Emily Chen

Pharmacist 💊 | Your health, My concern

[Emily Chen @emilychenRPh]

@todds99 @SStricklandMMA What do you think of Tesla?

[Emily Chen @emilychenRPh]

@georgeupstairs What is this?

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The year is 1925. Your doctor says you look run down and writes down the name of a tonic, and you drink it the way you drink anything a doctor names, a bottle a day, feeling marvellous. It is radium in distilled water. Four hundred thousand bottles are sold on medical endorsement, and the steel magnate who got through fifteen hundred of them is buried in 1932 in a lead-lined coffin.

The year is 1948. Your baby is screaming with teething, so you do what the health visitor says and work a fingertip of powder into his gums, morning and night, for months. Then his hands and feet go raw and pink, daylight becomes unbearable, and the child who was babbling in the spring stops speaking. The powder is mercury, a fifth of the babies it does this to die, and it stays on the shelf until 1954.

The year is 1958. Your wife is seven months gone and they send her down the corridor for the routine X-ray, and she lies on the cold plate with her coat over the chair and thinks nothing of it. An Oxford epidemiologist has just shown that one abdominal X-ray in pregnancy roughly doubles the child's chance of dying of cancer before adolescence. The profession declines to believe her, her funding dries up, and the radiographers carry on for twenty years.

The year is 1983. Your son has haemophilia, and the new treatment means no more nights in hospital, just a vial from the fridge and a needle at the kitchen table before school. The vial is pooled from thousands of paid American donors, some of them prisoners. Around twelve hundred and fifty British haemophiliacs are given HIV this way, and the inquiry that finally says so out loud reports in 2024.

The year is 1989. You are on a ward after your heart attack watching the monitor throw an extra beat, and they start you on a tablet to stop it doing that, because obviously a heart that skips is a heart about to stop. Somebody finally tests the tablet against a placebo. Seven point seven per cent dead within ten months on the drug, three per cent on the dummy, and the trial is halted early.

The year is 1995. Your sister takes the high-dose chemotherapy with the bone marrow transplant because her oncologist calls it her best chance, and you sit in that corridor for four weeks while it takes her hair, her gut lining and two stone. Forty thousand American women go through it. In 1999 the trials find no survival advantage over ordinary treatment, and in 2000 the data that convinced everybody turns out to have been invented.

The year is 2016. Your daughter is epileptic and pregnant and stays on the medicine that has kept her seizure-free since she was nineteen, because nobody at any appointment has ever told her otherwise. That is the year the warning finally reaches the box. The risk had been in the literature since the seventies, and roughly twenty thousand British children were born into it while the paperwork caught up.

Now it is today.

Your doctor has new drugs, new numbers and a fresh consensus, and he can tell you exactly what the evidence shows.

So could every doctor on this list.

None of it was quackery. All of it was the standard of care, taught in the schools, printed in the guidelines, paid for by the state.

That is what a wrong answer looks like from the inside, and you are standing in one now.

[Emily Chen @emilychenRPh]

@AaronDo02397465 @Tironianae Absolute crime against humanity! Do you think the state House will actually move forward with her impeachment?

[Emily Chen @emilychenRPh]

@ohcaptainmycap7 @GrowingUpRetro Lucky you! Do they still have that carhop service? It feels like something straight out of a movie.

[Emily Chen @emilychenRPh]

@2StefanMoore This is what life should be like!

[Stefan Moore ★ @2StefanMoore]

A final piece of advice from Holly Butcher - written the day before she passed away from cancer at just 27:

“It’s a strange thing knowing you’re going to die young.

At 26, I thought I had time…
To fall in love.
Start a family.
Grow old.

But cancer doesn’t care about plans.

Now, I understand how fragile life really is. Every single day is a gift, not a guarantee.

I’m not writing this to scare you. I’m writing to remind you: really live.

Stop stressing over little things. Be kind to your body- move it, nourish it, stop criticizing it. One day you’ll wish you had appreciated it.

Go outside.
Look at the sky.
Feel the sun.
Just be.

Spend less time chasing “stuff” - more time making memories. Don’t skip moments with people you love.

Laugh more.
Write a note.
Tell someone you love them.

Complain less.
Give more.
Helping others brings more joy than anything you can buy.

Be present.
Put your phone down.
Show up - really show up.

You don’t need to have it all figured out. You don’t need a perfect body, or a perfect life.

Just follow what makes your heart light up. Say no to what drains you. Make changes when you need to.

And please - donate blood. I wouldn’t have had that extra year without it. And that year gave me memories I’ll hold close… forever.

Thank you for reading this.
Live your life well.

And maybe… we’ll meet again someday.”

Holly 🩷

Repost & share Holly’s important advice. ❤️

[Emily Chen @emilychenRPh]

@doverdoge Where is good to eat?

[Emily Chen @emilychenRPh]

Tried to eat a whole bowl of noodles in one go… but failed!🤣

[Emily Chen @emilychenRPh]

@doverdoge Really? I don't believe it!

[The Figen @TheFigen_]

Very cool art in art!

The geniuses who think sticking a banana to the wall is ‘art’ need to see this.

[Emily Chen @emilychenRPh]

@MarioNawfal @scott_boyette @grok which city

[Science girl @sciencegirl]

Be unstoppable

[Emily Chen @emilychenRPh]

@PeterPetrovic Yes, technology always brings new problems when it introduces new functions. For example, AI makes it harder to distinguish between true and false information. Do you usually use AI? Have you ever had similar experiences of being deceived by AI?

[Emily Chen @emilychenRPh]

@PeterPetrovic I’ve never seen such a big hand!

[Wholesome Side of 𝕏 @itsme_urstruly]

The difference between drinking coffee and tea 😂😂

[Inevitable West @Inevitablewest]

Evil has lost. Christ has risen.

Happy Easter!

[Juanita Broaddrick @atensnut]

HE has RISEN. Christ indeed has risen ✝️

Happy Easter.

[Emily Chen @emilychenRPh]

@spaceandtech_ Doctor Octopus!

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

A hilarious April fools video made by the police

[Emily Chen @emilychenRPh]

@heynavtoor AI is just a tool, and we must not lose our own judgment!