Re no comment…, the waters receded and the Internet has returned to our piece of the planet. This post has only one purpose – the comments are turned on to see if the spam attack from yesterday has abated.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
Since this website doesn’t test for robots, I swear I’m not a robot.
testing . . . testing . . . (miss the comments–hope situation is remedied)
Hey Mickey, hope you are now spambot free. Cheers Jack
Test. There seems to be number of problems with spam and blogs of late.
Steve Lucas
Clear so far at T+1 hour!
Ya’ll might be interested in reading this article in the Times, if you haven’t already:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/08/opinion/crazy-pills.html
It’s about the effects of the anti-malarial drug mefloquine and it’s neurological and psychiatric side-effects. Remember Staff Sgt. Robert Bales who killed 16 Afghan civilians and said he didn’t remember it? I’ve been suspecting psyche meds all along, but it looks like mefloquine is the culprit. A similar incident happened with a Canadian soldier in Somalia. It’s been described as the “Agent Orange” of our last two wars as far as the seriousness and breadth of its permanent ill effects.
It’s recently gotten a black-box warning, which the author argues is not enough. Here’s an excerpt from the article that is nice and succinct:
Science is a journey, but commerce turns it into a destination. Science works by making mistakes and building off those mistakes to make new mistakes and new discoveries. Commerce hates mistakes; mistakes involve liability. A new miracle drug is found and heralded and defended until it destroys enough lives to make it economically inconvenient to those who created it.
Lariam is a drug whose side effects impair the user’s ability to report those side effects (being able to accurately identify feelings of confusion means that you probably aren’t that confused). The side effects leave no visible scars, no objective damage. But if Lariam were a car, if psychological or neurological side effects were as visible as broken bones, it would have been pulled from the market years ago.
Wiley–
Do you remember an episode of the old “M*A*S*H” television program where Klinger ‘got sick’. The army was passing out (requiring) anti-malarial medication for the troops–which most took without incident. Klinger took to his bed–and was labeled not only crazy (his ‘normal’ state) but a malingerer. Eventually, the doctors looked further and the particular antimalarial drug was NOT to be given to Negroes (such was our language at the time.) Klinger had a middle-Eastern ethnicity, and essentially had the same sort of response. Do we just have to keep reinventing the wheel? discovering ‘NEW’ adverse events? Are there no history books?
Glad to hear the waters have receded! I might very well be a robot, but I don’t do spam, mostly just information processing and complaining.
No, Melody, I hadn’t seen that. But it sadly doesn’t surprise me that our health care market conveniently forgets so much.
Maybe Hollywood writers–who obviously keep abreast of medicine and science–should be promoted to ‘regulators-in-chief.’
Hey, Dr. Mickey, I have a nice Michael Kors bag you might be interested in!