Robert D Bard wrote:
The good guys - that would be use common
folk - won two big rounds this week. ...
Robert D Bard
It is the leftist nonsense that appears all too often on this site and associated forums that turns me off concerning the organic/natural side of the issues.
As to the Vioxx situation, it appears that all sides lose--those that can't get relief from 'natural' means and those that got relief but suffer from side effects of the 'unnatural' drugs. I have never been able to figure out what is 'natural' about taking 5 pounds of herbs and 'distilling them into a few capsules so that RICH people can afford 'natural' solutions. Natural solutions often cost much, much more than the 'disadvantaged' can afford. In addition, many 'natural' solutions have side effects that proponents want to ignore.
Also, the anti-capitalistic leftist cBS (as in CBS BS--made up stories to suit its ideological purposes) that appears in the 'organic-natural' forums makes me want to go out and buy all the shares of Eli Lilly and Merck that I can afford and to buy my first gallon of Round-Up in over eight years (although I will not return to using it--vinegar works quite well). Give me the facts, not your leftist opinions. You know very little about those that work in the drug industry. I have a friend that works in that industry. I am taking a partial quote from his quote from another post:
"I used to work for a pharmaceutical company. I can testify to the fact that yes, they are earning their money. They are not "milking" our economy, they are doing exactly what the consumer expects ... developing new medication for the consumer. I have a degree in medicinal chemistry and I can also tell you that the cost of medical breakthroughs increases exponentially each year. For those drugs that come from plants, we have researched 99% of all the plants on the earth ... if we are to discover a new plant-based medicine, we have to find plants which have never been studied before. That was easy when 75% of the Amazon rain forest was unexplored, now we have to dig a mile below the anarctic ice cap to find something new. As for drugs which are designed in a lab, there are two ways to do that ... start with something you have and tweak it a bit, or try to create something totally different. Again, we have done the first to most all the drugs we currently know ... as for the second, that is a very LOOOOOOONNNNGGGG road to actually come up with a useful compound. Add to all this the fact that it costs over $100M to come up with a new medicine, and patents are only good for 17 years. It can take 7 to 10 years to come up with a new medicine, and you have to patent it at the BEGINNING of the road, you can't wait until the end. So now you may only be left with 7 years to recover $150M of research. That is over $20M/year."
Bard also stated: "Vioxx and celebrix and that family of drugs kills 100,000 of us each year and the FDA does nothing as their job is to protect the drug companies profits - not our lives." What utter nonsense! What tripe! You have NO FACTS to back up the assertion that these drugs DIRECTLY kill people. It is a fact of life that our bodies deteriorate due to many, many causes. When things were more 'natural,' people died at a much earlier age. Do we go back to those 'natural' methods?
I could go on, but I won't. I come here for information on how to grow plants and trees using natural methods. I share those methods with my family and friends to convince them that they don't need to use chemicals. I don't want to come here to put up with politico-socio nonsense. As a moderator, if you can't make your case without such stuff, you need to re-examine your political ideals.