A Modest Proposal

[varkam]

I was doing some searching on the google and the wikipedia and I think I have stumbled onto a solution to completely revolutionize modern medical health-care in the United States. It's something that will give many people who think pharmaceutical companies and the medicines that they produce mainly cause harm a welcome respite. It's an all-natural remedy that was developed by the father of medicine Hippocrates, has been around since ~400 BC, and has been widely practiced throughout human history (and even into today!). It has been hailed as a cure for a dizzying array of ailments from the physical to the mental! Perhaps the best of all, it doesn't require that you support and encourage a system that just makes people even sicker by keeping them on synthetic poision, thereby enslaving them to big pharma! You don't have to buy any drugs or suffer through expensive medical procedures that are about as likely to kill you as they are to help you! I know, I was excited too. I present - leaches.

You see, the fluids in the body (or, humors) are essentially four different types: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. The doctrine of humoral pathology grew from this groundbreaking medical discovery (and remember, it's been practiced throghout human history!). Humoral pathology is essentially the study of how an imbalance in these different types of humors cause specific diseases like depression (or melancholia) or the black death (which has been eradicated, no thanks to vaccines). It's been discovered that each disease has it's own unique imbalance signature, or in other words each disease is caused by a unique ratio of the four types of humors to one another. Now comes the exciting part: leaches offer a cheap, all-natural way of resetting the humors in the body, thereby eradicating disease!!! Most doctors don't practice humoral pathology anymore and will tell you it's because they have a better understanding of the human body now, but don't let them lie to you!! They're just shills for big pharma and want to push more poison!! The next time you need to see a doctor, make sure to call ahead and make sure that they practice humoral pathology. You'll be glad you did. You're welcome.



.....


Okay, seriously now. I think I've probably gotten as swept up in the recent Gardasil melee as much as anyone else and, further, I have always been butting heads with advocates of certain forms of alternative medicine (especially homeopathy) both here and elsewhere. As is probably evident by this point, the purpose of this post isn't for me to try to win brownie points with them. It's something that (I hope) is ultimately more useful than that. The first part of this post was mainly intended to make people laugh, and not to offend because it's simply so absurd. If it did offend you, then I wish I could say that I was sorry. I really do. But quite frankly, you should re-examine your reasoning. If this post gets you do one thing, and that one thing is re-examine your reasoning, then I am in no way, shape, or form, sorry. That's not even to say that the appropriate outcome is to think exactly like I do. No way. Just doubting and questioning your long-held beliefs, regardless of what they are, is a useful endeavor because otherwise you're just drifting along, pushing the same product you were pushing fifteen years ago. I know I'm guilty of that to some extent. We all are. I don't have all the answers, or even any of them. But what good are we doing if both sides just cling to the same bullshit rationales they developed years ago?

Anyway, I hope that I have a few useful thoughts on the recent controversy or really, more generally, the relationship between pharmaceutical companies, the products that they produce, and us - the consumer. Pharmaceutical companies (read: Big pharma or evil incarnate) are, at their core, corporations. In my view, that's the big problem with them. Because they are corporations, they really have no ethical guidelines or moral compass other than that which the government imposes on them. Their only purpose is to make more money. They don't care about you or your grandma. They don't care how you're feeling today or your concerns about how they conducted their clinical trials. Don't let the ads fool you. When they put an ad on TV about how they are spending money to help old people afford medication, they did so after a six-hour long meeting whose conclusion was that spending the money to boost the company's image would mean more investment dollars. They do care, and care passionately, about making effective medicines. If all they produced were sugar pills and tic-tacs, then no one would buy them because they don't suppress H.I.V. and they don't attack infections. Being that no one would buy them, they wouldn't make any money - which is their first, last, and only.

And I'm sorry to break it to you, but I would much rather live in a world with pills and vaccines than live in a world with...well...leaches. The medcines that evil incar...I mean pharmaceutical companies produce are of extrodinary benefit to humanity. Diseases have been cured. AIDS patients have been given relative stay of execution with the newer drugs, compared to where we were at even fifteen years ago. Medicines yet to be developed hold incredible potential for furthering the cause of eradicating disease. For example, it was found in a relatively small clinical trial that a small dose of IV ketamine (the Special K of street lore) sent depression packing - and kept it at bay for weeks. Imagine what that means if a pill can be developed that can do the same thing without the risks of dependence or abuse that ketamine poses.

Do I think Merck conducted itself ethically during this whole Gardasil debacle? Hell no. They're trying to get mandates established by funding the coffers of Republicans. Do I think pharmaceutical companies, even generally, conduct themselves ethically? Only if the ethical thing to do is also the financially prudent thing to do, otherwise, hell no. As it turns out, the ethical thing to do usually costs pharmaceutical companies millions of dollars in wasted money and even more in potential revenue if a drug fails safety and tolerability trials (e.g. Vioxx). They have no qualm with putting a beneficial drug on the market (because Vioxx was beneficial, at least for the people it didn't kill) that might also be dangerous for a lot of people. Like I said, they don't care about you or your grandma. There's no love lost between me a pharmaceutical companies.

But, for some strange reason, I'm able to seperate out my disdain for big pharma from the almost always beneficial and sometimes wonderous drugs that they produce. Maybe I'm crazy. Maybe I need pills. Or maybe I really am a shill for big pharma. Something tells me you probably already made up your mind before you finished reading this post.

Thanks for reading, in any event.

[TahitiNut]

1. Hmmm... I thought I was going to read about feeding babies to the starving poor.

Swift. :silly:

[NMMNG]

2. What is this?

Logic and rationality over knee jerk extremism? Where am I? :P

[trotsky]

3. Good post!

There seems to be a line of thinking among some that if you are in favor of Gardasil and/or mandating it for girls before they become sexually active, that you're a shill for big pharma AND you believe everything the government tells you. (Interesting the parallels between that and how you're treated if you ask questions about 9/11 conspiracy theories.)

Big pharma makes lots of money. But they're not selling sugar pills. As you note, their products almost universally WORK. Countless Americans literally owe their lives to big pharma. And yes, there have been many Americans who LOST their lives to big pharma thanks to rushed-through drugs or withheld information. I believe it is possible to acknowledge the truth of BOTH of these facts without having to either hate everything big pharma does or trust them on every issue. Sadly, there's a fairly vocal group that doesn't agree.

[varkam]

5. I agree.

And it doesn't seem like all that untenable a position to me, but what do I know?

[Taxloss]

4. Well done sir.

The problem solved at a stroke.

[atommom]

6. It's easier to see things in black and white than in shades of gray.

But you make a good point about the good that big pharma has done. Should we trust them blindly? Of course not ... but that doesn't change the fact that they've saved many of our lives.

[tavalon]

7. Guess what?

You do live in a world where leeches are still used. We use them to keep the swelling down when a particularly sensitive, easily destroyed reimplanted body part needs to stay unswollen, like say, a finger. So, if you lop off a finger, may I assume that you would prefer a vaccine to a leech?

(I'm just being a smartass here)