every month, I need to fill the same prescriptions I’ve had for between 10 and 20 years.

every month, one or more persons whose job it is to get those pills into my hands without interruption, fucks it up.

as a result, the stash of critical medication which I jealously hoard as a hedge against this exact problem (as well as natural disasters, etc) grows smaller. I now have about 7 days remaining. I will rapidly become sick and then completely nonfunctional if I miss my meds for even a day.

it’s now crystal clear that the American health care system is not designed to help me with this problem, and that it has no intention of ever doing so.

oh, you also got the “can never, ever, ever ‘tune out’ any type of speech sound” autism? it’s currently destroying my life and has been doing so for nearly a decade btw 🥲

Melatonin is a clock-setting hormone, not a sleep aid, and most of the supplements on the (US) market have waaaaay too high a dose. I get excellent results from 150ug (0.15mg) taken 4 hours before bedtime at the same time every night, and I suffered from delayed sleep phase syndrome for decades before figuring this out.

Dumping an entire bathtub full of melatonin (relatively speaking) into one’s brain leads to more problems than it solves, and it’s not even a very good sleep aid on top of that. Because its actual function is as a clock-setting molecule.

Industry also causes air pollution and plenty of it. It’s more visually segregated in developed countries. But as an example, have you ever explored the Pakistani factory video genre on Youtube?