RICHARD ALTSCHULER, - MedPage Today
Stephan: Recently I had a reader write and ask me whether I had anything on the expiration of medicines. Synchronistically, another reader and a medical authority whose opinion I trust and respect, Larry Dossey, the next day sent me this report as part of an ongoing conversation we have been having on the illness profit system. It is several years old but it may help you as it did me, get a handle on this question.
Does the expiration date on a bottle of a medication mean anything? If a bottle of Tylenol, for example, says something like ‘Do not use after June 1998,’ and it is August 2002, should you take the Tylenol? Should you discard it? Can you get hurt if you take it? Will it simply have lost its potency and do you no good?
In other words, are drug manufacturers being honest with us when they put an expiration date on their medications, or is the practice of dating just another drug industry scam, to get us to buy new medications when the old ones that purportedly have ‘expired’ are still perfectly good?
These are the pressing questions I investigated after my mother-in-law recently said to me, ‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ when I pointed out that the Tylenol she was about to take had ‘expired’ 4 years and a few months ago. I was a bit mocking in my pronouncement — feeling superior that I had noticed the chemical corpse in her cabinet — but she was equally adamant in her reply, and is generally very sage about medical issues.
So I gave her a glass of water with the purportedly ‘dead’ drug, of which […]
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Stephan: The awful budget deal that appears headed into law is the result of a cult part ideological part theological, American Theocracy. This essay provides a good account of what it is and what it represents for the country. I do disagree with one point it makes. There is nothing to stop a religion from becoming a political party. Nor should there be, so long as there is a firewall between church and state. But the Religious Right does all it can to breach that wall.
Nothing in their writings suggests that the Founders ever conceived of a political movement willing to crash the country in order to make it conform to a fact free vision. These were men of the Enlightenment, facts mattered. In their day people disagreed how to go about it -- Hamilton and Jefferson -- but they were all committed to the principle that making things better for citizens was one of main things government was supposed to do.
Why Conservatives Behave More Like a Bizarre Religious Cult, Than a Legitimate Political Entity
It is easy to get caught up in every rivulet of the default crisis as we approach the inevitable cascade of market panics followed byshock doctrine cuts to social services. It is easy to find fault with the Administration for its many flaws in handling the situation, and with Congressional Democrats as well.
But it’s also important to remember the big picture. The big picture is that America is being held hostage by a conservative movement that behaves much more as a bizarre religious cult, than a legitimate political entity. It is perhaps the most dangerous cult to have ever held sway over a major nation-state in modern times.
It is a cult founded on a number of dogmatic beliefs that have no basis in reality. These are people who believe that the inflection point of the Laffer Curve is somewhere in the low single digits, and that cutting taxes to insanely low levels will magically lead to revenue increases. These are people who believe that government itself is basically unnecessary but for a private property protection scheme, and that the unfettered market will provide all that society needs, […]
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EMILY P. WALKER, Correspondent - MedPage Today
Stephan: This is a seemingly esoteric issue of little interest to media, but the implications of being able to patent a gene are enormous, and will directly affect the life of you and your family. This is where what is now pharmaceutical medicine is headed. The age of infectious diseases that created these corporations is now ending, to be replaced with genetics
WASHINGTON — An appeals court here has ruled that a company that makes tests for breast and ovarian cancer can patent breast cancer gene sequences, in effect ruling that human genes can be patented.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit — a court that specializes in patent cases — ruled that when a gene is isolated from the human body, it is ‘markedly different’ and has a ‘distinctive chemical identify and nature’ compared with the way it is found in nature.
Friday’s 2-1 decision overturns parts of earlier decisions by a U.S. District Court judge in New York City who ruled that patents on the BRCA 1 and 2 gene sequences — and by extension all other human genes — are invalid.
The company that holds the patents, Utah-based Myriad Genetics, sells tests that assess a woman’s risk of developing breast or ovarian cancer based on detection of mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. Other companies, researchers, or doctors that test for the mutation would be violating Myriad’s patent. Companies can still do whole-genome sequencing without violating the patent.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Public Patent Foundation, along with a group of doctors, genetic scientists, and patients, […]
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