Will I Need A Prescription For These Sugar Pills?

Big Pharma is worried. Have you noticed that there are substantially fewer new drugs that are making it through pharmaceutical testing and being released to the consumer market? Especially in the mood treatment arena where Prozac and Valium have ruled for years.

Want to know one reason why?

Because evidently, sugar pills are as just as effective at curing us as many of comprehensively researched, painstakingly designed, and massively marketed medicinal cocktails being developed by companies like Merck and Smith-Glaxo. And it’s not that the new drugs don’t work. You don’t spend all those dollars on research and development unless you are pretty sure the drug will do what it’s supposed to do. The key to getting it to market is to ensure a minimum of overly dangerous side effects.

So the new drugs are typically effective in bestowing the medicinal benefits intended. It’s just that, during the clinical testing trials of these new drugs, the placebos are proving to work just as well at providing those same benefits.

New drug comes up for trial testing. A group of test subjects is selected. Some percentage of those subjects are given the real drug, while another group is given sugar pills that look like the real drug. Neither group knows whether they are getting the real thing or not.

Many of these tests are now showing that the group taking the placebo experiences an inordinately high number of member individuals who show the same benefits as those in the other group taking the real drug. In other words, in these cases, people even thinking they might be taking the real drug somehow fool their body into producing the same effects as they would expect if they really were taking the drug.

It’s really hurting the pharmaceutical industry because the FDA will not approve any drug where the placebo effect during testing distorts the true intended benefits of the drug.

As a result of this phenomena, scientists are beginning to discover that the power of the human brain can be a far stronger healing agent than Big Pharma’s black bag of pills, powders, and potions.

There’s a great article in last month’s Wired Magazine that gets into far more detail. You can read the online version here.

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

Government 101 - How To Ram A Bill Down The Throats Of The American Public

Encouraging news out of Philadelphia.

In an attempt to win public support, the Democrats are taking their government run health care pep rally to the streets.

Now first, never forget that the only time the politicians care what we street people think is when they don’t already have enough votes in Congress Castle to get their way. Chasing public support is a last ditch effort to pressure other politicians to jump on the bandwagon.

Well, it appears that this bandwagon is turning into a hearse.

Senator Arlen Specter and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius participated in a town hall meeting in Philadelphia this past Sunday. There, in front of over 400 people, they spoke about the need for health care reform and how the ruling minds in Washington will put out the best plan for the American people.

Of course, there are like fifty proposed plans currently in some stage of review in Congress. And the Senate proposal hasn’t even been written yet. So, it looks like they’ll have plenty of options to choose from.

The key message Specter and Sebelius were delivering is that the system is broken and that any viable solution will require a government run public health care plan to fix things. Needless to say, that message did not receive a warm reception. There were boos. There was yelling. There was rotten fruit being thrown. Okay, I can’t confirm the fruit, but the crowd definitely turned ugly.

Most of the crowd comments ranged from ridiculing the government’s ability to manage a lemonade stand much less health care, to questions as to whether Senator Arlen had even read any of the proposed bills. To which the esteemed Congressman replied that he had aides to do that. That comment really endeared him to the crowd, and almost every comment he made from that point forward was met with boos.

My favorite response from a woman in the crowd:

“I look at this health care plan and I see nothing that is about health or about care. What I see is a bureaucratic nightmare, senator. Medicaid is broke, Medicare is broke, Social Security is broke and you want us to believe that a government that can’t even run a cash for clunkers program is going to run one-seventh of our U.S. economy? No sir, no,” she said.

The American people have spoken.

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.