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Absolutely better for you....

Perhaps a better way to put it would be "not as terrible for you".

http://www.center4research.org...

Fegan’s repeated bouts of near death and resurrection coincided precisely with brief electrical jolts coming from a small device that had been implanted under his collarbone six years earlier to control his severe epilepsy. The Vagus Nerve Stimulation, or VNS, device sends electrical impulses to the vagus nerve, which controls many crucial body functions. Fegan’s neurologist raced to the ER to turn off the device-and Fegan’s heart began beating normally again. [Medical Devices That Can Kill]

Citation (sorry about the pdf)

Here is the same citation, but html: Early Morning Classes, Sleepy Students, and Risky Behavior.

More citations are listed at the bottom of the article.

Quick summary: Starting and ending the school day early is really dumb.

Are the people at the American Academy of Pediatrics condescending pricks as well? Because their advice is to allow no screen time at all for infants and toddlers.

"How does the kindle discriminate against the blind any more than, say, A BOOK?"

Simple: by forcing Amazon to come out with a new device that caters more to their needs, 0.3% of the population (~1 million blind vs 300 million Americans) forces the other 99.7% of the population to pay for all the hardware and software advances required for them to use the device.

Completely fair IMHO

First time I've ever been called an Industry Shill, however I don't work for any drug company. If you had clicked the link I provided you would have seen that the studies that give that 2.5% figure are the studies that concluded that hormone therapy had harmful effects and resulted in a 50% reduction in the use of hormone therapy.

heres the link again, it is quite readable.

http://www.center4research.org/wmnshlth/2009/hrt02-2009.html

To provide a better sense of the additional risks that come with combination hormone therapy, the study data can be summarized more simply. Compared to a group of 10,000 women taking placebo, 10,000 women taking combination hormone therapy will experience:
-- 7 more heart attacks
-- 8 more strokes
-- 8 more cases of breast cancer
-- 18 more blood clots
-- 6 fewer cases of colorectal cancer
-- 5 fewer hip fractures

Largely the negative effects are an increase in blood clots, which kind of leads on to my next point.

Me and my grandfather have one thing in common we both had coronaries however his was in the 50's and mine was 3 weeks ago. His killed him, I'm recovering pretty well. The difference are the drug treatments and therapies that have been developed. I've now got a stent in my heart, thats an alternative to a bypass, which was first tried in 1977. Hoping for new treatments to be developed false hope? Well its clear that medical science has advanced since my grandfather had his heart attack, I would be dead without the drug that busted that clot that was killing me.

A Coronary is what happens when a clot blocks an artery feeding oxygenated blood to your heart after 20-30 minutes your heart muscle starts to die, after enough damage, heart failure the inability to pump blood occurs.

Smoking increases the load on the heart and narrows arteries, fat and high cholesterol result in a build up of fat lining the arteries and when this breaks off it causes a bleed and a clot. Obviously losing weight will reduce the amount of fat your carrying and reduce the strain on your heart. You can make 'lifestyle' changes
to reduce the risks something which everyone should be doing. The supermarkets are full of junk that is liable to kill us.

Seems that the risks of Hormone Therapy could be mitigated by the same lifestyle changes that I'm having to make after my heart attack. Actually I'd strongly recommend making changes before experiencing the effects of poor diet, lack of exercise and smoking.

The original poster was asking why Wyeth shouldn't be totally nailed for misrepresenting the risks of hormone therapy and while I don't think its right what they did I also don't see a need to bring out the pitchforks and torches either and I'm cynical enough to see that any punishment thats given out is going to be paid for by the people needing the drugs and treatments.

  I'd like to hear a womans point of view regarding hormone therapy and its benefits and dangers. Hormone therapy is quite widespread even now, its certainly in a different league to some of the other notorious drug treatments that have been brought out and then proven to be harmful.

There are benefits to hormone therapy for women as well as negative effects.

http://www.center4research.org/wmnshlth/2009/hrt02-2009.html

"It's important to note that only 2.5% of the women in the study experienced health problems. So, while the percentage increase in some diseases was rather large, the risk for most patients remained relatively small. That does not mean these risks are not important however."

The pro's and cons and associated risks and benefits is complicated and research is still on going.
while some women have decided that they do not want to risk hormone therapy others continued in spite of the
greater risks now known to exist.

3 weeks ago I had to choose to have a drug with a 5% chance of giving me a bleed on the brain 20:1 sounds bad doesn't it till you know it was almost certain death if I didn't take it.

While its bad that the real risks were hidden, you do have to remember hormone therapy can increase the quality of life for many women, and suing the drug company just increases the cost of drugs and treatments including those that are unrelated to hormone therapy. Is this practice exceptional? I doubt it.

If you sue this company your just making drugs cost more and could be making the difference between patients living or dieing due to the ability to pay for more expensive treatments.

I don't expect this to be a popular view especially with many Slashdot readers being both young and healthy.
but for older readers, who start the day with their daily meds, perhaps they would be less appreciative of the calls to make their drugs either unavailable or far more expensive.

Theres a good number of people with incurable diseases and cancers hoping and praying that the drug companies find effective treatments before they die. When you look at it that way a 2.5 % chance of some negative effect occurring isn't worth pushing a drug company to bankruptcy or delaying bringing new treatments to market.