JAMA says doctors should stop accepting bribes from drug companies

Here is an interesting article about the current bribing of doctors and the control exercised by drug companies over the medical profession: JAMA says doctors should stop accepting bribes from drug companies.

One thing to be aware of: the number of people killed by drugs (due to side-effects, mis-prescriptions, etc.) is much higher than the mere 60,000 quoted for deaths from Vioxx. For full details see the article: Death by Medicine.

The Big Pharmaceutical Interpretation of Ethics

When they think of "Ethics" most people think of the traditional definition: "a system of moral principles governing the appropriate conduct for a person or group". Normally we think "appropriate conduct" is conduct which is "good" or "helps" or is "honorable", etc. But it seems the executives of the pharmaceutical company Merck have a different way of looking at "appropriate conduct". To Merck executives conduct is "appropriate" if it leads to making billions of dollars no matter the cost in human lives:

New England Journal of Medicine accuses Merck of deleting important Vioxx information from study

ADHD Drugs are no longer "safe and effective"

An FDA Advisory Panel has finally come out and recommended that ADHD drugs such as Ritalin, Concerta, Methylin, Metadate, Adderall and Adderall XR should have a "black box" warning - the strongest kind. The reason? The drugs kill people. Aside from the usual side-effects of psychiatric drugs, such as suicide and murder, these drugs also cause cardiovascular problems. On a first look at the data that only covered a couple of years, they found 25 deaths and it is estimated that only a small percentage of adverse reactions to drugs are reported so the actual number of people who've died from these drugs is much, much higher.

Here is one of the articles: FDA panel urges strong, ‘black box’ alerts on ADHD drugs

Some people have been pointing out the dangers of these drugs for many years: Citizens Commission on Human Rights: ADHD & Learning Disorders.

Google Desktop - Privacy Warning

Here's a scary article: Google Desktop 3 Raises Privacy Concerns. Is Google intending to send text versions of your documents across the Internet encrypted or just as plain text? It's bad enough having your private documents uploaded to their site, but uploaded in a plain text format? Hackers are going to have a field day trying to intercept this stuff. What kind of data will they be able to gather? Social Security numbers? Credit Card numbers? User ids and passwords if you've been incautious enough to put them in a document?

Serotonin and Depression - The Big Lie

Drug companies claim that a "chemical imbalance" of serotonin in the brain causes depression and that the anti-depressant wonder drugs (like Zoloft, Prozac, Paxil, etc.) correct this imbalance. In truth there is NO evidence to back up these claims, which is why you will read "depression is a serious medical condition that may be due to a chemical imbalance." Note the word "may". The drug companies never say "is" they always say "may" or "it is believed" or "experts think". Hmmm, I always thought science was a field where you could say "is". Anyway, someone has recently taken a stand and told the truth: Serotonin and Depression: A Disconnect between the Advertisements and the Scientific Literature.

More on Wikipedia

The man who created a false biography for another person on Wikipedia was tracked down by another man who was a victim of a similar false bio on Wikipedia. What is interesting about this is that it wasn't someone from Wikipedia who did the tracking down, it was a private individual who had his own disagreements with the Wikipedia administrators. The Wikipedia administrators didn't take the responsibility to find out who was using the site for their own purposes.

Note that although the article is entitled "Wikipedia Prankster Expresses Remorse", he didn't do any expressing until he got caught: Wikipedia Prankster Expresses Remorse

New Citizens Commission On Human Rights Website

I was looking to see if the CCHR site had a "link to us" page and was surprised to find a totally redesigned site. The home page has an incredible Flash presentation listing facts and figures about psychiatry, its treatments, its drugs, its other abuses and its damaging results. Just go to the home page and watch it: Report Psychiatric Abuse. Visit www.cchr.org

Wikipedia - The Flaw

I use Wikipedia quite a lot, usually to clear up technical terms and concepts related to the computer field and I find it very useful for this purpose. Often someone has come up with a new term for something in my industry and it is not defined anywhere but Wikipedia. This is the place where Wikipedia excels. Areas where facts are facts and there is no real room (or need) for opinion. A widget is a widget and it has a specific definition. However, where Wikipedia falls down is when it allows people to make entries about things that are not so cut and dried. This is the place where opinion and bias can enter in and the area where Wikipedia's flaws really show up. It is time someone at Wikipedia figured out a way to handle this or else they are going to end up being taken to court by someone for defamation. Read this article for an example of what can happen: Wikipedia: It's Online But Is It True?

Psychiatry and the "Science of Interrogation"

Here is an interesting article about the increasing viciousness of interrogation techniques used by the US military and intelligence agencies. Guess who brought these wonderful breakthroughs to us? Psychiatrists, such as Dr. Louis Jolyon West, perhaps one of the most evil men who ever lived, were employed by the US government to develop these techniques.

Here is the article: American science of interrogation

Death By Modern Medicine

Here is a great book for anyone interested in staying alive and healthy: Death by Modern Medicine.