Monday, September 24th, 2012
KRISTEN GWYNNE, - Salon/AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: Gosh, it seems like every week there is a new study reporting the benefits of marijuana in medicine. That this plant is illegal is so perverse as to almost be a social evil.
Two scientists at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco have found that cannabidiol (CBD), a non-toxic marijuana compound that delivers many of weed’s benefits without the high, might stop metastasis in aggressive cancer, ‘potentially altering the fatality of the disease forever.
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Monday, September 24th, 2012
DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and STEVEN ERLANGER, - The New York Times
Stephan: As I have been writing for years now, the result of the Neocons wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will ultimately produce only one toxic fruit -- virulent anti-Americanism, that will curse American Islamic relations for a generation, or more. Bombers and jihadists are the extreme. Here from the mouth of the Egypt's new president Mohamed Morsi is the moderate position. We need to pay attention. If we don't this trend spirals downward very quickly.
CAIRO - On the eve of his first trip to the United States as Egypt’s new Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi said the United States needed to fundamentally change its approach to the Arab world, showing greater respect for its values and helping build a Palestinian state, if it hoped to overcome decades of pent-up anger.
A former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mr. Morsi sought in a 90-minute interview with The New York Times to introduce himself to the American public and to revise the terms of relations between his country and the United States after the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, an autocratic but reliable ally.
He said it was up to Washington to repair relations with the Arab world and to revitalize the alliance with Egypt, long a cornerstone of regional stability.
If Washington is asking Egypt to honor its treaty with Israel, he said, Washington should also live up to its own Camp David commitment to Palestinian self-rule. He said the United States must respect the Arab world’s history and culture, even when that conflicts with Western values.
And he dismissed criticism from the White House that he did not move fast enough to condemn […]
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Sunday, September 23rd, 2012
JILL LEPORE, - The New Yorker
Stephan: This excellent article describes how the great political 'lie factories' that dominate our culture got started. It is a story worth knowing.
I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty, by Upton Sinclair, is probably the most thrilling piece of campaign literature ever written. Instead of the usual flummery, Sinclair, the author of forty-seven books, including, most famously, ‘The Jungle,
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Sunday, September 23rd, 2012
CRYSTAL PHEND, - MedPage Today
Stephan: Just like the yogurt story I ran yesterday, here is a second report showing that improved eating choices have a significant effect on hypertensive disease and high blood pressure. Read this, and consider it in the context of the decreasing life expectancy story, also in today's edition.
Both the yogurt and cranberry studies, of course, will have to be replicated to achieve their full importance, but this research points in a direction that should command your attention about your own diet.
Cranberry juice modestly lowers blood pressure in healthy adults when consumed daily, a carefully controlled trial showed.
Systolic and diastolic blood pressure both fell by an average 3 mm Hg with two 8-oz. glasses a day for 8 weeks, Janet Novotny, MD, of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Beltsville, Md., and colleagues found.
The effect was significant compared with placebo for diastolic pressure, with a trend for systolic reduction as well, the group reported at the American Heart Association’s High Blood Pressure Research meeting in Washington.
Cranberry juice contains a ‘broad and interesting array’ of the kind of plant flavonoids shown to reduce cardiovascular disease risk in epidemiologic studies, Novotny explained in an interview.
‘If [patients] are trying to reduce blood pressure through diet, low-calorie cranberry juice would be something that would be good and healthful to include in that diet’ as a replacement for less healthy drinks, she told MedPage Today.
The antihypertensive effect may be another reason to recommend cranberry juice in addition to its urinary tract benefits, commented Rachel Johnson, PhD, RD, chair of the American Heart Association’s nutrition committee.
The use of a low-calorie cranberry juice may have been an important factor, she explained in an interview with MedPage Today.
‘Cranberries on […]
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Sunday, September 23rd, 2012
BEN GOLDACRE , - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: This is an excellent and very insightful account of what has happened in Big Pharma's quest for profit above health. Although the physician author is based in the U.K., his comments apply to the U.S. as well. If it doesn't scare you, you're not paying attention. I hope all the physicians who are readers particularly take this to heart. Irving Kirsch, Associate Director of the Program in Placebo Studies, a lecturer in medicine at the Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, professor of psychology at Plymouth University in the United Kingdom, and professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Hull, United Kingdom, and the University of Connecticut has published many papers showing that anti-depressants in general do little better, or even not as well as placebos. It is hard not to see the entire anti-depressant industry as anything other than a multi-billion scam.
This is an edited extract from Bad Pharma, by Ben Goldacre, published next week by Fourth Estate.
Reboxetine is a drug I have prescribed. Other drugs had done nothing for my patient, so we wanted to try something new. I’d read the trial data before I wrote the prescription, and found only well-designed, fair tests, with overwhelmingly positive results. Reboxetine was better than a placebo, and as good as any other antidepressant in head-to-head comparisons. It’s approved for use by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (the MHRA), which governs all drugs in the UK. Millions of doses are prescribed every year, around the world. Reboxetine was clearly a safe and effective treatment. The patient and I discussed the evidence briefly, and agreed it was the right treatment to try next. I signed a prescription.
But we had both been misled. In October 2010, a group of researchers was finally able to bring together all the data that had ever been collected on reboxetine, both from trials that were published and from those that had never appeared in academic papers. When all this trial data was put together, it produced a shocking picture. Seven trials had been conducted comparing reboxetine […]
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