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Talk about alt treatments, it's the day I do my own self acupuncture on my knee. Yes, I've done a lot of acupuncture with pros but learned to do my own. Pretty simple as the lessons are at our fingertips and we should have learned from the pros.
Many on this forum have no idea how much it cost to develop or manufacture drugs. I am just a grunt; but I have personally disposed of $43,000,000,000 of vaccine that would not make it to market in time before the expiration date. I also know of many larger so called 'dumps' for various reasons. We make enough vaccine to cover the expectations of the following year; but sometimes other companies will beat us to market or have better sales or a better products available.
Nothing we do is 'cheap'. You go out and buy a 5 gallon container from Lowes for about $20. A 20 L (about the same size as your 5 gallon) container, of pharmaceutical grade that can stand the heat of our autoclaves, can cost us $1,500. We do not use products that have not been approved or validated for the job. We cannot just change anything without going through several reviews - there is no substitution allowed (without approval that can take years).
Even 'throwing out the trash' is expensive. Everything has to be autoclaved because we cannot take the chance of spreading any biological contamination. Some of the rules, to me sound stupid - like we cannot exceed a set temperature (but those are the rules we agreed to and that is what we must do). If the temperature is too high, or too low, or the humidity is too high, the vacuum cycles did not function properly, or we did not autoclave the correct amount of time; the waste is run a second time until it meets the preset parameters. Most loads take an hour or hour and a half and they use a lot of energy. Even throwing out the waste becomes a three man operation: One loader and one check signer and one manager to review the load book, run sheet and print out from the autoclave. Then unloading can involve a fourth person/checker and another manager signature.
These are the regulations and practices that our industry lives with; if we want to survive. It is easy to complain about how expensive your drugs are; it is another thing to see 'why'. Our FDA created most of these regulations to insure that we do not give you an impure, contaminated, or ineffective product. Natural/homeopathic remedies do not have to pass through the hurdles we pass through and one day your industry will pay the price.
I'm sure they spend millions on what they do including the barrage of TV ads pushing their drugs. I resent all those ads, some pretty dumb. 2 in a bathtub for cialias...that one blows me away.
Natural/homeopathics have been around for centuries and embellished over many decades.
I'm sure they spend millions on what they do including the barrage of TV ads pushing their drugs. I resent all those ads, some pretty dumb. 2 in a bathtub for cialias...that one blows me away.
Natural/homeopathics have been around for centuries and embellished over many decades.
I also do not like pharmaceutical ads. I do not know why we ever allowed them in the first place since this is what we supposedly trained our doctors for - to prescribe the right treatment for the patient they are examining. Patients are not supposed to tell their doctors what medication to prescribe! It is one point that I will agree with you. By the way, that same goes for natural/homeopathic medications - let the scientific evidence, through our 'professionals', prescribe exactly what each patient needs to recover from any illness.
As far are your natural/homeopathic that have been around forever: People have used cocaine, opiates, lead, arsenic, mercury, radiation and the results have not all been miraculous. While you might have benefits; those benefits have to be studied and regulations applied to insure the sterility/purity/and strength of your products - hearsay does not count.
Talk about alt treatments, it's the day I do my own self acupuncture on my knee. Yes, I've done a lot of acupuncture with pros but learned to do my own. Pretty simple as the lessons are at our fingertips and we should have learned from the pros.
Acupuncture? The best you can do with that is a placebo effect....
Exactly. The alternative treatment (I refuse to call it medicine since it's not) crowd always has an excuse handy that makes the failure a human one instead of the failure of some supplement. How they continually justify their magical thinking is beyond me.
Let's see. Yes sometimes the supplement itself may be to blame for its ineffectiveness but I consider the possibility that I could be doing wrong because I'm the one that did the research.
On the other hand Big Pharma should be 100 percent responsible because they are the ones that have PUSHED patients to take it. Rarely is someone pushing me to take a supplement. The responsibility relies on the drug companies/doctors if you are going to write out that script for me when I didn't even ask it in fact sometimes I have tried to tell you that I do not want it.
So I'll say it once and I'll say it again: The problem I have with Big Pharma is they are a monopoly. Even the OTCs are abundant because there will be shelves of them in various stores but if you want a variety of herbs you have to go to the Vitamin Shoppe/GNC or buy them online.
Now when holistic medicine is covered by insurance you can come to us to argue about our hypocrisy then but western doctors is all I have to choose from if I want free health coverage.
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Hope you are all up on your Vit D...talk about something that depletes. Or if you've never been in the sun for a long time, your tank has been empty for a long time.
Funny you should say that. The blood test that I took in May showed I was low on Vitamin D but I'm not sure how. I walk my dogs everyday and I like milk and ice cream which I would have some of on a fairly regular basis.
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Originally Posted by sanspeur
Acupuncture? The best you can do with that is a placebo effect....
So I'll say it once and I'll say it again: The problem I have with Big Pharma is they are a monopoly.
Not quite: List of companies that produce Vaccines,. If anything; we have more competition than ever on many of the vaccines that our company pioneered years ago.
Not quite: List of companies that produce Vaccines,. If anything; we have more competition than ever on many of the vaccines that our company pioneered years ago.
That's not what I mean by monopoly. There may be abundant companies but they are all the same to me because they're all traditional medicine so I still don't really get much of a choice.
I am an insulin-dependent diabetic. A few years ago I read a book by Richard K. Bernstein, M.D. Dr. Bernstein (now some 81 years old), had developed type I diabetes in 1942. Long story made short, he obtained his college degree in engineering, yet kept experimenting with food and diets to better control his blood sugars.
Dr. Bernstein wrote about how, prior to the early 1970s, one had to visit a medical doctor to get their blood sugar levels measured. As such, a diabetic would be lucky to know their numbers once a month, if they could afford the fee for the visit and test.
A company developed a home glucose meter in the early 1970s. Dr. Bernstein was outraged that the medical profession lobbied against this device being made available to the public; said medical profession desired people to continue to come into the office and pay for a glucose test (back then, about $25.00 per visit).
Dr. Bernstein was also outraged that the 'official' diabetic diet actually caused more harm than good. He developed his own diet, after much experimentation, in which he stressed low, low intake of carbohydrates.
When the medical profession ignored his recommendations, and dismissed him as a quack, he quit his job as an engineer, went to medical school, and became a licensed physician. He then started treating his own patients, and began publishing his recommendations.
Of course, afterwards, other doctors (like Adkins) jumped on his low-carb bandwagon. However, he was the first to drastically revise the diabetic diet guidelines (still pretty much ignored by the ADA and such). He was also pleased that the medical profession lost their fight to prevent the public from doing their own testing at home (I test my sugars 4-6 times a day).
No one ever lobbied against home glucose monitoring. The biggest impediment to home monitoring was that the first meters were very difficult to use.
The problem with very low carb diets is that people have a hard time staying on them.
My brother did the Atkins diet one time. He was at a restaurant and leaned over to a guy sitting next to him and told the guy he could "kill" him for the bread on his plate.
Bernstein advocates very low carbs. That does not mean his in the only approach or that other diets "actually caused more harm than good". It is also not true that the ADA has ignored Bernstein.
I know one doctor in my town who lost his license since he went outside the so called medical box of treatments...there are others I have followed who were working to help people working and thinking outside the so called conventional box. This is what the AMA does to doctors who think and do outside their rules and regs. Same goes with cancer treatments. Many who go with conventional treatments of drugs/cut/burn and not getting better and going to mexico for alt treatments, but too late by then...I remember Coretta S King's story with cancer.
The doctor who lost his medical license still works in alt treatments as a naturopath doctor. He's been thru the mill with the AMA.
The "AMA" has nothing to do with licensure of doctors. That is done by the states.
The "alt treatments" for cancer in Mexico are (very expensive) scams. They do not work. It's not a matter of it being "too late by then".
So I'll say it once and I'll say it again: The problem I have with Big Pharma is they are a monopoly. Even the OTCs are abundant because there will be shelves of them in various stores but if you want a variety of herbs you have to go to the Vitamin Shoppe/GNC or buy them online.
Now when holistic medicine is covered by insurance you can come to us to argue about our hypocrisy then but western doctors is all I have to choose from if I want free health coverage.
Every OTC in the store has been tested & proven and is regulated. Nothing on the supplement shelves can say the same.
When supplements go through the rigorous double blind testing that medications must go through before going to market, as well as submit to FDA regulations to prove that what it claims is in the bottle is actually in there, then we might be able to have a conversation.
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