in office. We also know Blair's date of birth. Check any trove of NHS data that records a person who matches those three facts and you've found Tony Blair – and all the private data contained alongside those public facts is now in the public domain, forever.

Not everyone has Tony Blair's reidentification hooks, but everyone has data in some kind of database, and those databases are continually being breached, leaked or intentionally released. A breach from a taxi service like Addison-Lee or Uber, or from Transport for London, will reveal the journeys that immediately preceded each prescription at each clinic or hospital in an "anonymous" NHS dataset, which can then be cross-referenced to databases of home addresses and workplaces. In an eyeblink, millions of Britons' records of receiving treatment for STIs or cancer can be connected with named individuals – again, forever.

Re-identification attacks are now considered inevitable; security researchers have made a sport out of seeing how little additional information they need to re-identify individuals in anonymised data-sets. A surprising number of people in any large data-set can be re-identified based on a single characteristic in the data-set.

Given all this, anonymous NHS data releases should have been ruled out years ago. Instead, NHS records are to be handed over to the US military surveillance company Palantir, a notorious human-rights abuser and supplier to the world's most disgusting authoritarian regimes. Palantir – founded by the far-right Trump bagman Peter Thiel – takes its name from the evil wizard Sauron's all-seeing orb in Lord of the Rings ("Sauron, are we the baddies?"):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/01/the-palantir-will-see-you-now/#public-private-partnership

The argument for turning over Britons' most sensitive personal data to an offshore war-crimes company is "there is no alternative." The UK needs the medical insights in those NHS records, and this is the only way to get at them.

As with every instance of "there is no alternative," this turns out to be a lie. What's more, the alternative is vastly superior to this chumocratic sell-out, was Made in Britain, and is the envy of medical researchers the world 'round. That alternative is "trusted research environments." In a new article for the Good Law Project, I describe these nigh-miraculous tools for privacy-preserving, best-of-breed medical research:

https://goodlawproject.org/cory-doctorow-health-data-it-isnt-just-palantir-or-bust/

At the outset of the covid pandemic Oxford's Ben Goldacre and his colleagues set out to perform realtime analysis of the data flooding into NHS trusts up and down the country, in order to learn more about this new disease. To do so, they created Opensafely, an open-source database that was tied into each NHS trust's own patient record systems:

https://timharford.com/2022/07/how-to-save-more-lives-and-avoid-a-privacy-apocalypse/

Opensafely has its own database query language, built on SQL, but tailored to medical research. Researchers write programs in this language to extract aggregate data from each NHS trust's servers, posing medical questions of the data without ever directly touching it. These programs are published in advance on a git server, and are preflighted on synthetic NHS data on a test server. Once the program is approved, it is sent to the main Opensafely server, which then farms out parts of the query to each NHS trust, packages up the results, and publishes them to a public repository.

This is better than "the best of both worlds." This public scientific process, with peer review and disclosure built in, allows for frequent, complex analysis of NHS data without giving a single third party access to a a single patient record, ever. Opensafely was wildly successful: in just months, Opensafely collaborators published sixty blockbuster papers in Nature – science that shaped the world's response to the pandemic.

Opensafely was so successful that the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care commissioned a review of the programme with an eye to expanding it to serve as the nation's default way of conducting research on medical data:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/better-broader-safer-using-health-data-for-research-and-analysis/better-broader-safer-using-health-data-for-research-and-analysis

This approach is cheaper, safer, and more effective than handing hundreds of millions of pounds to Palantir and hoping they will manage the impossible: anonymising data well enough that it is never re-identified. Trusted Research Environments have been endorsed by national associations of doctors and researchers as the superior alternative to giving the NHS's data to Peter Thiel or any other sharp operator seeking a public contract.

As a lifelong privacy campaigner, I find this approach nothing short of inspiring. I would love for there to be a way for publishers and researchers to glean privacy-preserving insights from public library checkouts (such a system would prove an important counter to Amazon's proprietary god's-eye view of reading habits); or BBC podcasts or streaming video viewership.

You see, there is an alternative. We don't have to choose between science and privacy, or the public interest and private gain. There's always an alternative – if there wasn't, the other side wouldn't have to continuously repeat the lie that no alternative is possible.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/08/the-fire-of-orodruin/#are-we-the-baddies

Image: Gage Skidmore (modified) https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Peter_Thiel_(51876933345).jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

[aleksatia]

Do you use AI to help with your writing?

Ah, the AI question — let’s talk about it 👀

Yes, I use AI regularly and for a lot of things! For example, certain tools help me keep track of fandom lore, character notes, and timelines ��� basically a searchable database so I don’t get lost in my own worldbuilding.

I also use AI-generated art and playlists to build moodboards before I write — it helps me feel the tone and atmosphere of a story before I dive in.

When it comes to research, ChatGPT has genuinely saved me hours. A few years ago, I’d have dozens of tabs open — cross-referencing medical symptoms or fighter jet engine parts (just to describe one bolt, mind you). Now, I can ask once and get a concise, reliable overview. It helps me keep the realism without sinking time into a Wikipedia black hole.

As for the writing itself — every plot, line of dialogue, emotional beat is mine. I usually write in my native language and translate, though I’m doing more and more in English from the start. Before posting, I sometimes run drafts through AI to check for missed typos, polish phrasing, or catch awkward bits — like a built-in editor.

To me, that’s what healthy AI use looks like: the creative vision stays 100% mine, and the tools just make the process smoother. It’s still me, telling the story.

[transmutationisms]

in addition to being prone to an obvious naturalistic fallacy, the oft-repeated claim that various supplements / herbs / botanicals are being somehow suppressed by pharmaceutical interests seeking to protect their own profits ('they would rather sell you a pill') belies a clear misunderstanding of the relationship between 'industrial' pharmacology and plant matter. bioprospecting, the search for plants and molecular components of plants that can be developed into commercial products, has been one of the economic motivations and rationalisations for european colonialism and imperialism since the so-called 'age of exploration'. state-funded bioprospectors specifically sought 'exotic' plants that could be imported to europe and sold as food or materia medica—often both, as in the cases of coffee or chocolate—or, even better, cultivated in 'economic' botanical gardens attached to universities, medical schools, or royal palaces and scientific institutions.

this fundamental attitude toward the knowledge systems and medical practices of colonised people—the position, characterising eg much 'ethnobotany', that such knowledge is a resource for imperialist powers and pharmaceutical manufacturers to mine and profit from—is not some kind of bygone historical relic. for example, since the 1880s companies including pfizer, bristol-myers squibb, and unilever have sought to create pharmaceuticals from african medicinal plants, such as strophanthus, cryptolepis, and grains of paradise. in india, state-created databases of valuable 'traditional' medicines have appeared partly in response to a revival of bioprospecting since the 1980s, in an increasingly bureaucratised form characterised by profit-sharing agreements between scientists and local communities that has nonetheless been referred to as "biocapitalism". a 1990 paper published in the proceedings of the novartis foundation symposium (then the ciba foundation symposium) spelled out this form of epistemic colonialism quite bluntly:

Ethnobotany, ethnomedicine, folk medicine and traditional medicine can provide information that is useful as a 'pre-screen' to select plants for experimental pharmacological studies.

there is no inherent oppositional relationship between pharmaceutical industry and 'natural' or plant-based cures. there are of course plenty of examples of bioprospecting that failed to translate into consumer markets: ginseng, introduced to europe in the 17th century through the mercantile system and the east india company, found only limited success in european pharmacology. and there are cases in which knowledge with potential market value has actually been suppressed for other reasons: the peacock flower, used as an abortifacient in the west indies, was 'discovered' by colonial bioprospectors in the 18th century; the plant itself moved easily to europe, but knowledge of its use in reproductive medicine became the subject of a "culturally cultivated ignorance," resulting from a combination of funding priorities, national policies, colonial trade patterns, gender politics, and the functioning of scientific institutions. this form of knowledge suppression was never the result of a conflict wherein bioprospectors or pharmacists viewed the peacock flower as a threat to their own profits; on the contrary, they essentially sacrificed potential financial benefits as a result of the political and social factors that made abortifacient knowledge 'unknowable' in certain state and commercial contexts.

exploitation of plant matter in pharmacology is not a frictionless or infallible process. but the sort of conspiratorial thinking that attempts to position plant therapeutics and 'big pharma' as oppositional or competitive forces is an ahistorical and opportunistic example of appealing to nominally anti-capitalist rhetoric without any deeper understanding of the actual mechanisms of capitalism and colonialism at play. this is of course true whether or not the person making such claims has any personal financial stake in them, though it is of course also true that, often, they do hold such stakes.

[justdiptych]

Trans issues are rarely brought up in the Fallout series. Fallout 2′s cut Environmental Protection Agency location was apparently slated to include 'Top Secret Research into Gender Modification', but there's little suggestion what that content would have actually included. Also, the pre-war USA was a fascist hellscape that was actively hostile to human rights - witness, for example, a federal information release about the New Plague, which conflates contagion, socialism and queer sexuality, and encourages readers to report anyone displaying any of the above for 'quarantine' - so pre-war trans communities likely drew as little attention to themselves as possible. More recently, two non-binary characters (Burke and Orlando) have been introduced in Fallout 76's expansions; their roles have been relatively minor.

All that said… the Auto-Doc technology we see in Fallout 2 and New Vegas would be an absolute boon for trans patients. Auto-Docs can synthesise and administer medications, including hormone treatments (the models in the Sierra Madre Villa Clinic can dispense adrenaline, for instance). Any medications not already available can be added to the Auto-Doc's database by a knowledgeable user - this is how the cure to Jet addiction is manufactured in Vault City.

Auto-Docs are also capable of all manner of surgeries. Cosmetic surgery is not unheard of in the Fallout universe - Rivet City’s Horace Pinkerton and Diamond City’s doctors Crocker and Sun all offer it - but Auto-Docs can go even further. Advanced models can even alter a patient’s entire skeleton, with minimal scarring: Fallout 2′s Chosen One can can have their skeleton reinforced, without any Charisma penalty (unless they opt for the heavier, more invasive upgrade), and New Vegas’ Courier can have their spine and central nervous system replaced with a synthetic alternative. Auto-Docs can even give a patient a new voice - Christine Royce tragically had this done to her without her consent, but this does demonstrate show the procedure’s viability for a willing user.

Whether or not the major medical companies of the Falloutverse would sign off on such uses of their tech, breaking and customising Auto-Doc programming seems to have been a simple matter. A suitably sympathetic or motivated physician could have easily started a trans health clinic that could address the bulk of their patients’ medical needs - hormone treatment, surgery far more advanced than exists in the real world, and even voice alteration.

In short, there is absolute, copper-bottomed, canon-compliant room in the wasteland for fully automated transing of genders, and I hope the devs will recognise and embrace this fact.

[alienpreg]

Whats the most common type of alien to be impregnated by?

Hard to say due to the inconsistent reporting we get. However the general idea is that thr most common types are one off alien pregnancies that allow off spring to spread quickly. Usually fast and sudden, they're hard to catch if not vigilant.

This is a perfect example as this woman was impregnated and due to give birth within hours. Unfortunately the report didn't come in until well after the fact. When agents arrived on scene, the woman was leave exhausted, dehydrated and ragged with a trail of fluids leading out of her home. With medical attention she was thankfully able to recover rather quickly. The side effects of her pregnancy became apparent once she was full conscious as she had no recollection of the past three months.

Following this encounter, the database was updated and many similar cases were found. This reveals a pattern among a specific species which has the trait of hormonal induced amnesia. As well, the species also appears to have a preference for thinner targets with low body fat percentages. Further observation data needed for confirmation, however possible species identification is imminent.

[mariacallous]

Dizzied by an accumulated pileup of busted norms, you might have missed a presidential executive order issued on March 20. It’s called, “Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos.” It basically gives the federal government the authority to consolidate all the unclassified materials from different government databases. Compared to eviscerating life-sustaining agencies in the name of fighting waste and fraud, it might seem like a relatively minor action. In any case, the order was overshadowed by Signalgate. But it’s worth a look.

At first glance, the order seems reasonable. Both noun and verb, the very word silo evokes waste. Isolating information in silos squanders the benefits of pooled data. When you silo knowledge, there’s a danger that decisions will be made with incomplete information. Sometimes expensive projects are needlessly duplicated, as teams are unaware that the same work is being done elsewhere in the enterprise. Business school lecturers feast on tales where corporate silos have led to disaster. If only the right hand knew what the left was doing!

More to the point, if you are going to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse, there’s a clear benefit to smashing silos. For instance, what if a real estate company told lenders and insurers that a property was worth a certain amount, but reported what were “clearly…fraudulent valuations,” according to a New York Supreme Court judge. If investigative reporters and prosecutors could pry those figures out of the silos, they might expose such skulduggery, even if the perpetrator wound up escaping consequences.

But before we declare war on silos, hold on. When it comes to sensitive personal data, especially data that’s held by the government, silos serve a purpose. One obvious reason: privacy. Certain kinds of information, like medical files and tax returns, are justifiably regarded as sacrosanct—too private to merge with other records. The law provides special protections that limit who can access that information. But this order could force agencies to hand it over to any federal official the president chooses.

Then there’s the Big Brother argument—privacy experts are justifiably concerned that the government could consolidate all the information about someone in a detailed dossier, which would itself be a privacy violation. “A foundational premise of privacy protection for any level of government is that data can only be collected for a specific, lawful, identifiable purpose and then used only for that lawful purpose, not treated as essentially a piggy bank of data that the federal government can come back to whenever it wants,” says John Davisson, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

There are practical reasons for silos as well. Fulfilling its mission to extract tax revenue from all sources subject to taxes, the IRS provides a payment option for incomes derived from, well, crookery. The information is siloed from other government sources like the Department of Justice, which might love to go on fishing expeditions to guess who is raking in bucks without revealing where the loot came from. Likewise, those not in the country legally commonly pay their taxes, funneling billions of dollars to the feds, even though many of those immigrants can’t access services or collect social security. If the silo were busted open, forget about collecting those taxes. Another example: the census. By law, that information is siloed, because if it were not, people would be reluctant to cooperate and the whole effort might be compromised. (While tax and medical data is considered confidential, the order encourages agency heads to reexamine information access regulations.)

Want another reason? Spilling data out of silos and consolidating it into a centralized database provides an irresistible honeypot for hackers, thieves, and enemy states. The federal government doesn’t have a great record of protecting sensitive information of late.

Trump’s order does state that consolidation must be “consistent with applicable law.” On its face, the order seems at odds with the 1974 Privacy Act, which specifically limits what it calls “computer matching.” But the order also says that it supersedes any “regulation subject to direct Presidential rulemaking authority.” This president considers that a very broad category. Also, as evidenced by multiple court rulings, Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has been less than meticulous in respecting current law. In more than one example, current agency officials have cited legal barriers to block DOGE’s access to information. As a result, they were placed on leave, replaced by those who were willing to fling open the silos. In addition, on March 25, Trump issued another executive order that dictated that the Treasury Department should have access to other government databases. As legal justification, it cited an obscure passage in the 1974 law that allowed federal computer matching in limited circumstances. Perhaps this loophole will be broadened to justify the massive consolidation envisioned in the silo executive order next.

Oh, and the March 20 order also gives the federal government “unfettered access to comprehensive data from all State programs that receive Federal funding, including, as appropriate, data generated by those programs but maintained in third-party databases.” That seems to mean that not only will the silos between federal and state data be compromised, but the government could get access to some information in private hands too.

While DOGE wasn’t mentioned in the March 20 executive order, getting access to personal information has been an obsession of the so-called agency since day one. The order that repurposed USDS and established DOGE mandated that all agency heads “ensure USDS has full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems.” The question was whether this need arose from a desire for genuine reform or something darker. Apparently US district judge Ellen Lipton Hollander holds the latter view. On the same day that the president signed the executive order on silos, she signed a temporary restraining order on DOGE’s attempt to get access to identifiable social security records. “The DOGE Team is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion,” she wrote in her decision, concluding that DOGE was intruding into the personal affairs of millions of Americans without justification. Note that her order involved just a single agency—a mere fishing pole compared to the commercial seafood operation that could happen if social security records were consolidated with IRS data, unemployment information, military, VA, and countless others.

I’m not condemning efficiency when it comes to government operations, and I certainly don’t condone fraud and waste. Of course, the US government should do better. But DOGE isn’t operating as if efficiency were job one, even though its actual title contains the word. In covering tech companies, I often hear boasts that the process of upgrading an existing product was like “rebuilding a plane in mid-air.” But when the vehicle in question is carrying live passengers, every move must be done with extreme caution, because a mistake means catastrophe. Both President Trump and DOGE seem happy to fly the plane into a mountain, figuring they can pick up the pieces later.

Compared to some of the administration's actions involving pandemic responses, nuclear safety, and social security support, the March 20 executive order on information silos might seem like small beer. But if this order is followed aggressively, we could lose the accuracy of our databases, a good bit of our revenues, and above all, much of our privacy. We’re going to miss those silos.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Alejandra Caraballo at Erin In The Morning:

Early last fall, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Dallas pediatrician, Dr. May Lau for providing gender-affirming medical care to teens. The lawsuit accused Dr. Lau of prescribing testosterone to “at least 21” minors between the ages of 14 and 17, in an alleged defiance of a new state ban on providing gender affirming care to trans youth. Lau’s medical license is now on the line under Texas Senate Bill 14, which prohibits hormone therapy for transgender youth and requires the state medical board to revoke any doctor who violates it. Within weeks, Paxton’s office filed similar suits against two more physicians, branding them “scofflaws” and “radical gender activists” for treating adolescents with puberty blockers and hormones. By February, Paxton boasted that he had effectively shut down these three doctors’ ability to practice: two agreed to stop treating patients entirely, and a third is under court injunction barring any care for trans youth. Paxton’s lawsuits are the first enforcement of Texas’s new transgender health restrictions. What is not immediately apparent is how it is a striking example of how government officials can weaponize private prescription records to target anyone they want. At the heart of these cases lies a statewide database that quietly logs every controlled substance dispensed to Texans: the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program ("PDMP"). The database enabling this crackdown was never billed as a tool for political persecution. PDMP's were originally established in the 2000s to combat the opioid epidemic and “doctor shopping” for narcotics. Every U.S. state and territory now maintains a PDMP – an electronic registry of controlled substance prescriptions, typically Schedules II through V, that doctors and pharmacies are required to report. Testosterone, classified as a Schedule III controlled substance, is automatically tracked in the PDMP database. Although the attorney general’s complaints do not spell out how these physicians were caught, the detailed counts of their hormone prescriptions and the fact that virtually all of the patients were transmasculine points to the usage of the PDMP to find providers still prescribing hormones to trans youth. The reason for this is that estrogen is not a controlled substance and is not subject to PDMP surveillance. The PDMP itself is administered by the Texas State Board of Pharmacy. Within the system run by regulators, authorized personnel can query exactly which providers are prescribing a given drug, and even filter by patient age or other criteria. Paxton’s investigators appear to have combed through Texas’s pharmacy records for evidence that certain doctors continued providing testosterone to minors after the ban took effect, evidence they are now using to sue the providers and strip their licenses.

[...]

From Opioid Tracking to Dragnet Surveillance

In theory, PDMP's allow physicians to spot signs of addiction and help authorities flag illicit prescribing practices and abuses by patients and doctors. In practice, PDMPs have evolved into something much broader. From a recent law review article by Jennifer Oliva in the Fordham Law Review, she describes how modern PDMP platforms “collect a litany of sensitive, prescribing-related information about every monitored prescription drug” and increasingly about other medications as well. Oliva goes on to say that what began as a targeted public-health database has morphed into a “dragnet” of personal health information. PDMP datasets typically include patient details, medication dosages, refill schedules, and identifying information for the prescriber and pharmacy. In nine states, the PDMP entry even contains the diagnosis code (ICD-10) associated with the prescription. That means a police officer scrutinizing the file could directly see why a person was prescribed a drug. In states like Tennessee or Florida, which track diagnoses, a record showing testosterone cypionate accompanied by an ICD code for “gender dysphoria” would immediately telegraph that the patient is transgender. As is often the case with law enforcement surveillance tools, PDMPs have proven susceptible to mission creep, Oliva writes, noting that most state programs now track not only opioids but “all controlled substances as well as non-controlled ‘drugs of concern.’” In other words, a system built to catch illicit OxyContin refills has quietly become a mechanism to monitor any number of treatments – from anxiety medications and stimulants for the treatment of ADHD to testosterone for gender transition. Crucially, this vast trove of prescription records exists in a legal gray zone outside standard medical privacy protections. The questions about HIPAA compliance typically come up when I've discussed this subject. However, once a pharmacy uploads your data to a PDMP, that information is no longer covered by HIPAA privacy rules. Instead, each state dictates who can access the PDMP and for what purpose. Unfortunately, law enforcement agencies have lobbied hard for access.

[...]

Gender-Affirming Care and Reproductive Health in the Crosshairs

The Texas cases underscore how PDMP surveillance can be aimed at politically charged medical care. But gender affirming care isn’t the only area of concern. The same prescription databases could be used to monitor and punish those seeking reproductive care or other stigmatized treatments. After the overturning of Roe v. Wade, states that outlawed abortion began exploring new avenues to track and prevent medication abortions. Their task is made easier by the sheer scope of PDMP monitoring. Ultimately, the PDMP effectively becomes a shortcut to gleaning some of the most sensitive details of a patient’s health status. While Abortion medications like Mifepristone are not federally scheduled controlled substances, and thus not routinely logged in PDMPs yet, Louisiana recently classified the abortion medication Mifepristone as a controlled substance, which could now be tracked by Louisiana's PDMP and might be flagged with a code indicating miscarriage or abortion. But many states vest their pharmacy boards with power to add any drug to the PDMP’s watch-list as a “drug of concern,” without legislative approval. Conceivably, an anti-abortion regulator could designate abortion-inducing medications or other reproductive treatments for tracking, instantly pulling them into the surveillance dragnet. The targeting of gender-affirming care is thus part of a much larger pattern. It exemplifies how data collected for one purpose – public health and patient safety – can be repurposed for surveillance and social control. 

Alejandra Caraballo wrote in Erin In The Morning wrote about Texas AG Ken Paxton (R)’s data privacy-invading accessing of prescription records to attack reproductive health and gender-affirming care.

[brandwhorestarscream]

TFP Reincarnation au

Today i'm not in the mood for unhappy endings. How about the ending being like the one in " megaop twins au"?With the war ending positively for the Decepticons?

It's because i want Orion having a life with his bf and they multiples sparklings? Yes. SS and SW having healthier frames so the can have they little ones?too. I have ideias for others like Tfp Prowl, for example? yeah

So... consider. In this situation, Orion isn't turned back into Optimus Prime. Not permanently, anyway. The autobots manage to steal him back from the cons, nabbing his firstborn reincarnated bitty as well. They get the recently recharged Matrix back into him, but something is Wrong™

Mainly that the baby's health takes a turn for the worst. They've been screaming and crying ever since Optimus returned to them, and the Prime himself has no memory of his infant. It's very clearly his child, looks just like him, but he has no recollection of ever being sparked, no knowledge of this tiny baby. And the poor kid is spiraling: they're so, so little, and Orion's spark is distinctly different from Optimus. They are functionally different people. The baby cries and carries on fir hours, days, until they run out of energy and wilt. They're limp and unresponsive curled up in a little ball, wracked with fever and shaking, vents shallow and wheezing. All they do is whimper and cover away from anyone who approaches them, and brays mournfully at his mother-not-mother whenever Optimus gets too close

Ratchet's the only one qualified to diagnose the issue, but they can all tell the sparkling is dying. Suffering from a shattered maternal bond, and he's so little it's killing him. He's doomed to a slow, painful death as his spark dwindles without support and his systems shut down one by one

Optimus can't stand to watch it happen. He knows the sparkling will die if they continue on this way, and... he doesn't have it in him to let the little one extinguish. There's only one thing to do, and he removes the Matrix from his chest late at night while watching over the bitty in the medbay.

When Orion returns to consciousness, his last memory before everything went black was that group of strangers abducting him and his son, and he's horrified when he sees what state his baby is in. He grabs the kid, straps them into his alt mode, and peels out of the base as fast as possible. Hailing Megatron on his comms, saying he's escaped and mini-Orion desperately needs medical attention. Thankfully, they're able to stabilize the baby with an energon infusion and close spark-to-spark contact with his mother. Crisis averted

Idk exactly how going about achieving peace between them all would go, but. Nyeh. It's not important and I'm lazy. Perhaps Orion discovers his true calling as a diplomat, maybe the decepticons succeed with the Iacon Database and are victorious. Whatever works

Point is, Megop get to go home to Cybertron as equals, and start building a proper life for their bitties together. All's well that ends well

As for Starscream and Soundwave, it's not so much an issue of their bodies not being healthy, but rather their bodies not being the right size. As I mentioned before, their Aligned designs are much more streamlined than previous iterations, sleek and made for extreme speed rather than physical combat. It's not surprising they'd struggle with babies that are chunkier akin to their previous iterations. If they were to get caught in the reincarnation loop, there's no way the carrying cycles would be undiscovered, and they'd likely have to undergo cesarean.

[thebreakfastgenie]

public health-related question, what are your thoughts about the NIH compiling medical records for studying autism? i'm concerned about the idea of autistic people being registered, as well as about privacy in general, but it also seems like having this data available could be beneficial for medical research in general? this is not my field at all, but in my science niche, lack of data is always a huge problem, so i can see how this could be beneficial.

I share both your concerns about privacy and your inclination that this could be beneficial for research. Balancing the potential benefit of research with the potential risk to research subjects, as well as how to protect privacy in the process, is the fundamental ethical challenge of human subjects research. There are people whose entire job is dealing with this.

I'm going to quote a CBS news article:

The National Institutes of Health is amassing private medical records from a number of federal and commercial databases to give to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s new effort to study autism, the NIH's top official said Monday.

This sounds like the NIH will be taking information that is already available and compiling it in a more efficient way. Here's a quote from RFK Jr himself:

"The idea of the platform is that the existing data resources are often fragmented and difficult to obtain. The NIH itself will often pay multiple times for the same data resource. Even data resources that are within the federal government are difficult to obtain," he said in a presentation to the agency's advisers. 

If this is accurate, it sounds like this is medical information the NIH already had access to. Public and private institutions often maintain databases for their own research or other purposes and allow other institutions or researches access to their databases, often for a fee. He also mentions that some of the existing resources already belong to the federal government, which makes sense. Anyone who has listed autism on their application for disability benefits, for example, is already identified in government records.

My primary privacy concern, with the information I currently have, is whether all of the patients whose records are included signed an informed consent form indicating that their records may be shared with other institutions for the purpose of research. If some of the databases belong to healthcare providers or insurance companies, patients may not have universally consented to that, and those companies should only provide the records of patients who did. If this mostly involves existing research databases that RFK Jr wants to compile into a single, more comprehensive NIH resource, I'm less concerned about that because I would expect the original institutions to have included sharing data in their informed consent document. If any of them did not, however, those records should not be given to NIH.

I don't have experience with this kind of research, so I'm not certain what the standard is with medical records, but in the kind of research I do, it's standard practice to anonymize data. Theoretically, you could create a database of anonymized medical records, allowing scientists to conduct autism research but not to identify the subjects. RFK Jr's mention of an autism registry makes me think the records he's after are not anonymized, but I'm not sure. Again, the government already has access to at least some identifying information about autism through other government agencies, but I'm not sure of the numbers, and I know a lot of autistic people don't qualify for disability benefits.

The National Institutes of Health exist to conduct publicly funded health research. In theory NIH is an organization we should be able to trust with sensitive medical information. Under other circumstances, I would think the NIH compiling and maintaining a secure comprehensive database for autism research would be a pretty good idea. A single database is more efficient and the NIH should be an organization that can be trusted with sensitive and confidential data. Unfortunately, the current administration has a pretty bad track record with information security already, so some level of concern is not unreasonable under the circumstances. This is yet another reason not to put right wing lunatics in charge of the federal government!

I know you don't need this reminder but just for anyone else reading who might, "autism research" sometimes gets associated with the Autism Speaks crowd, but that's an unfair association. Autism research does not mean trying to find a "cure," it means gaining a deeper understanding of how autism works. This is beneficial to the autistic community, because it helps develop better ways to support and accommodate autistic people.

In terms of how we should feel about this right now... that's hard to say. "Autism registry" sounds scary but I don't think there's any reason to jump from that to the government trying to round up autistic Americans. I think RFK Jr is more interested in trying to prove vaccines cause autism (they don't) than in any kind of systemic control of autistic people. I think the biggest issues facing autistic Americans right now are disability benefits being cut and the Department of Education, which handles special education resources, being dismantled. This government compiling any kind of registry is something to keep an eye on, but I don't think this is an immediate cause for panic.

[john-macnamara]

*Norton rolled his eyes as Myers and Bartlett pulled him into the experimental science bay, more specifically the medical science section. Apparently Doctor Averys had been playing around with an old bio-scanner and rigged it to scan other matter in the system to track agents biological connections, Norton hadn't been too keen on going but if nearly everyone was going anyways he supposed it couldn't hurt to go check it out.*

Averys: Basically, it takes a sample of your genetic code and matches it to anyone in the database, for example-

*The Doctor attached the scanner up to himself, a few odd names popping up on the screen of people he was related to.*

Averys: -As you can see, my great-great-uncle here was a part of the early secret service in America, and because he's on record it lines up with my ancestry. Would anyone else like to try?

*There was a soft buss around the room, people from nearly every department interested in the work and technology being displayed. It wasn't very new or anything, it was fairly simple compared to some of the stuff in the rest of the building, this type of system simply hadn't been implemented yet so everyone was fairly intrigued by it. Myers shrugged next to Norton when no one seemed close to volunteering, putting up his hand before waltzing over. Bartlett gave him a look that Norton couldn't quite decipher, like she was warning him, of what Newman couldn't be sure, but Myers didn't seem to care as he hopped up and held out his arm. Doctor Averys seemed to stop when the crowd parted to show the General, giving him room out of respect.*

Averys: Ah, hello Sir, I didn't think you were going to come, we didn't disrupt you, did we?

*Norton raised an eyebrow at the interaction, watching silently and wondering if this was going to get shut down before he had to deal with much of the ordeal.*

@peip-agent-no-5

Not at all, I was just hoping to see what all the buzz is about. I hope this isn’t interfering with anyone’s work?

[John scans the whole room, making eye contact with agents he knows have assignments in other sections of the building]

Please, tell me about what this does.

[the-alarm-system]

need validation on my values from a stranger on the internet /lh anon because i dont like being doxxed >:3 i am kinda like. more into psychiatry system reform than abolition. because that can like. work. if we fund psychiatry research and stop underpaying workers, and view psych wards as more. help than containment. and uh. also emphasize diversity in that workplace. and talk about the implicit n explicit biases when it comes to white mentally ill vs others. it can work. or im being delusional. anyway. review my words i beg -silly person.

I'm sorry this is pissing me off but you're probably just new to all this, I will not validate your inherently abusive opinion. Psychiatry reform will not work, it's like prison reform. It will only strengthen it's oppressive regime as reform usually does. For better perspective on that I recommend reading

The First Civil Right How Liberals Built Prison America

and

Are Prisons Obsolete

Psych wards will never be help, which angers me most about this ask. Psych wards will always be a tool of oppression and hiding of those perceived as "not normal" which is a construct built by oppressive psychiatry. Pysch wards are the sword of abuse forced onto psychotic people using forced restraint and forced medication.

Psychiatry at its base creates the concept of insanity and mental disorders to turn away the blame from capitalistic oppression. Those deemed psychotic are silenced by the psychiatric system whenever they attempt to question the abuse psychiatry puts them through. Psychiatry has always been a weapon to push white supremacist rhetoric, examples of this include how homosexuality was pathologized, as was running away from slave owners. A modern example can include oppositional defiant disorder which basically is "if you dont listen to the authorities you're mentally ill".

Here is some sources on anti-psych you should get on to if you plan on starting

also supporting an abusive weapon like psych wards is not silly, it's abhorrent

[transmutationisms]

this hasn't happened to me in a long while, but when I was a kid getting weighed I remember a doctor pulling out a separate BMI chart for Asians with lower cutoffs. this was around a decade ago. no doctors have done this since. is that like, normal? or in any way meaningful?

'normal', unfortunately yes---I don't know that I've heard of doctors actually making up charts for this but it is a commonly held belief among physicians and epidemiologists that BMI cutoffs should be lower for Asians than for whites, because Asians supposedly have higher rates of weight-correlated adverse health outcomes (diabetes, CVD, &c) at the same BMIs.

meaningful is a different matter. there are two major and really damning issues with this belief:

firstly, the (handful of) studies documenting this disparity have all the same issues as any other medical literature on weight and health. we don't actually have good evidence to say that weight causes these health outcomes; it's difficult to disentangle environmental factors, or the fact that disease can often cause the weight gain itself, as in the case of diabetes or 'metabolic syndrome'. weight stigma, not interchangeable with weight itself, has a massive and documented negative effect on health outcomes. also, as far as I can tell, most if not all of the studies on this particular question seem to have been done using Asian-American subjects specifically, so that opens a whole host of further statistical ambiguities: you're talking about immigrant populations in the US. physicians love to interpret shit like this as evidence of biological racial differences instead of probing questions like: does this suggest that Asian immigrants to the US are subjected to forms of marginalisation that cause particular health effects? and the usual critiques of weight science include the problem that long-term deliberate weight loss is not achievable for th vast majority of people save through the development of behaviours that would otherwise be identified as eating-disordered, so BMI chart cutoffs are of pretty limited value for individual health guidance even if we were confident in their causal relationships.

secondly, and arguably even more fundamentally, any data that purport to differentiate people on the basis of race are data that are using an invented social category, not a 'natural' or biological one. there are absolutely health outcomes and conditions that affect different populations at different rates or with varying effects. but 'Asian' is not a coherent category genetically, epigenetically, historically, physiologically, or anything else. it's no more a 'real' biological grouping of people than 'white' or any other racial category. these are social designations, they're not biological facts. medicine that purports to display sensitivity to marginalised groups by reifying the biological ideology that defines them is reactionary at its core, and is not even solving the problems people think it is. when we lean on the idea of racial health disparities, we're basically relying on a crude average of a whole bunch of different people and groups who have been socially slotted into one 'race' category. this doesn't help people; on the contrary, it often obscures the actual rates of particular health issues in different populations: for example, the gene responsible for sickle cell anemia is common in families from many parts of the world, and sickle cell anemia is not a 'race-based disease' but an inherited genetic disorder. the allure of 'innate racial differences' as an etiological explanation is still pervasive and pernicious in medicine as elsewhere. Rana Hogarth talks about this in the epilogue to Medicalising Blackness, and I've also heard Iris Clever discuss it in conferences, although to my knowledge her published work focusses more on the epistemological architecture of genetic and anthropological databases. anyway my point is that, even if we solved all the issues raised in part 1 above and were confident that we had indeed pinpointed BMI cutoffs causally linked to adverse health effects, it still would be harmful and not helpful to set these cutoffs on the basis of 'race', which is a social system of categorisation and marginalisation and has no biological basis or 'natural' justification.

[darkmaga-returns]

Sunday June 8, 2025 TRUTH BOMB

Karen Bracken

DARPA To Simulate Disease Outbreaks: Model Lockdown, Vaccination & Messaging Strategies - ARTICLE/VIDEOS (2 videos 1=1 min., 1=30 secs.)

40 State Attorneys General Warn: 'Big Beautiful Bill' Will Strip States of Power Over AI by Jon Fleetwood - the big beautiful bill gets uglier the more you read. Majorie Taylor Green said if she knew this section was in the bill she would ot have voted for it…….open admission that she and probably every member of the House failed to actually read the bill they just obeyed orders to vote for it. This article also provides an easy action you can take - The bill also provides for the federal government to take land in order to implement the carbon capture pipeline across the country. I thought Trump was against the pipeline. Did he neglect to read the bill as well??? ARTICLE

New Jersey May Require All Residents to Be Automatically Added to Electronic Vaccine Registry - will NJ be the canary in the coal mine?? If this is passed could they, in the future, deny you medical insurance or health care? You betcha?? Are they getting ready for the next planned bio weapon assault on the people? You betcha!! What’s next a tag in your ear like they do to livestock?? I only can hope the people of New Jersey wake up and once again become a red state. NJ used to be a great place to live but election fraud turned that state blue and election fraud keeps that state blue. One legislator stated she was concerned the bill would cause vaccination hesitancy. I surely hope that is true. But it also shows she has no clue as to the real intent of this bill. What state will be next?? ARTICLE

The U.S. Government Secretly Poisoned Alcohol During Prohibition, Killing at Least 10,000 Americans - ARTICLE

Bombshell: Dutch Government Admits It is Obligated to Follow a Secret NATO Agenda by Sasha Latypova - waaaay past time for the US to get out of NATO and the UN - ARTICLE

The Danger of Muslims - remember Sharia is NOT a religion. They intertwine religion with government as their way to use religion to take down governments. Sharia melds religion with government which violates the US Constitution which does not allow our government to dictate a national religion and Sharia is a prime example of why that part of our Constitution is so important. VIDEO (1 min. CPAC Hungary)

[heycerulean]

May I ask what "to:a" stands for?

to:a stands for Transmission Origin: Arke, which is a shared Wolf 359 AU between me and @st-peculiar .

It chronicles the lives of the people aboard the U.S.S. Arke (otherwise known as ARKE: INTL, or ARKE: INTERNATIONAL), a mission fathered by Goddard but with ties to several other global companies. It was launched after the failure of the Hephaestus mission, as a sort of spiritual successor; a giant, better-equipped ship, to finally figure out what the fuck was going on with the stars.

Also, everyone's speaking several languages, the crew's a wreck, the aliens are mean and there's like 7 editions of Pryce and Carter in different translations sitting on the table. And gravity!

Right now, we've got 7-8ish characters, but the full Arke staff is around 27-28 (this part is still a HEAVY wip).

Some examples of our people so far: - Ithax, the ship's AI unit, who is NOT doing well with the engineering of the ship and in some kind of fucked up partnership with his company-provided engineer, Marijn Lamarr. They're fun together. - More on Marijn Lamarr; he's everyone's (not-)favorite technician who WILL yell at you if things go wrong and is constantly in some kind of turmoil. They're a sweetheart to Ithax at least <3 - Dr. Basil "Baz" Dow Thorne, resident astrophysicist with a cool database of stars (S.E.A.S.) that he is WAY too into. He's canonically good at pictionary and irrationally terrified of waterslides. What's not to love? - Chief Ossian J. Hellström. He misses his husband and he will never admit that. Resident grump. (honestly, he's allowed to be grumpy, the entire station is a Frankenstein in so many ways and it's his job to keep it running) - Officer Beauden Locke, That One Guy Who Got His Memory Wiped And Got Angry About It (justifiably). Resident skeptic and beloved comms officer. - That one dude in medical with the herbal science degree nobody trusts to do medicine (plant monster pt. 2) - KC Ruona, the alchemist who. Really hasn't done much, and everyone kind of tries to stay away from her, but is also actually chill. 'We Love KC Ruona' we all say in unison. - The Chief of Arms that everyone's fucking terrified of (we should really make them a name) - The Unnamed Captain Who Also Canonically Doesn't Have A Name And Is Just Referred To As "Captain" (hope to god you never piss them off. hope. to. god.)