Yes. That's pretty much how it works for fascism. The government uses powers meant for a legitimate purpose to instead intimidate people and the mechanisms of government meant to restrain such abuse fail or are taken over entirely. Have you ever studied history?
But the idea is that you don't elect people who would behave that way in the first place. Plus the US courts are demonstrably not in fact mindless rubber stamps for the president. And it's not like anyone is actually canceling elections at this time, so they can be voted out later.
To me a fascist government would prevent people from being able to take their power away at all, and simply do whatever they want with impunity, but I don't quite see that happening in the US right now. Courts are still ruling against the government, they're largely complying in most ways, and there will still be more elections.
Are they trying to do some things that smell "fashy"? Maybe. But I still think it's a stretch to say the US government is full blown fascist in the same way we've seen that in the past in some other countries.
As someone with herniated discs, spinal stenosis, degenerative disc disease and scoliosis for decades, who's already had surgery but still got worse... what else even is there besides more surgery?
I can't wave a magic wand and just put more space between my discs... that's the only thing that's going to ease off my pain as far as I'm aware.
This missing bit is that many people are pain free with the same scans as you have. Surgery does help people, but it’s clear that the signals we use to say surgery is needed are very noisy and not as accurate as the surgeons would have you think.
I have been trying many different types and combinations of stretches and various prolonged physical therapies (in-office and not) for many years... unfortunately nothing has ever helped, not even the McGill Big 3.
Sitting and laying is fine, but walking I can manage maybe 10 minutes max before it starts to hurt, and only gets worse quickly from there. Then I must rest for at least as long as I was walking to get another 10 or so minutes.
Sometimes manually stretching my spine out can help reset that time limit (like lay down with knees up and push down on my thighs to stretch it, it usually pops), but it's only temporary.
If I'm walking on uneven terrain then my muscles go into wild inflammation mode and are hard as rocks... on top of the spinal/nerve pain.
My situation is similar to you. Additionally I can't take NSAIDs. I've been doing RF ablation sessions every 3-4 months (along with steroid shot occasionally.) After a year it's much improved on the pain side but as you know, it's like there's a limited amount of activity you can do and once you go over it, you're stealing from tomorrow, the next day and so on (which means rest on those days.)
Inversion table for 15min a morning also helps just to unload the spine. You can try to do the start of an abdominal crunch to build stomach muscle there while unloaded.
Have you ever tried serious strength training of your posterior chain? That fixed me up although my back wasn't as bad as yours. I feel that if the muscles are weak they fail to support the spine in an appropriate way.
IIRC, besides being pain caused by physical problems, it can also be pain caused by nerve issues (slightly different), and pain caused by your brain (very different, could be multiple causes there).
If surgery doesn't help, and/or like the other commenter mentioned, people with similar physical characteristics don't have pain, then it's time to explore the other two.
I'm sorry you're suffering. There are several regenerative approaches getting ever closer which will be able to help your body re-grow cartilage. Hopefully they'll be FDA approved sooner than later.
founder here. extremely accurate comment. we had a customer send us this website recently. they said "we think you need a better website, we made this with claude"
Why would you be embarrassed? when bootstrap came out it took like 10 years for websites to start looking "not bootstrap". These people are just looking for something to complain, maybe GP is a designer and it's running out of work to do... As long as the product is solid...
> Why can't connect Amazon to ChatGPT today? I don't know.
They just don't want to, because there's no ads. The human gets removed from the loop of visiting the site entirely. And it doesn't say Amazon all over it.
If the user is not browsing the site/app, Amazon cannot collect the analytics about your browsing habits. The AI system does though. There is absolutely no incentive for Amazon to discourage users from using their system. After all, the AI system might not show the user an Amazon item.
Source:
reply