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Valid Point, There is this ;)

America does have one of the Worlds Best Health Care Systems."Money Can Buy" ;) ATM

FYI
Canadians Increasingly Come to U.S. For Health Care
Canadian Politician Comes to U.S. for Heart Surgery
Why Canadian premier seeks health care in U.S. - SFGate

We already have the walk-in Euthanasia clinics. It's called the Medical Industry. Just keep visiting all sorts of doctors and have scans etc. eventually they'll mess something up, or pretend you have cancer so they can drug you and train some students on the latest butcher 2000 robot operating experiment and if that or your nurse doesn't kill you, they'll send you to the hospice to do it.

http://www.consumerreports.org...
http://www.medpagetoday.com/En...
http://www.nbcnews.com/health/...
http://rense.com/general9/cre....

Reading an article like this, I can just hear my regulatory affairs officer having a heart attack in my head.

I realize that very few people here have ever had dealings with the FDA. The FDA regulates the interstate marketing of medical tools (including software) and drugs, everything they do comes from that core mission and authority. Press releases and statements are pretty central to that mission. You should try to limit press on your product to what the FDA agrees you've proven. Depending on your views of the government, medical ethics, and your risk tolerance, "should try to" in that statement might be "must" or "should pretend to."

Software focusing on "health" isn't really regulated, but "diagnostic" means this is medical. If you think they made a diagnostic tool for skin cancer, then they may have a problem when it comes time to talk with the FDA. They haven't shown that they have a diagnostic yet, that's the point of the last quote in the article, but that quote is in FDA-speak while the rest of the article is less formal sounding. (They've done what's called a retrospective study, which is at most half of what is necessary.)

Generally, the authors on the paper are smarter than this. Here's an example of an article a Stanford Dermatologist usually contributes to. Note that the Dermatologist quoted in that article is also quoted in TFA. Note the difference in tone of the publication, the whole thing is in FDA-speak. Yes, it's super boring. It's also not going to give anyone at the FDA a reason to hold up an application for marketing prior to approval.

If your asshole is tight and is only used for poop, then you don't have HIV.

You dumb fuck.

http://www.medpagetoday.com/me...

No the "cure" I am talking about is dissolving the inclusion bodies and allowing the cells to function normally again.

Lets says you have a condition that for whatever reason is forming these bodies in your cells at a certain rate and as you age your cells get worse at running correctly so at 60 your cells are damaged enough you are diagnosed with alzheimers. We could give you the treatment and completely restore the cells to full functioning.

To be certain, by the time any of the effects show up, the damage is long done. Any plausible fix/repair for Alzheimers would require very early intervention. As in early 30's http://www.medpagetoday.com/ne... , or perhaps even childhood: http://www.wsj.com/articles/al...

The problem is you still have the condition and will still make more of these inclusion bodies but the process is very slow. At 80 you would probably need another treatment to restore full function and another at 100 etc. That is why these are not permanent cures but there is also no reason not to just use it again.

I can see from your post that you are sort of confusing some of the telltale clues and assuming that removing the aluminum containing plaques will restore a person's mental facilities. This is probably a false lead for many. It is the sort of thing that has caused many people to attempt to avoid aluminum and alumina - one of the most common elements and minerals on earth, so good luck with that. Because of studies and easy database searches, and out desire to blame ourselves for our frailty. As well, too much zinc supposedly causes Alzheimer's. Then again, too little zinc supposedly causes Alzheimer's.

But as with the overwhelmingly largest factor influencing our longevity in the first place, my money is on genetics. And any "cure" for Alzheimer's will have to be tackled through genetic manipulation. Some people are going to get it, some aren't. My father and I discussed finances within 12 hours of his death from COPD. My Mother in law thought my wife was her mother for 10 years.

Most of the stuff I am aware of is trying to restore full functionality. That is why restoring the brain is so important since it is a major reason to end up in a nursing home.

I'm pretty curious about a treatment that can restore full function in a symptomatic Alzheimer's patient. As noted, the neurodegeneration has been going on for a good while before the overt symptoms appear.

Thanks to all the mentions of colchicine in all these discussions, I got to Googling around to see if anything has changed since I quit getting my refills of the brand-name colchicine, which for a long time was the only option.

I have just discovered that there is now apparently a generic available:

http://www.medpagetoday.com/Rh...

Probiotics are only effective to prevent C diff. Useless once you have it, except maybe to prevent recurrence. Once you have C diff, it is imperative to get treatment, either fecal transfer (either as a pill or via colonoscopic instillation; enemas or nasoduodenal routes are less effective) or go on to a special antibiotic regiment.

The problem is that C diff has become to common that it is starting to become resistant to the typical treatment (metronidazole or oral vancomycin). This is starting to become dangerous, because unchecked C diff can be lethal (I have seen people die from this) or result in the removal of the entire colon - if your surgeon can get to you in time.

And before you DIYer get any ideas....this is not something to mess around with. It's kinda like packing your own parachute, you better know what the hell you're doing cause you probably only have one shot at this.

I dunno. Lots of association-or-causation questions there.

I read Nora Volkow's review article in NEJM. Here's a good article in MedPage Today commenting on it. http://www.medpagetoday.com/Ps...

You are correct. Thanks for the citation.

Kevin Pho wrote about this on his blog.

http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/20...
A virtual office visit for your cold is not a good idea
Kevin Pho, MD | Kevin's Take | February 10, 2013

But something is lost through these virtual connections. There is value to face-to-face interaction, where a provider talks to and examines a patient in person. For example, I’ve seen a patient convinced that he had a sinus infection only to find that he had a tumor inside his nose. Another complained of minor ear pain, but after examining her, I saw that it had spread to the point where she needed to be hospitalized for intravenous antibiotics. Both of these diagnoses would have been missed had I only treated them over the Internet.

Without the ability to talk to and examine patients in the exam room, many doctors play it safe and reflexively prescribe drugs, whether patients need them or not. A recent study from the Journal of the American Medical Association http://www.medpagetoday.com/Pr... found that patients who were treated through Internet-based virtual visits had higher antibiotic prescription rates for their sinus infections, compared to patients whom were seen in the office.

That's actually Archives of Internal Medicine (now JAMA IM).
"Physicians ordered fewer tests, but prescribed antibiotics more often, when they evaluated patients for sinusitis and urinary tract infections (UTIs) via Internet-based virtual office visits versus in-person visits, a study of four primary care practices showed," as MedPage Today put it. Mehrotra A, et al "A comparison of care at e-visits and physician offices visits for sinusitis and urinary tract infection" Arch Intern Med 2012; DOI :10.1001/2013/jamainternmed.305.

It's frustrating to see how they keep prescribing antibiotics for sinus infections. You can't do a quick strep test on Skype (not that a negative strep test will stop many inappropriate prescriptions for antibiotics). JAMA IM had 2 articles lately about patients who got inappropriate antibiotics for sinusitis, and went on to Clostridium difficile, one of them fatal. It's interesting to see the answers doctors give when you ask them, "Why are you giving me antibiotics for a viral infection?"

Oh, you wanted to know what I thought of the value of a physical examination. I told my doctor, "I want whatever the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force says I should have." I want him to follow the guidelines, whenever there are guidelines. You can't do a lot of the stuff in the guidelines over Skype.

I'm not sure that you can do much more on Skype than you can over the phone. And my doctor (and his covering doctors) are not willing to do much over the phone, I think not because of the money but because they don't feel confident diagnosing someone over the phone. I'd like to be able to discuss things over the phone, with the understanding that I'd follow up with an office visit when appropriate. But doctors don't do that.

Last time I went to the doctor, it was because some nurse on the phone told me that, based on my symptoms, I might have heart failure. (It was ridiculous.) So there you go: standard exam for heart failure. In addition to listening to my history, my doctor listened to my chest, observed my neck veins, and ordered blood and urine tests. You can't do that on Skype.

Skype sounds like a gimmick, which may be appropriate in rural Alaska or Africa, but not in developed countries. Typical American marketing: You can do something equally well with a simple, cheap phone call or a fancy hi-tech teleconference. Which do you do?

There were studies which found that telephone psychotherapy was as effective as in-person visits. I wouldn't be comfortable with that, but if they have good published evidence for it, I'll go along with it.

Went looking for the original paper to see how many cases were looked at. Dr. Sandhu doesn't show up in a search for UC at Denver so no luck there. A few news article referenced a Conference which points to http://www.medpagetoday.com/Me... .

That page says that the # of extra attacks is 8. Moreover, Dr. Sandhu is quoted as saying that the total number of heart attacks in the week leading up to and following the clock change is unchanged so if there is an effect at all, it's front-loading the week's expected heart attack frequency.

And if my child got permanently disabled (H1N1 Vaccine Tied to Spike in Narcolepsy - http://www.medpagetoday.com/In...), then what do I do?

Note, I am all for vaccinations, but in today's world, I'm increasingly cautious because governments health agencies don't do their jobs in proper science or oversight...

And then I read stuff like this:
H1N1 Vaccine Tied to Spike in Narcolepsy: http://www.medpagetoday.com/In...

I'm so tired of having my tin-foil wearing friends tell me that they were right all along.

Why should I risk my child getting disabled for life due to some hidden government agenda/bad science/[insert-favorite-reason-here]? These researchers are never around to share in any poor parent's misery when their children suffer permanent harm.

There are indeed such risks. Particularly in the US, doctors sometimes suggest or encourage unnecessary c-sections because they think they're safer (and less likely to result in lawsuits), opening the door to a number of complications; people (either doctors or mothers) choose to induce labour chemically to fit a schedule, leading to fatal exhaustion from prolonged labour; and there's some evidence that lying down while giving birth is less healthy than standing up, simply because of how the human body is built, which comes with yet another raft of potential issues. Here is a discussion of the first one. Not sure I agree with this study, but hey, these things happen. It's fairly easy to research.

http://www.medpagetoday.com/Cardiology/Hypertension/36248

In 2011, for example, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study by Stolarz-Skrzypek et al. that found only a weak correlation between salt and blood pressure

3. Generics are readily available. Instead of buying Panadol (Tylanol) I can get Brand X paracetamol/codeine which is the same recipe but 1/4 the price. The same is true for most prescription drugs.

As it turns out, generics aren't necessarily equivalent to the original perscription drug.
Since it's late, you get the first article I found on Google
It's a fair representation of the other articles I've read on the subject.

That article is comparing different types of drugs, not the generic variant of the same drug. Completely different thing.

If I were to buy a packet of branded "Nurofen Plus" (200 mg ibuprofen, 15 mg codeine) instead of a generic "Pharmacy Brand Ibuprofen plus" (200 mg ibuprofen, 15 mg codeine) what exactly is the difference? Aside from price, the difference is cosmetic, the box is plain without much branding, generic white pills, pills only embossed with batch numbers.

Now when it comes to patented prescription medication, in Australia there is a box on every prescription that state "Do not allow substitution" that doctors can tick if they want a patient to get a specific drug if the generic has a different effect.

1. They aren't allowed to advertise prescription medicine.
2. They aren't allowed to offer payola to doctors for using their drugs. Both the doctor and the company get busted if they get caught.

You've just described the developed world... except for the USA and New Zealand.
Everyone else has strong limitations on direct-to-consumer-advertising, or an outright ban.

3. Generics are readily available. Instead of buying Panadol (Tylanol) I can get Brand X paracetamol/codeine which is the same recipe but 1/4 the price. The same is true for most prescription drugs.

As it turns out, generics aren't necessarily equivalent to the original perscription drug.
Since it's late, you get the first article I found on Google
It's a fair representation of the other articles I've read on the subject.

The TLDR version is that generics don't always make the same amount of drug available to the patient
and even if they do, the drug may not be released in the same fashion, leading to early or late peaks of the drug.

This has been studied time and time again.
Any sport that involves any repeated impact to the head - whether football, boxing or soccer will result in brain injury.

In Minnesota and the surrounding states a lot of people have been coming down with pertussis/whooping cough due to the new vaccine being less effective. http://www.medpagetoday.com/MeetingCoverage/IDWeek/35469. Oops! re-vaccinate.

In the small group of participants who became cannabis dependent before age 18 -- a total of 23 cohort members -- the decline translated to an average of about 8 IQ points, whereas 14 participants who also showed heavy cannabis use but only beginning in adulthood showed only a very small drop in full-scale scores (P=0.02), Meier and colleagues indicated online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

However, the strongest relationships between persistent dependence and IQ decline applied to those who began heavy use in adolescence. Meier and colleagues suggested that, actually, the relationship between dependence and IQ decline may be entirely driven by this group.

here is the source i used: http://www.medpagetoday.com/Psychiatry/Addictions/34415 i would bet there is some external factor not controlled for.

They seem to be making some progress on ALS:
http://www.medpagetoday.com/Neurology/GeneralNeurology/28129
http://alsn.mda.org/news/ubiquilin-2-abnormalities-connected-als

Hopefully it'll be fast enough for you.

"I'm not sure what the right response would be. Mostly to grow up as a society and stop alienating people to the point where they decide that the solution to their problems with the rest of society is to eliminate as much of it as possible. But I really have no idea how to achieve that."

I agree, and here are some ideas I put together on that:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere? ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "

And:
http://www.livableincome.org/amillionairegli.htm
"Right now, a profit driven health care system has sized emergency rooms for average needs, and those emergency rooms are often full. With a basic income and more money going on a systematic basis to the health care system, the health care system emergency rooms will no longer be overrun with people there for reasons they could see a doctor for. So, emergency care would be better for millionaires. Millionaires with heart attacks won't be as likely to end up being diverted to far away hospitals because the local hospital emergency room is full.
Likewise, emergency rooms might, with more money going to medicine, become sized for national emergencies, not personal emergencies, so they might become vast empty places, with physicians and other health care staff keeping their skills sharp always running simulations, learning more medical information, and/or doing basic medical research, with these people always ready for a pandemic or natural disaster or industrial accident which they had the resources in reserve to deal with. So, millionaires who got sick or injured in a disaster could be sure there was the facilities and expertise nearby to help them, even if most of the rest of the population needed help too at the same time too. In that way, some of this basic income could be funded by money that might otherwise go to the Defense department, because what is better civil defense then investing in a health care system able to to handle national disasters? So, any millionaires who are doctors (many are) would benefit by this plan, because their lives as doctors will become happier and less stressful, both with less paperwork and with more resources."

Lots more links on my site. See also this site on "A Newer Way Of Thinking":
http://anwot.org/

Sadly, this was also in the news yesterday about budget cuts to health programs:
"Report Claims Cuts Weaken U.S. Bioterrorism Response"
http://www.medpagetoday.com/InfectiousDisease/Surveillance/30333

A great related article:

For example...
Most of southwest USA will be hispanic within 20 years. It's a growing population.
http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/PublicHealth/22479
* Teen Birth Rate Drops in U.S., but Not for Hispanics
and
http://www.census.gov/population/www/pop-profile/natproj.html
* In fact, the Hispanic-origin population would contribute 32 percent of the Nation's population growth from 1990 to 2000, 39 percent from 2000 to 2010, 45 percent from 2010 to 2030, and 60 percent from 2030 to 2050.

Similarly, elsewhere the islamic population is coming to dominate populations.

I can't find this on India.
China had such a brutal birth control policy it may not be happening there.

The cause for high breeding rate could be personal traits or some social meme (religion, customs, etc.)

Similarly, people who are sloppy about birth control.
Think about the personality traits that lead you to be reckless about birth control (high lust, impulsive, substance use combined with sex) and those traits which do not.
In one generation, the "reckless" female can have 4 to 5 children who will share those traits with the mother. The reckless male could have many more children.
The cautious female and male might have no children.

So after just one generation, you could have (as a pure example) 100 couples that produce 100 children.
None from 10 careful couples who missed breeding opportunity.
about 80 from 80 careful or mixed couples who bred at replacement level.
about 20 from 10 careful couples.

The next iteration- the reckless traits are more common.

I don't think we have had enough time pass yet to conclude people will continue having no children based on a tradeoff for a better life. Very quickly those who value children over a better personal life will die out from the population over multiple iterations.

Of course, then you have the drop in sperm counts from estrogen poisoning-- that may take longer to develop resistance to.

Those are some pretty big if's:

1. The safety of the machines hasn't been proven, they haven't been out long enough to compile long term statistics on their safety to the public and to the people running the scanners. Xrays are ionizing radiation, and even if they don't penetrate the skin I can't imagine that messing around with skin cell DNA molecules is healthy for anyone and there are some real questions about the effects of the machines. What safeguards are in the machine to monitor X-ray levels and prevent overdosing? Everyone here knows that even if there are safeguards in place, they are not foolproof.

2. The security of the scanners is quite another unknown - who will be viewing the images? What precautions are taking to protect the privacy of the virtually naked pictures of an unsuspecting public?

And the biggest "if": Have the machines proven to be effective? Some researchers have already found trivial ways to bypass the scanners (hiding contraband in a body cavity is the obvious hole (no pun intended), but they also found that you can tape high explosives to your body to conceal it. And a typical bus station or stadium has more security holes than an airport (which have already been shown to have a porous perimeter despite the security screenings), so why should we think that scanning the public will enhance security at all?

New York Times, November 28th 2009 - 1 in 4 children currently on food stamps

MARTINSVILLE, Ohio -- With food stamp use at record highs and climbing every month, a program once scorned as a failed welfare scheme now helps feed one in eight Americans and one in four children.

Half of American Children Receive Food Stamps

Nearly half (49.2%) of American children will, at some point between the ages of 1 and 20, reside in a house that receives food stamps, according to a report in the Nov. 2 issue of the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

More than a quarter of American children (26.1%) will receive food stamps by the age of 5, the study found.

39 Million and rising on Food Stamps - Household SNAP participants increased from 12,728,981 in Fiscal Year 2008 to 15,232,105 in fiscal year 2009, a 16.4% increase. For comparison purposes, watch the growth in household participation.

and up higher again - 41,275,411 as of June. - Double digit increases in all but 4 states - average increase 18% year over year.

More from the NYTArticle:

This is the first recession in which a majority of the poor in metropolitan areas live in the suburbs, giving food stamps new prominence there. Use has grown by half or more in dozens of suburban counties from Boston to Seattle, including such bulwarks of modern conservatism as California's Orange County, where the rolls are up more than 50 percent.

Use among children is especially high. A third of the children in Louisiana, Missouri and Tennessee receive food aid. In the Bronx, the rate is 46 percent. In East Carroll Parish, La., three-quarters of the children receive food stamps.

Please educate yourself.

Recent Results do not look good for Saw Palmetto.

http://www.medpagetoday.com/Urology/BPH/2643

I'm on HRT so I take it. It looks like it may not have made a difference.

When I ever get Prostate Cancer, I'll be taken off HRT and life will turn back to the hell it was before I went on HRT.

So the prostate cancer vaccination news was nice in some regard.

HRT does not cause prostate cancer but it accelerates it once you get it.

The Lancet didn't retract that ridiculous paper from 1998 until last month and it pretty much started all this ridiculous BS. It's absolutely unconscionable that they didn't retract it sooner. Ten of the original 13 authors retracted back in 2004. That should have been a hint.

The problem with vaccines is that being vaccinated as an individual isn't what makes you safe. It's the vaccination of the herd that protects. That is, for a particular disease that you might be vaccinated against, let's say measles, it's safer to be the only person in a crowd who isn't vaccinated than to be the one person in the crowd who is vaccinated. Vaccines aren't 100% effective and what makes them truly effective, is having everyone take them.

Back in 2006, some girl in Indiana got measles on a trip to Romania. She came back and shared that gift with the people in her church, simply by showing up. Roughly 10% of the 500 people present weren't vaccinated and 32% of those people developed the measles. One person who got the vaccine also got the measles, but 94% of the cases were unvaccinated people.

The problem these days is that people don't bother to learn history. Anyone who's been to an old cemetery (I live in Arkansas, and we have tons of them) pretty much can't miss the fact that there are tons of kids aged 10 and under buried. Why? In the early 1800s, infant mortality was about 20%. Think about that. One in five infants (1 year old and younger) died. A lot more died before the age of 5. Not all of that is vaccines, but a lot of it is! Before the vaccine, smallpox alone was killing 400,000 Europeans a year.

Personally, I think vaccines ought to be required by law because they're a public safety issue and people who won't do it should go to jail.

Just to note that curing vitamin D deficiency (very inexpensive, either from sunlight or supplements) can prevent many cases of cancer:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/cancerMain.shtml
as well as many cases of heart disease, stroke, hypertension, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, depression, chronic pain, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, muscle weakness, muscle wasting, birth defects, periodontal disease, influenza, autism, and more (there are different degrees of scientific evidence for those). See:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/

But vitamin D supplements or sunbathing is so cheap, there is not profit in telling people about this...
"Treating Disease With Vitamin D"
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
"Why Michelle Obama is More Likely to Die From Breast Cancer than Hillary Clinton"
http://curtisduncan.blogspot.com/2009/10/why-michelle-obama-is-more-likely-to.html

There are other inexpensive treatments to prevent or cure cancer with various degrees of anecdotal evidence (like IV vitamin C as a cancer treatment),
http://www.medpagetoday.com/HematologyOncology/OtherCancers/2938
but curing vitamin D deficiency (now widespread as we all spend more time indoors at computers) has lots of scientific evidence about its value in relation to cancer and a wide variety of other things because vitamin D is essential to regulating the expression of thousands of gene. That is why being vitamin D deficient has such widespread negative effects -- sort of like deleting thousands of files at random on your hard drive... What's amazing is that humans survive at all with so little sunlight... So big is this effect of vitamin D deficiency on health that for Western Europe alone it has been suggested:
"A Decade Of Vitamin D Supplementation Would Save $4.4 Trillion Over A Decade; Would Save $1346 Per Person Per Annum"
http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi111.html

Where are the US CDC, FDA, AMA, and other acronyms doing about all this? Good question...

Essentially, the US RDA for vitamin D is about ten times too low, as it was set decades ago for healthy bones, not a healthy heart, a healthy brain, a healthy immune system, or a healthy weight. The toxicity fears have also been overblown (vitamin A is much more toxic, and according to Dr. Cannell who runs the vitamin D council website, many people through supplements have too much vitamin A which interferes with vitamin D.)
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/vitaminDToxicity.shtml
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/newsletter/2008-december.shtml

Although just how much vitamin D as supplements you need depends on things like your weight, your skin color, your behavior outdoors, your latitude, your personal biochemestry, and so on, so regular blood tests are important (even though people still disagree over what the optimum level should be). Example:
http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-rda-for-vitamin-d.html

The average light skinned human adult in a bathing suit at moderate latitudes under noonday summer sun will make 10,000 to 20,000 IUs of vitamin D in twenty minutes or so in their skin, and up to 50,000 units before their skin turns pink (sunburns are of course bad for you). The reaction is self

Maybe we should spend a little more money on literacy and math, since you fail at both.

US medical spending is over $2.5 trillion http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/Washington-Watch/13016
US defense spending is $685 billion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States

Free your mind ... your ass will follow.

Your case is very unique. The doses you take would be considered excessive if I were to take them, but in your case it is appropriate because otherwise there is a good chance you'd get incredibly sick or possibly die. Primary immunodeficiency is said to occur in 103/1 million people. Any change in the prescribing of antibiotics would be focused on the other +900k people that can often recover on their own without antibiotics in less time than the full prescription is supposed to be taken for.

No wonder we see large movements away from things like vaccinations, which save lives.

Some vaccinations save lives. Smallpox vaccine? Polio vaccine? Rock on. Flu shot? Questionable benefit. Chicken pox vaccine? Might save kids from itching (or might just save them from catching it as kids and let them get chicken pox as adults, when it's more dangerous), but you're more likely to die from a lightning strike than from chicken pox; I'm highly skeptical.

> one of the victims saying how awful it was to vomit for hours on end.

One of the most common side effects of Osteltamivir (Tamiflu) - seen in over one in ten treated - is nausea and vomiting, sometimes diarrhoea. Almost all cases of suspected swine flu since a couple of weeks ago would be treated with Tamiflu. A worrying fact is that the flu virus splits into separate strands inside the cell, and if another flu virus is present, they can swap strands, effectively recombining into totally new strains. There are already strains resistant to the Tamiflu in the wild.

It scares me when nitwits like you post garbage like the following:

Without measurements, I can say with certainty that our climate is changing.

Because as we all well know, human memory is fallible.. Not just that, extremely fallible. Not to mention extremely vulnerable to self-delusion, unconsciously-induced Selection Bias and Confirmation Bias, and to false memory planting.

You may not agree with the scope and severity of the climate change. Fine. But to deny that it is happening shows a complete inability to observe the world around you over the course of decades.

"To deny that it is happening" - I didn't see that. I did see an argument over whether it is man-made, and the entire ARTICLE is about the supposed "scientists" who are engaging in poor science because they are engaging in Selection Bias and Confirmation Bias quite deliberately, invalidating all of their supposed "research."

some folks still prefer urban legends over real science

Some of us thought we were preferring the latest research.

We've been vaccinating people against disease for what? Forty years?

The Jenner smallpox vaccine was over 200 years ago. So we've been vaccinating people for a long time. The basic idea is a win. But...

I doubt vaccinations will be laughed at in a hundred years, because they have a proven track record.

Vaccination itself, no. But I hope that the idea of putting thimerisol (a mercury compound) into vaccines will be laughed out of practice, indeed I think this is already occurring.

We may - or may not - find that other additives currently used in vaccines ought to go.

We may - or may not - find that a different scheduling is easier on the immune system and causes fewer complications. (We usually don't catch three or four major diseases at once, after all.)

We may - or may not - find that some of the vaccines for minor diseases aren't worth the hassle. (For example, for a generally healthy person like me, without a lot of exposure and in a normal flu season, I don't think that the risk of complications from a flu shot is worth the benefit of being immunized against a strain that might not even be current. And it turns out it may not be useful in the elderly after all. Instead I'm watching my vitamin D.)

Actually soap doesn't tend to kill bacteria. It merely lifts it off the surface of the skin and running water carries it away. (but for sanitization purposes it serves essentially the same outcome) However, there were studies done that found antibacterial soap was no better at sanitizing skin than normal hand soap. The antibiotic in some hand soap rarely takes effect until the bacteria is already off of your hands. And therefore is essentially useless. This is however merely allowing the bacteria to gain an evolutionary defense against the antibiotic. It should not be used in the home. It should be reserved for hospital use only.

Citation

There is some indication that parasites might help you as well.

Basically the theory, which originated from the observation that autoimmune diseases were vastly more prevalent in the developed world, goes that there has been a natural selection for parasites that manage to downregulate the immune system (so as to stop it from attacking them). This made a corresponding natural selection for more aggressive human immune systems. Basically you had somewhat of a downregulation aggression race which was pretty balanced. Then, in one generation, the parasites were wiped out, leaving many humans with way too aggressive immune systems.

Who knows, but it does seem to be quiet a hot research topic (although it is currently mostly focused on the likes of Crohns), with several articles in medical journals and at least two companies into producing worms. Here's a link to some results with respect to MS.

Good luck with your disease.

The NIH alone contributed 28% of medical research funds in 2005. There are other sources of state and federal funds. My statistical source for the roughly half number is from an article in Wired magazine (I couldn't find it online; do a lexus nexus search if your school or workplace will pay for it ;-)). It stated that government money previously provided for the majority of the funding for medical research, and government funding for health science has increased, but industry funding has increased faster, so now private funds account for just over half. Not for profit private foundations also provide some funding (I've seen 10% attributed to them). Whatever the exact numbers, it should be clear that the fruits of this research is excessively ending up in for profit hands.

97.8

The occasional childhood problem was making people believe I felt lousy. Some viruses can make you feel pretty crummy with only a degree or so of fever.

As a down side I wonder if that is a contributing factor to my borderline obesity. I do feel noticeably and unpleasantly cold when I am hungry. And I hate with a passion levels of office air conditioning that others seem to find tolerable.

Since we are taking names, probably the most famous low temperature person?

George W. Bush

President Bush Sails Through Annual Physical
http://www.medpagetoday.com/PrimaryCare/Preventive Care/tb/1460?pfc=101&spc=235

Their study is bogus. Obesity has been already linked to depression, and everyone knows that the depressed person has more problems with memory and with cognitive thinking. So they spent all of that money on the study for nothing. Obesity Linked to Depression, or Vice Versa Obesity and Depression

You've hit on an interesting point. People who drink bottled water (unfluoridated, obviously) tend to have a HIGHER incidence of tooth decay: http://www.medpagetoday.com/PrimaryCare/DentalHeal th/tb/1756

I think you've summed up the problem well, what the diagnosis was intended for and what's it becoming applied to are two different things.

more of a bizarre confusion regarding what the mental disorder entails.

I agree it's a confusion, but to me it doesn't seem bizarre, I believe the diagnostic criteria are poorly written and overly broad, to the point where way too many people are getting diagnosed (the wikipedia article for aspergers cites numbers like 7 expected cases per 1000, yet diagnosis rates are shooting up, way up).

It's not just aspergers, but that one is close to my heart since my chosen lifestyle and my personality almost just fits into what they are calling diagnostic criteria.

Mental Disorders Strike Nearly Half of All Americans

Do you really think half of all americans are mentally ill? Discounting certain election-induced mass delusions, I seriously doubt it.

It's becoming a major industry to create disease where there is none, to make any nonconformity a disease. It's a dangerous cross between commercial interest in pushing designer prescription drugs, and government interest in supressing non-conformity, and removing personal responsibility. Removing responsibility removes freedom.

It also does a disservice to the truely mentally ill like your brother in law. It clouds the issue of what is and isn't a mental disorder. Him being lumped in with millions of kids with normal behavior problems, and thousands of nerdy adults that want an easy cop-out does not do him any good.