The article in question was the result of actual research:) And it's well known that clearing land from forest raises temperatures. There are several reasons. One *minor* one is the contribution of CO2 from the burning of the cut materials. But there are other more significant reasons - none of which I can recall at the moment!:P I am pretty sure that part of it is related to the way that forest moderates local temperatures - it's always cooler under the trees than out on the bare ground. But I can't remember the way it works. The timeframe went all the way back to the beginning of farming (4000 BC?)
I'm still rooting for Svensmark - and speculating on whether it's possible to maintain a city under a moving sheet of ice a mile thick. If it's in the right place (say, in a deep river valley like Pittsburgh so there wasn't much tendency to push on the side, such as a raised dome would suffer), could a city-covering frame be engineered carry the weight of the ice? If so, then some northern cities might actually be able to survive, given a sufficient energy source.
Interesting - several major city ports from Roman times, referenced in the New Testament (I think Ephesus is one of them), are now miles from the Mediterranean. If sea level rises, then maybe those cities might become ports again.
An article in Scientific American back around 2003-2004 (I forget when exactly) covered work that seemed to show that indeed, we were not only overdue for another ice age, but we had begun going in back a few thousand years ago. But the advent and epansion of farming (which has a tendency to warm things, for several reasons discussed in the paper/article) increasingly mitigated the cooling trend. The variance between actual temperatures and predicted temperatures for entering into an ice age was linear with the expanding acreage of farmland. So the author argued that we have been staving off the next ice age for some 4000 years. He had citations, sorry I'm too lazy to go back and find the article.
I'll just add that the sons of a friend of mine have an online Rx business, based in India. It turns out that an increasingly large majority of all Rx drugs sold in the US are actually manufactured in India, mostly by contract manufacturers. And with proper authorization, you can buy the legit drugs in India from the manufacturer, WITH the U.S. labelling, for a small fraction of the cost. Even with the cost of overnight shipping the cost is often 1/5 of what it costs here. As far as they can tell the drug companies don't even object - they have a good relationship with the companies.
The little secret with almost all Rx drugs is that the actual cost of manufacturing is almost in the noise level compared to the retail cost - maybe 0.5%. The whole business has a financial model similar to power utilities - huge up front costs, amortized over many years. But also that cost for a few new drugs (9 out of 10 of which don't make it) is amortized over the whole product line - and again, liability insurance or amortized reserves for handling liability eats 1/3 of gross wholesale receipts.
Also kinda like rock bands - a band may put out three or four CDs with a dozen songs on each, and one of those three dozen songs is actually a money maker. And only about one in 1000 bands makes $100,000 on their CD sales in a year.
Funny you should mention colchicine. Back when I was in 9th grade I started a Science Fair experiment that I was going to use colchicine for. Colchicine has this interesting property - when you treat seeds of some plants with it they often die, but sometimes they survive but the chromosomes are doubled in the plant that grows, and the result is a tetraploid plant that often has much brighter colors, stronger smell or flavor, and sometimes grows half size. My experiment involved Euglena, which I was going to try treating with colchicine and see what happened. At that time you could buy colchicine over the counter from chemical supply companies - I don't think it even had a medicinal use at that time. I never followed through with the experiment though. As it happens, we now know that Euglena are not simple one-celled plants, so it's hard to say what might have occurred.
we're way offtopic here, but I have had some experience in healthcare a long time ago. It's not 'gouging' so much as the entire structure of the health delivery system is built in such a way that everything is treated like an FAA-certified custom-built part for a 747. (The coffee pot on a 747 costs about $5000.) The structure has several components - low volume, high liability, onerous regulatory and reporting requirements, captive markets, and boutique suppliers. The new Obamacare is going to make all of that worse, essentially the entire industry has been sold to the 'beltway bandits', who are used to the government contracting process.
Back in 1979-1980 I took flying lessons. I learned that the crappy radios in general aviation airplanes (that sound like the ordering station at Quickie Burger) cost $2500 each in 1978. At the time a much higher quality CB radio - much newer technology, better reception, better sound, higher reliability, better user interface - cost about $100. the difference was that an aviation radio had to be certified by UL, FAA and FCC. Each of those certifications cost over $1 million (and a year or two) even in 1978, and if even the supplier of a resistor was changed, the whole thing had to be recertified. That cost was amortized over a few thousand radios - adding perhaps $1000 to the cost of a $100 radio, then add normal R&D, engineering, other business costs and markups, and you're going to sell it for $2500 including retail store markup.
In 1977 I worked briefly for a company that made kidney dialysis machines. Part of the machine was a blood pump. A blood pump was a loop of clear 1/2" PVC tubing, looped around a triangle of three little wheels that pushed against the tubing, squeezing it shut in two places at the same time, forcing blood gently through the system as the triangle rotated - a simple, reliable system. The tubing had to be replaced for each dialysis treatment. The tubing was identical to the stuff you can buy in any hardware store today for about $1 per foot ($3 per meter?), but it was cut, sterilized and put into a sterile package and shipped to the dialysis center. It's a low volume business - this ain't WalMart. Included in the cost was all of the testing, analysis, liability insurance, and of course the labor to package, process orders, and ship. Again, it had to be recertified by FDA if the length changed or the supplier changed - cost $1 million. Liability insurance was on the order of 30% of the cost. the market was a captive monopoly - no sane dialysis center would use any brand of tubing except the one provided by the machine manufacturer because if anything went wrong, even if it wasn't the fault of the tubing, the dialysis center would be in deep doodoo. That tubing sold for $150 per unit, in 1977. And the company's profits were only about 22%. (re liability - a very popular heart surgeon I knew personally paid liability insurance premiums of 35% of his gross receipts.)
Clear back in 1990 my team and I built a product that interfaced a full text context-aware semantic search engine (Thunderstone software's 'Metamorph', since incorporated into their 'Texis' product) to the NextStep Mail.app. It was called MailQuery (tm). This could search 100,000 emails in a few seconds - and it did it by actually skimming through the email files, not by constructing an index. If you looked for 'congress' its semantic network also had it find 'representative' and 'senator' if you wanted. Another example from Metamorph - one of the original applications was for some government agency, that wanted 'trouble spots in the Middle East' to find things like 'riot in Cairo' and 'coup in Bahrain'. They were using it to process thousands of newspapers that had been scanned in and translated. We've come a long way since then... NOT!
Unfortunately for the product, after the various markups and commissions necessary to get the NextStep catalog to carry the product and actually sell it, the licensing fees I paid exceeded the net from a sale. A $500 list price worked out to receipts of about $30, IIRC. And my license fees were more than $30.
I gave up on Evolution and went to TB a year or two ago, due to long mailbox load times, too many crashes etc. I forget the details... Oh yeah - all that stuff was an annoyance but finally it didn't work with the Exchange 2010 server my company moved to. Is it better?
Please no. It is the only client that does what I need (including handling seven to ten separate email accounts, seamlessly). It's not perfect, but it's all I got.
By removing Outlook Express, they did the world a favor. What a gigantic piece of crap that was.
Indeed. In 1999 the Global 1000 company I worked for banned Outlook Express from the company after spending $5 MILLION on support and lost time by users, mostly dealing with malware that was tied to OE. To this day they do not use Exchange either.
Ha. Let's see, counting... yep, I have seven different email accounts that I have to keep an eye on at least hourly, and a few more that I need to check less often. Gmail is just one of them. (No, forwarding them all to gmail is not an option.) I'm sure I'm going to maintain seven different web pages to dink around with each email - especially since most of the webmail clients don't do simple things like select and delete/move numerous emails at once, or drag and drop. Some webmail clients are truly horrendous (network solutions comes to mind)
Using TB I can move mail between accounts as well as between folders within accounts. I can use the same filters for mail coming in or going out on different accounts. And no ads, or tracking cookies, etc.
This must be something to do with configuration & plug-ins. On my Ubuntu (10.4) FF always opens up a separate application (acroread), and the file is always in/tmp/blah.pdf. I'm not sure I always want PDFs to open up in the browser, but I would sometimes prefer that. I have 'open new window' links always open into a background tab, so maybe that has something to do with it. It's never been enough of a hassle to spend the time to figure this out.
Consider that the cost of public education in the US has tripled over the last 40 years, and the results have, shall we say, not kept up. Consider that in general private education regularly has better results at dramatically less cost - as does home schooling. Consider that home schooling, when successful, typically takes only a couple of hours per day instead of six or eight - dramatically better efficiency. Consider that, immediately given the chance, 70% of Wisconsin teachers have stopped paying dues to the primary proponent of the federal education behemoth - the National Education Association. In my own experience as a child and a parent, teachers at two different local schools refused to join NEA as they considered it to be counter-educational. Consider that, according to an article I read yesterday, the average hourly pay of a teacher in the US is more than the average architect or nurse, with generally much better benefits. Consider that in countries all over the world, including India and other poor countries in Africa, dirt-poor parents will pay from their meagre subsistence income to send their kids to private schools instead of free public schools because they get much better results. Many villages will have several private schools and an empty public school. Consider that poor parents in the inner city are the most vocal advocates of voucher systems that would allow their children to go to any reasonably nearby school, instituting supply and demand based on quality - something that the NEA has single-handedly managed to block for two decades.
What does that tell you about 'free' public education?
Funny, most uni's appear to be quite proud of those who finish early, and promote them in the bulletin and so forth. They probably think it tends to attract other smart folks.
Health insurance companies have to spend at least 80% of revenue on premiums.
I think you don't mean premiums - that's the revenue. I think you meant medical payments. So, given that... The problem with this is that it's way too easy to juggle the books on this sort of requirement - especially for HMOs where the treatment is being performed by another subsidiary of a holding company. For example, the holding company can have the insurance company pay for records management to another company, which is owned by the holding company. The records management company can run at a 90% profit, charging the insurance company through the nose. It's a bit harder to hide the profits in the treatment side, but since typically each insurer has a different payment schedule with each clinic, the clinical side can charge the insurer an extra 5% above what it charges another insurer. So that 10% does not show up as profit to the insurer, but it does show up for the holding company. This gambit is common in many industries, and can be made so complex that it is impossible to know what or where the profits are.
Look up allopathic medicine, and the history of the AMA. AMA was originally funded by the Pharma companies, and is still mainly supported by their ads in the AMA journals. During the 1930s through the 1950s at least, AMA worked hard to destroy any kind of medical treatment that did not involve taking drugs. My favorite example is the entire set of electrically-based therapies and experimentation. Only now (and still with great difficulty) are such therapies being researched significantly. See Biologically Closed Electrical Circuits - the original work was done in Sweden, in the 1960s. This avenue has become more 'respectable' recently with the advent of other non-invasive and non-medicinal therapies such as ultrasound, infrared, laser, etc. but the fundamental concepts were well established 40 years ago, for those willing to do a bit of research.
IIRC, Lithium works for about 50% of the cases it's even tried on, and nobody knows why it works on some and not on others. It's not indicated for many forms of psychosis, and can even be counterproductive.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. - H. L. Mencken
I had hepatitis long ago, when I was a vegetarian. I asked the doctor if any dietary changes would help. He told me, "Nutrition was an elective. I didn't take it. As a vegetarian you know more about that than I do."
+1. I think we have been spoiled by the 'success' of antibiotics and discovery of essential vitamins & minerals starting in the 1920s. These both resulted in remarkable, often permanent cures. So we as a culture now have an expectation of swift permanent cures. But many/most diseases are more like what you have described. And, of course, the antibiotic cycle may be coming to an end. Then we will have to go back to wearing gloves and avoiding crowds to protect us from the newly-deadly pathogenic diseases.
I heard of cholesterol as a health problem long before Lipitor existed
Yes, but how did you hear of it? Probably advertising, or PR in a magazine (same thing) or in school (same thing). Also, what about the folks who are just coming through high school, or early adulthood, who haven't heard? Now that you know something should all the information pipes be shut down? (Advertising and the various means of PR are certainly not perfect but they are useful.
Giving a drug to someone who does not need it is malpractice.
No it isn't. It would be if the drug reduces their health (including increased risk of future problems.) It _might_ be if the supply of that drug is so limited that giving it to someone who doesn't need it makes it unavailable for someone else. However beyond some very limited in-the-village example, this is impossible to ascertain in nearly all cases. Systematic effects are well beyond the scope of 'malpractice' and become just guilt-tripping.
Advertising drugs does not really increase your legally and ethically available customer base.
And this is just plain wrong. Look at the work that NGOs do to spread the word about the availability of, for example, bed nets for prevention of malaria. That is, technically, advertising a medical treatment. It has saved thousands of children's lives already. Similarly with polio vaccine - the PR campaign to make people aware of the need and the availability extends down to individual negotiations with village chiefs. That is exactly what the 'evil Pharma' companies do as well. Does describing symptoms of heart problems on the TV, in order to promote a particular brand of statin, not educate those who might have the disease? 'Tis true that the Pharma companies often take this too far, and use scare tactics, etc. But that does not relate to your thesis.
You are assuming at least the following: every potential customer already knows everything necessary about their health; they all have doctors who are paying attention; and there is one easy-to-determine ideal drug for every case. So all the patient & doctor have to do is look up the patient's particular profile and the menu of drugs that will work ideally will just pop out. Life is not that tidy.
Slashdot Mirror
Or the ultimate question of why space is so important. It's empty, guys.
- only until we get there. :)
The article in question was the result of actual research :) And it's well known that clearing land from forest raises temperatures. There are several reasons. One *minor* one is the contribution of CO2 from the burning of the cut materials. But there are other more significant reasons - none of which I can recall at the moment! :P
I am pretty sure that part of it is related to the way that forest moderates local temperatures - it's always cooler under the trees than out on the bare ground. But I can't remember the way it works. The timeframe went all the way back to the beginning of farming (4000 BC?)
I'm still rooting for Svensmark - and speculating on whether it's possible to maintain a city under a moving sheet of ice a mile thick. If it's in the right place (say, in a deep river valley like Pittsburgh so there wasn't much tendency to push on the side, such as a raised dome would suffer), could a city-covering frame be engineered carry the weight of the ice? If so, then some northern cities might actually be able to survive, given a sufficient energy source.
Interesting - several major city ports from Roman times, referenced in the New Testament (I think Ephesus is one of them), are now miles from the Mediterranean. If sea level rises, then maybe those cities might become ports again.
An article in Scientific American back around 2003-2004 (I forget when exactly) covered work that seemed to show that indeed, we were not only overdue for another ice age, but we had begun going in back a few thousand years ago. But the advent and epansion of farming (which has a tendency to warm things, for several reasons discussed in the paper/article) increasingly mitigated the cooling trend. The variance between actual temperatures and predicted temperatures for entering into an ice age was linear with the expanding acreage of farmland. So the author argued that we have been staving off the next ice age for some 4000 years. He had citations, sorry I'm too lazy to go back and find the article.
I'll just add that the sons of a friend of mine have an online Rx business, based in India. It turns out that an increasingly large majority of all Rx drugs sold in the US are actually manufactured in India, mostly by contract manufacturers. And with proper authorization, you can buy the legit drugs in India from the manufacturer, WITH the U.S. labelling, for a small fraction of the cost. Even with the cost of overnight shipping the cost is often 1/5 of what it costs here. As far as they can tell the drug companies don't even object - they have a good relationship with the companies.
The little secret with almost all Rx drugs is that the actual cost of manufacturing is almost in the noise level compared to the retail cost - maybe 0.5%. The whole business has a financial model similar to power utilities - huge up front costs, amortized over many years. But also that cost for a few new drugs (9 out of 10 of which don't make it) is amortized over the whole product line - and again, liability insurance or amortized reserves for handling liability eats 1/3 of gross wholesale receipts.
Also kinda like rock bands - a band may put out three or four CDs with a dozen songs on each, and one of those three dozen songs is actually a money maker. And only about one in 1000 bands makes $100,000 on their CD sales in a year.
Funny you should mention colchicine. Back when I was in 9th grade I started a Science Fair experiment that I was going to use colchicine for. Colchicine has this interesting property - when you treat seeds of some plants with it they often die, but sometimes they survive but the chromosomes are doubled in the plant that grows, and the result is a tetraploid plant that often has much brighter colors, stronger smell or flavor, and sometimes grows half size. My experiment involved Euglena, which I was going to try treating with colchicine and see what happened. At that time you could buy colchicine over the counter from chemical supply companies - I don't think it even had a medicinal use at that time. I never followed through with the experiment though. As it happens, we now know that Euglena are not simple one-celled plants, so it's hard to say what might have occurred.
we're way offtopic here, but I have had some experience in healthcare a long time ago. It's not 'gouging' so much as the entire structure of the health delivery system is built in such a way that everything is treated like an FAA-certified custom-built part for a 747. (The coffee pot on a 747 costs about $5000.) The structure has several components - low volume, high liability, onerous regulatory and reporting requirements, captive markets, and boutique suppliers. The new Obamacare is going to make all of that worse, essentially the entire industry has been sold to the 'beltway bandits', who are used to the government contracting process.
Back in 1979-1980 I took flying lessons. I learned that the crappy radios in general aviation airplanes (that sound like the ordering station at Quickie Burger) cost $2500 each in 1978. At the time a much higher quality CB radio - much newer technology, better reception, better sound, higher reliability, better user interface - cost about $100. the difference was that an aviation radio had to be certified by UL, FAA and FCC. Each of those certifications cost over $1 million (and a year or two) even in 1978, and if even the supplier of a resistor was changed, the whole thing had to be recertified. That cost was amortized over a few thousand radios - adding perhaps $1000 to the cost of a $100 radio, then add normal R&D, engineering, other business costs and markups, and you're going to sell it for $2500 including retail store markup.
In 1977 I worked briefly for a company that made kidney dialysis machines. Part of the machine was a blood pump. A blood pump was a loop of clear 1/2" PVC tubing, looped around a triangle of three little wheels that pushed against the tubing, squeezing it shut in two places at the same time, forcing blood gently through the system as the triangle rotated - a simple, reliable system. The tubing had to be replaced for each dialysis treatment. The tubing was identical to the stuff you can buy in any hardware store today for about $1 per foot ($3 per meter?), but it was cut, sterilized and put into a sterile package and shipped to the dialysis center. It's a low volume business - this ain't WalMart. Included in the cost was all of the testing, analysis, liability insurance, and of course the labor to package, process orders, and ship. Again, it had to be recertified by FDA if the length changed or the supplier changed - cost $1 million. Liability insurance was on the order of 30% of the cost. the market was a captive monopoly - no sane dialysis center would use any brand of tubing except the one provided by the machine manufacturer because if anything went wrong, even if it wasn't the fault of the tubing, the dialysis center would be in deep doodoo. That tubing sold for $150 per unit, in 1977. And the company's profits were only about 22%. (re liability - a very popular heart surgeon I knew personally paid liability insurance premiums of 35% of his gross receipts.)
Clear back in 1990 my team and I built a product that interfaced a full text context-aware semantic search engine (Thunderstone software's 'Metamorph', since incorporated into their 'Texis' product) to the NextStep Mail.app. It was called MailQuery (tm). This could search 100,000 emails in a few seconds - and it did it by actually skimming through the email files, not by constructing an index. If you looked for 'congress' its semantic network also had it find 'representative' and 'senator' if you wanted. Another example from Metamorph - one of the original applications was for some government agency, that wanted 'trouble spots in the Middle East' to find things like 'riot in Cairo' and 'coup in Bahrain'. They were using it to process thousands of newspapers that had been scanned in and translated. We've come a long way since then ... NOT!
Unfortunately for the product, after the various markups and commissions necessary to get the NextStep catalog to carry the product and actually sell it, the licensing fees I paid exceeded the net from a sale. A $500 list price worked out to receipts of about $30, IIRC. And my license fees were more than $30.
umm... TB supports local folders just fine
I gave up on Evolution and went to TB a year or two ago, due to long mailbox load times, too many crashes etc. I forget the details ... Oh yeah - all that stuff was an annoyance but finally it didn't work with the Exchange 2010 server my company moved to. Is it better?
Please no. It is the only client that does what I need (including handling seven to ten separate email accounts, seamlessly). It's not perfect, but it's all I got.
By removing Outlook Express, they did the world a favor. What a gigantic piece of crap that was.
Indeed. In 1999 the Global 1000 company I worked for banned Outlook Express from the company after spending $5 MILLION on support and lost time by users, mostly dealing with malware that was tied to OE. To this day they do not use Exchange either.
Ha. Let's see, counting ... yep, I have seven different email accounts that I have to keep an eye on at least hourly, and a few more that I need to check less often. Gmail is just one of them. (No, forwarding them all to gmail is not an option.) I'm sure I'm going to maintain seven different web pages to dink around with each email - especially since most of the webmail clients don't do simple things like select and delete/move numerous emails at once, or drag and drop. Some webmail clients are truly horrendous (network solutions comes to mind)
Using TB I can move mail between accounts as well as between folders within accounts. I can use the same filters for mail coming in or going out on different accounts. And no ads, or tracking cookies, etc.
This must be something to do with configuration & plug-ins. On my Ubuntu (10.4) FF always opens up a separate application (acroread), and the file is always in /tmp/blah.pdf. I'm not sure I always want PDFs to open up in the browser, but I would sometimes prefer that. I have 'open new window' links always open into a background tab, so maybe that has something to do with it. It's never been enough of a hassle to spend the time to figure this out.
Consider that the cost of public education in the US has tripled over the last 40 years, and the results have, shall we say, not kept up.
Consider that in general private education regularly has better results at dramatically less cost - as does home schooling.
Consider that home schooling, when successful, typically takes only a couple of hours per day instead of six or eight - dramatically better efficiency.
Consider that, immediately given the chance, 70% of Wisconsin teachers have stopped paying dues to the primary proponent of the federal education behemoth - the National Education Association. In my own experience as a child and a parent, teachers at two different local schools refused to join NEA as they considered it to be counter-educational.
Consider that, according to an article I read yesterday, the average hourly pay of a teacher in the US is more than the average architect or nurse, with generally much better benefits.
Consider that in countries all over the world, including India and other poor countries in Africa, dirt-poor parents will pay from their meagre subsistence income to send their kids to private schools instead of free public schools because they get much better results. Many villages will have several private schools and an empty public school.
Consider that poor parents in the inner city are the most vocal advocates of voucher systems that would allow their children to go to any reasonably nearby school, instituting supply and demand based on quality - something that the NEA has single-handedly managed to block for two decades.
What does that tell you about 'free' public education?
Funny, most uni's appear to be quite proud of those who finish early, and promote them in the bulletin and so forth. They probably think it tends to attract other smart folks.
Health insurance companies have to spend at least 80% of revenue on premiums.
I think you don't mean premiums - that's the revenue. I think you meant medical payments. So, given that ... The problem with this is that it's way too easy to juggle the books on this sort of requirement - especially for HMOs where the treatment is being performed by another subsidiary of a holding company. For example, the holding company can have the insurance company pay for records management to another company, which is owned by the holding company. The records management company can run at a 90% profit, charging the insurance company through the nose. It's a bit harder to hide the profits in the treatment side, but since typically each insurer has a different payment schedule with each clinic, the clinical side can charge the insurer an extra 5% above what it charges another insurer. So that 10% does not show up as profit to the insurer, but it does show up for the holding company. This gambit is common in many industries, and can be made so complex that it is impossible to know what or where the profits are.
Look up allopathic medicine, and the history of the AMA. AMA was originally funded by the Pharma companies, and is still mainly supported by their ads in the AMA journals. During the 1930s through the 1950s at least, AMA worked hard to destroy any kind of medical treatment that did not involve taking drugs. My favorite example is the entire set of electrically-based therapies and experimentation. Only now (and still with great difficulty) are such therapies being researched significantly. See Biologically Closed Electrical Circuits - the original work was done in Sweden, in the 1960s. This avenue has become more 'respectable' recently with the advent of other non-invasive and non-medicinal therapies such as ultrasound, infrared, laser, etc. but the fundamental concepts were well established 40 years ago, for those willing to do a bit of research.
Whoa now, Viagra does address a real problem! What if you were so fat you couldn't get it up anymore!? Viagra could be a real benefit then. You suck!
Hmm. Is that last phrase an insult, or an instruction to those with the problem? :D
IIRC, Lithium works for about 50% of the cases it's even tried on, and nobody knows why it works on some and not on others. It's not indicated for many forms of psychosis, and can even be counterproductive.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. - H. L. Mencken
Because they won a freedom of speech case, I think back in the 1970s. FDA lost the case.
I had hepatitis long ago, when I was a vegetarian. I asked the doctor if any dietary changes would help. He told me, "Nutrition was an elective. I didn't take it. As a vegetarian you know more about that than I do."
+1. I think we have been spoiled by the 'success' of antibiotics and discovery of essential vitamins & minerals starting in the 1920s. These both resulted in remarkable, often permanent cures. So we as a culture now have an expectation of swift permanent cures. But many/most diseases are more like what you have described. And, of course, the antibiotic cycle may be coming to an end. Then we will have to go back to wearing gloves and avoiding crowds to protect us from the newly-deadly pathogenic diseases.
I heard of cholesterol as a health problem long before Lipitor existed
Yes, but how did you hear of it? Probably advertising, or PR in a magazine (same thing) or in school (same thing). Also, what about the folks who are just coming through high school, or early adulthood, who haven't heard? Now that you know something should all the information pipes be shut down? (Advertising and the various means of PR are certainly not perfect but they are useful.
Giving a drug to someone who does not need it is malpractice.
No it isn't. It would be if the drug reduces their health (including increased risk of future problems.) It _might_ be if the supply of that drug is so limited that giving it to someone who doesn't need it makes it unavailable for someone else. However beyond some very limited in-the-village example, this is impossible to ascertain in nearly all cases. Systematic effects are well beyond the scope of 'malpractice' and become just guilt-tripping.
Advertising drugs does not really increase your legally and ethically available customer base.
And this is just plain wrong. Look at the work that NGOs do to spread the word about the availability of, for example, bed nets for prevention of malaria. That is, technically, advertising a medical treatment. It has saved thousands of children's lives already. Similarly with polio vaccine - the PR campaign to make people aware of the need and the availability extends down to individual negotiations with village chiefs. That is exactly what the 'evil Pharma' companies do as well. Does describing symptoms of heart problems on the TV, in order to promote a particular brand of statin, not educate those who might have the disease? 'Tis true that the Pharma companies often take this too far, and use scare tactics, etc. But that does not relate to your thesis.
You are assuming at least the following: every potential customer already knows everything necessary about their health; they all have doctors who are paying attention; and there is one easy-to-determine ideal drug for every case. So all the patient & doctor have to do is look up the patient's particular profile and the menu of drugs that will work ideally will just pop out. Life is not that tidy.