Archives for May 2006

In my wrap-up for that last piece, I promised to reveal something even more disturbing than Crawford's alleged securities violations and political game-playing to block drug approvals to suit President Bush's agenda. But in order to understand the full import of what I'm talking about, a little background is necessary…

I normally wouldn't do something like this, but in this case I just had to. I wanted to see what the mainstream media would do about this story before I broke it in this forum. I hoped it would make headlines for weeks and cause ripples that would shake the very columns of the brand-new Food and Drug Administration building…

I told you about the incredible statistic that the average child sees 20,000 TV ads per year, many of them for junk foods or fast food restaurants. I even cited a 1991 study, which revealed that a typical four-hour stretch of Saturday morning cartoons contains around 200 junk food ads!

And not to add to the list of ways in which we've cheapened, packaged, governed and homogenized our love lives, but there's now a new sex aid on the horizon. According to a recent article in the UK Guardian, a colorless, odorless spray called PT-141 may soon be all the rage for on-demand sex.

Ah, terrorism. What a lovely framework for our every thought these days. One wonders if we'll ever get back to the days when we didn't fear a sudden violent death at the hands of foreign extremists – or a slow, wasting one at the hands of God-knows-who domestically…

It's been a while since I plainly articulated one of the basic underlying pillars of my writings: That modern medicine in America – the kind espoused by all but a few MDs is entirely backward in its philosophy. It treats only effects, not causes.

In the last Daily Dose, I wrote to you about a bird flu scare in an open-air bird market in New Jersey. Although that flu strain turned out NOT to be the H5N1 influenza virus that has plagued Asia, Europe, and Africa, the alarm has definitely been raised on The Hill…

But unless you're a circus freak who bites the heads off live chickens, or a worker in a poultry yard (mostly non-citizens nowadays), you've got nothing to worry about as far as infection with H5N1 goes. That's the reality, despite the warnings, even those I may have sounded myself.

For one thing, I could only in good conscience write about it from a medical standpoint. And since it seems like the overwhelming bulk of the dialogue about the drug centers on its political aspects, its medicinal properties – and I'm not saying I'm certain there are such (I've seen evidence on both sides) – seem always to take a backseat. Because of this, the subject of marijuana use just hasn't come up very often in contexts I've found it necessary to weigh in on.

According to an April 24th Associated Press investigative report, a rare, yet often fatal lung condition called bronchiolitis obliterans has sprung up in abnormally high numbers among junk-food industry workers – most specifically among those who make the flavorings for snack chips, certain candies (like butterscotch), and especially popcorn.