[Health] Pulse oximeter readings while asleep and awake - what do these readings mean?

[robbob2112]

The problem with trying to track pulseox as a value for health is it changes so quickly depending on what is going on. If your pulseox craters it can be apnea if it only happens at night. But, the finger rings take an instant reading every 2, 4, 15, 30, etc minutes, it just depends on the ring. Stand up and walk across the room and it plunges for a second. Walk up a flight of stairs and the same, but longer. Sit in one place a while and it can taper or spike up and down as you inhale and exhale.

My point is pulseox is a great data set to add to the data from a pap machine, but by itself it is only good for trending. The higher the sample rate the more it bounces around.

[srlevine1]

Why did you decide not to study medicine?

When I was 18, I attended an operation with my mentor, and the patient went into ventricular tachycardia. They used a defibrillator with multiple discharges up to 360 joules, and the patient flatlined. He asked me what was next, and I replied, "Intracardiac injection of adrenaline, followed by open heart massage." He said, "Wrong answer." 

He explained that the patient on the table was an older indigent with no known familial support system--and this is the part that did it for me--it would screw up the OR for hours and push back elective procedures. 

He said I was too empathetic, not realistic, and didn't know when to give up. He said med school could train me to combat the first two, but there is no training to suppress the need for a successful outcome without eventual issues with depression following failures-- at least for cardiology. He told me I was playing a game, racing down the diagnostic tree and then interventional protocols, hopefully before adverse effects. By the nature of the profession, adverse effects were given, and I passed. 

Likewise, I passed on the law when I found out justice didn't really matter; it was mostly political, you advocated for whoever paid you, and the facts and the law were mutable, with the victory going to the side with the best connections first and the believable argument second.

That left physics and computing, both of which I pursued. After all these years, I have no regrets and believe I made the right decisions. I just wish I had taken an entrepreneurial track when I first started school.