#a lot of this is spitballing. i highly doubt there would be that many established places

[orcelito]

also THIS,,,

from the Big Fall. 20 million casualties, 60 million missing (could be assumed now residents of Gunsmoke?)

802 ships destroyed. 74 emergency landings. 124 ships missing.

these are some fucking statistics.

we know that there are 7 main cities: April, May, Jeneora Rock, July, Augusta, Octovern, and December

but then there are other locations like November, New Miami, Valdour, Carcasses (in South Cornelia), Ripmela, Meldreck, Nouve Town Muncipal, & New Santiago...

there are mentions of ships being the center of towns, like Nouve Town Muncipal Ship (the location where Knives kills Everyone in the location). & we see these ships being the center of so many towns

im going to need to make a comprehensive guide for all these locations bc GOD there are so many locations. and if these stats are to be believed, then there are at LEAST 74-124 ish (maybe up to 198??) potential locations for ships that people could have built residences around. this could be as big as the giant ships that act as the basis for the main cities, or as small as the tiny little gas station we see built around one plant bulb that fell from a ship.

there are so many potential cites around this planet, & i'm taking note of every place that is mentioned. im Going to build a comprehensive guide on all the locations of Gunsmoke Yet.

[bitternanami]

im really really excited by this idea, i think its brilliant. on reading this post it had me thinking, like. how much expertise would be necessary to produce something like that? what would it take to implement it?

if i may im gonna spitball a little on this. pls bear with me, bc im going into a fair bit of detail as to potential hurdles, but overall i dont think this is unachievable at all. it would help a lot of people enormously.

im also putting it under a cut bc it got Really Long. oops

(ill note im coming at this from a usamerican perspective, so im not sure how this would work globally, though that would obviously be the larger objective. more research needed.)

i think the main reason this might prove difficult is that a lot of the time, comorbidities with chronic illness can span across the fields of a variety of different specialists. specialists who absolutely Hate to talk to each other 🙄

depression borne of thyroid disease is a great example here. i would be surprised to run into a psychiatrist who even like.. knows that that is a thing that can happen, or at least has internalized it to the extent that its something they would honestly suggest. doing that would mean putting into focus the interconnectedness of human bodymind systems, which doesnt jive well with the way the health industry has compartmentalized our care into distinct little boxes at all.

and this obviously sucks. it leaves our hypothetical patient out in the rain, with no real recourse to learn what the actual problem is, short of doing all of these doctors' jobs for them, as is the case now. ideally it would not work like this at All, but if we assume that for our purposes here that we're maneuvering within the flawed framework as it exists, then it means giving practitioners across the board access to multidisciplinary information they otherwise wouldnt be bothered to look for themselves. in order to do that, one needs to compile it in the first place.

creating an accurate, referable directory of comorbidities with the according sets of diagnostic checklists would have to be a multi-pronged effort, because of how varied and multifaceted the area of study is. so itd likely require the formation of several specific focus groups consisting of ppl from a range of bgs, most critically those with lived experience, as well as good-faith medical scholars. each of these groups could maybe develop a list of common symptoms, comorbidities that currently exist in patients, risk factors.. answers to the question 'what does it look like when you have both [x] and [y]?'

like, the answers to those questions Exist already ! the raw quantitative data isnt necessarily there rn--we're not currently recording a lot of these statistics outside of like. medicaid/medicare, which means the sample set is inherently gonna have some degree of bias, but even still thats Something to work with. we can use what we have to back up any findings and like. Tell people about them.

when it comes to pitching this resource to the established systems.. training existing practitioners as well as appending this information to medical curricula…. who has the authority to do this? legislature? national health associations? those are made of people, and like…. in theory we can talk to people, right?

i mean, im definitely being reductive abt the amount of bullshit youd have to wade through to enact this on a large scale; i know doctors are a standoffish, stubborn bunch on the whole, and therefore no doubt highly resistant to change of any sort. but the healthcare system has been improved before, yknow? it sucked to do and it happened too slowly. many many many lives could have been improved, saved, if the those treating us considered it a priority to listen to sick people. but if they dont want to do that, then there must be ways to make them.

upon implementation, the database would also require updating as we collectively learn things about chronic illness, in order to make a questionnaire/test directory like that a functional tool even as research progresses. so you need the resources to do that, to be up on the current medical texts alongside regularly repeating the initial fact-finding process, to see what, if anything, has changed over time. maintenance would comparatively be a lot simpler than establishing it in the first place tho.

like, its a large large project. it might be out of an individual's means but it really feels doable when i look at it as a, a grant proposal to bring to a nonprofit or patient advocacy group or something. id need to look into whats out there for chronic illnesses broadly, bc i know a large number of those are focused on specific diagnoses, but. i dont know!! am i way off base here ?? are there people working on projects like this already? is it embarrassingly naive to think theres a chance of actually affecting how this all works???

when you get diagnosed with a chronic illness they should automatically offer you free tests for the ten most common comorbidities.

bc chronic illnesses DO often come in bundles like that and people experiencing them often struggle with recognizing symptoms in things we’ve lived with sometimes for our entire lives meaning we have to a) identify that something we experience is a symptom of something that hasn’t been diagnosed and b) believe it’s possible/important/realistic to address that symptom AND c) communicate this to our doctors often/clearly/emphatically enough that we eventually can get tested AND, usually, d) figure out what’s causing it ourselves because let’s be real doctors often don’t care enough to figure it out themselves and will often just shrug unless you mention a specific possible diagnosis for them to check

and all of this could be made one trillion times easier if after someone did that ONCE and got diagnosed, if it was standard practice for the doctor to then pull out their handy dandy reference app and put in the New Diagnosis and be given a list of the most common comorbidities that they must now check you for.

like they don’t even have to run the lab tests if that’s too expensive! Just go over the diagnostic criteria and proactively ask, “Do you experience these symptoms?” and suddenly people will have adequate diagnoses and possible treatment options SO much faster