Just like with Watergate: Follow the money.
In 2003, Mary’s 26-year-old son, Dan, was enrolled against her wishes in a psychiatric drug study at the University of Minnesota, where I teach medical ethics. Less than six months later, Dan was dead. I’d learned about his death from a deeply unsettling newspaper series by St. Paul Pioneer Press reporters Jeremy Olson and Paul Tosto that suggested he was coerced into a pharmaceutical-industry study from which the university stood to profit, but which provided him with inadequate care. Over the next few months, I talked to several university colleagues and administrators, trying to learn what had happened. Many of them dismissed the story as slanted and incomplete. Yet the more I examined the medical and court records, the more I became convinced that the problem was worse than the Pioneer Press had reported. The danger lies not just in the particular circumstances that led to Dan’s death, but in a system of clinical research that has been thoroughly co-opted by market forces, so that many studies have become little more than covert instruments for promoting drugs. The study in which Dan died starkly illustrates the hazards of market-driven research and the inadequacy of our current oversight system to detect them.
Does anyone here understand that “a risk of dying” means that someone might die? How do you think knowledge/safety is gained except by testing?
Your alternative to closely monitored testing of drugs for possible side effects not seen during development is what?
Silly hoomans.
i AINT READING ALL THIS,
But if anyone hasnt got the point..
Drug corps make MONEY making DRUGS..
NOT curing, your problem..
They DONT make money on OLD PILLS…they have to make MORE to keep copyrights. So, they MIX and MATCH, and play with chemicals..only enough to PROVE you ‘may NOT die’ from them.
IF you knew the CURES, you wouldnt need the pills. and there are CURES. Not from these folks. as they get PAID to sell you DRUGS>
It always seems to be an “us vs them” mentality at work in “medical science”. And many other so-called professions. Back in WW2, the Nazi elite experimented on captured Jews. Now it seems the tables have turned. And its these medical elitists feeling it’s both necessary and justifiable to experiment on the lesser classes.
If a US health reform bill were to do any damn good. It would start be reigning in the profession’s tendency toward such elitist attitudes and practices. Especially with the taxpayers’ money. Which apparently, they’re not too proud to keep taking from us peasants.
http://helpineedhelp.com/
bobbo…when you mention a risk of dying, I’m reminded of mortality in a different way. My ex-wife (of two days) was diagnosed with colon cancer two weeks ago. She’s got an 85% chance of surviving five years, whatever that means, even with no further treatment. (she’s going to be fine)
85%? I’m thinking about that last week, and wondering what my own mortality percentage is, sans cancer (as far as I know).
85% doesn’t sound too bad, all things considered.
Olo–I’m not a “good listener” as I almost always respond. Your post reminds me that marriages have a mortality as well. On day one its 50% not including physical death of a partner from any and all causes. In all such unnatural terminations, the deep issue is was the greater harm in the ending, the start, or just the slow change over time? Good to think and resolve oneself over that issue. Resolution being the key, the accuracy of same not even most important. From the emoter’s point of view. The truth is always the ultimate good, in its own abstract way.
85% survival over 5 years? I know you know what that means, as you say she’ll be fine cancer wise. What it means is that if you married 100 women today, five years from now you would be a polygamist 84 times over. Maybe that should even be your plan?
Good hard numbers can be a real comfort. The statistic is probably false, the doc is just giving it a nice sheen, like a placebo. All things are never considered, our brain are finite. See what talking does? I’d have a few beers and listen to favored music myself.
Remember the good times and think well of her and yourself.
Yea, veerily.
Thanks, bobbo.
I don’t think I could keep up with 100 wives, but I’d love to try.
Coincidental you should mention what to remember…that’s almost exactly what I told her a couple weeks ago.
Olo–otoh==an evening with Sam Kinison can be a tonic as well. smile!
http://youtube.com/watch?v=cV1dyV9d_1k&feature=related
good advice: always a stretch goal. It will come with time.
I remember him on Steve Dahl’s radio show in the 80’s…I might have some of those shows recorded on VHS…he was insane. But usually right. LOL
The one year mortality rate is 50% at age 114.
I never want to be the oldest person alive…the poor bastards just keep dying. Seems like every other month another one goes.
Thats very interesting Mike. Why you lookin at mortality tables? Ha, ha.
#17, Ah Yea
From your article;
The opening two sentences.
A sulfa drug called Elixir Sulfanilamide released in 1937 killed over 100 Americans, mostly children. A sedative called Thalidomide released in Europe in 1957 and taken by pregnant women caused deformities in 10,000 children. These famous episodes strike us as horrible injustices that must be prevented.
In closing
A drug may be developed, tested, and found to save lives. But the FDA will prevent Eli Lilly, Rite Aid, and Kaiser Permanente from making the drug available until it has gone through the tortuous and expensive approval process. That might take ten years. Because voluntary society would accomplish anything that the FDA accomplishes, the harms of the FDA are unredeemed.
So drugs that weren’t properly investigated and did cause sever harm is somehow proof we don’t need to study drug safety.
BTW, putting lipstick on a pig doesn’t change the fact this is a LIEbertarian site.
You know, even when they do “legitimate” drug trials. They only do them on about a thousand volunteers. Which also happens to be the magic number of families they get to rate Tv shows. And look at the kind of CRAP we end up watching, that most of them like! The thing is, how can any sampling of only 1000, represent the reaction of over 300 million people, to anything? Considering the billions the drug industry make off of new drugs. They can well afford doing more thorough human trial testing. These are powerful drugs, not Tv game shows, we’re risking our lives on.