I have assumed that most people delete the numerous Nigerian Scam emails that they get. Here's a sad story about the scam succeeding, though. It's a reminder to be careful whenever you are presented with a deal that's too good to be true.
At a Salon.com article entitled "The corporate financiers are wrong," Joe Conason says the obvious about "free market" fanatics because it is necessary to say the obvious about "free market" fanatics, given that they've been so successful at promulgating their drivel. What is the obvious thing we now need to…
Here's the bottom line, as reported on Yahoo: The Pentagon cannot account for nearly 15 billion dollars in payments for goods and services in Iraq, according to an internal audit which members of Congress blasted Friday as a "shocking" accountability failure. Why didn't a government accountant catch the problem? Good…
Check out this current website from Tylenol. You’ll see that McNeil (maker of Tylenol) has heroically and voluntarily removed all of these medicines from the market:
Concentrated TYLENOL® Infants' Drops Plus Cold Concentrated TYLENOL® Infants' Drops Plus Cold & Cough PediaCare® Infant Dropper Decongestant PediaCare® Infant Dropper Long-Acting Cough PediaCare® Infant Drops Decongestant (containing pseudoephedrine) PediaCare® Infant Dropper Decongestant & Cough PediaCare® Infant Drops Decongestant & Cough (containing pseudoephedrine)Why remove all these children's medicines? According to Tylenol,
Are they gone? Are all the millions of people who take Prozac, Effexor, Paxil and Serzone-who-are-not-severely-depressed gone? Good. Now we can talk. The rest of you have probably already read the news that:
Antidepressant medications appear to help only very severely depressed people and the drugs work no better than placebos in many patients, British researchers said Tuesday.
Why would the news media ever report the truth regarding these wildly-hyped antidepressants? After all, scientists have long known that most of the power of these drugs is in the placebo effect. Or, at least, scientists should have suspected this, because the FDA was refusing to release the full data sets regarding these drugs trial, at least until the good scientists who work on this new report (Prof Irving Kirsch and colleagues) requested “the full data under freedom of information rules from the Food and Drug Administration, which licenses medicines in the US and requires all data when it makes a decision.” Gosh, it appears that some of the relevant data wasn’t available to the forty million people taking these drugs, until long after the release of these drugs through massive corporate guerilla marketing.
In its advertisements, the manufacturer of Prozac, Lilly, doesn’t say anything about the drug not working well for large numbers of the patients for whom it was being prescribed. In fact, Lilly makes this claim:
…The safety and effectiveness of PROZAC have been thoroughly studied in clinical trials with more than 11,000 patients. There have been more than
