godzillabacter

This is incorrect. You just can't switch manufacturers easily if you're stable on one. But that's not a brand vs generic thing, that's an any manufacturer to any-other manufacturer thing. Same with warfarin, narrow-therapeutic index antiepileptics, etc.

No idea unfortunately, but definitely not to release pressure. You don't get air in your brain, it's all fluid. Outside of the hospital, all the drains drain to somewhere internal, usually the abdominal cavity

Am doctor. Outside of very rare and specific causes of headache, no this wouldn't fix anything, just put you at risk for infections.

Am a doctor, this wasn't actually a migraine and is not how migraines happen. Shunts are placed for elevated intracranial pressure, which can occur for a number of reasons, and do cause headaches. But it's a very uncommon cause of headaches and a shunt will not fix your actual migraines or tension headaches.

Cellular insulin resistance is the definition of Type II diabetes

Body-bag ice cooling has actually been pretty common practice across emergency medicine for some time. Legit body bags (clean ones obviously) are purpose built to be watertight and hold an adult human, and they're easily accessible to hospitals. It's a very effective and affordable method for controlling hyperthermia

Not OP but loss of the Pi results in loss of network connectivity. A headache if you're home and never doing anything time-critical on the network. A disaster if you or anyone else is dependent on the network for anything time-sensitive (virtual doctors appointment, work call, etc), or you're away from home and unable to directly VPN to your router to reconfigure DNS settings.

It's not that we don't use mode, there are definitely times mode is used. It's just that mean (and median as well) contain a lot more useful information about distributions that we often care about. For a normal distribution mean, median, and mode should all be identical. So why do we use mean? Because mathematically, the mean is what underpins the formula for the normal distribution, not median or mode, and when you're talking about doing math with normal distributions mean is the thing to talk about (along with standard deviation).

We use median a lot too, you probably just don't hear it called median very often. The median is useful in non-normal distributions, and it defines the 50th percentile, so along with the 25%-ile and 75%-ile you've got your quartile distributions. We use these all the time to talk about grades in schools, or when we talk about home prices distributions in a given area, or salaries within a given field.

We use mode too, again just by a different name most of the time. Any time you've asked "what's the most common blank" you're basically asking for a mode. When we talk about "average" income in a country, we're usually actually talking about median or mode. Favorite animal? Answered as a mode.

You have to use the right statistical tool for your question: unfortunately English doesn't do a good job of conveying this without math jargon.

Oh, absolutely, there was going to have to be a discussion well before I would be willing to do that. I'd never take unilateral control of a player's character like that

My table tends to not metagame at all, even in situations I really wish they would. I think of all the answers I've gotten, this is the most reasonable and actionable answer. Just remind the player more often. I'm gonna have to come up with a good way to not sound like a condescending asshole because this is the only player I'm going to have to do it to. It just sucks cause it's one more thing I've gotta do while running combat. But that's life I guess

That's a really cool narrative way to go about fixing this, though it does feel kinda rail-roady. I'll give it some thought.

I go back and forth on this. I feel like I'm enabling these choices by pulling punches. But it feels excessively anti-fun to just kill them and be like "sorry lol be better". I don't think I have the heart to just murder characters all the time.