Sunday Strip: "Make it Sh*tty" -
Just what the doctor ordered...
The year is 1950. Your doctor lights a cigarette and tells you smoking is fine. He read it in a study. He is telling the truth about having read it. He does not know, or is not saying, that the study was funded by the tobacco industry.
The year is 1958. Your doctor tells you to eat less fat. The evidence is contested. The contestation is not in the public messaging. The food industry has been helpful in clarifying which findings deserve attention. Some researchers who published contradictory data have been quietly defunded. Ancel Keys is on the cover of Time magazine.
The year is 1962. Your doctor prescribes thalidomide to your pregnant wife for morning sickness. It has been approved. The FDA gave it the green light in Europe [JGM - factcheck, EU regulators did that]. Twelve thousand children will be born with severe limb malformations before anyone in an official capacity acknowledges the problem. The families are told the drug was safe. The drug was approved. Both of these things remain true.
The year is 1972. Your doctor prescribes Valium. Britain is in the grip of a benzodiazepine wave that will last two decades. The dependency risk is known internally. It is not shared. Your doctor is not lying to you. He was not told either.
The year is 1999. Your doctor prescribes Vioxx for your arthritis. It is newer than ibuprofen, well-tolerated, and Merck has a study showing it works. Merck also has internal data suggesting it roughly doubles the risk of heart attack. This data will not reach your doctor for four more years. Fifty thousand people are estimated to have died in the interim. Merck eventually settles for 4.85 billion dollars. No criminal charges are brought.
The year is 2002. Your doctor prescribes OxyContin. Purdue Pharma trained its sales representatives to tell doctors the addiction risk was less than one percent. That figure came from a letter, not a study. The letter was about patients with terminal cancer on short-term doses in hospital settings. Your doctor is a GP with a patient who has a bad back. Nobody draws a distinction. Nobody is required to.
The year is 2008. Your doctor checks your cholesterol. Your LDL is elevated. You are prescribed a statin. Nobody mentions that the number needed to treat for primary prevention is approximately 250. Nobody mentions that the muscle deterioration you'll notice over the next two years is listed as a rare side effect rather than a documented pattern affecting a meaningful percentage of patients. The trial that informed the prescription was funded by the manufacturer.
Now it is today.
Your doctor has new guidelines. New studies. New consensus.
He is confident.
He has always been confident.
The confidence has never been the problem.
The confidence is, in fact, precisely the problem.-From: Sama Hoole @SamaHoole on X
That would be US AID or… USAID
“Strait of Hormuz is Open!
Strait of Hormuz is Closed!
Open! Closed!”
JGM
JGMalone, thanks for the smiles and bringing us all together every Sunday! Hopefully this will bring you some light.
Just like man nations face dark times as well. It’s in these times, when things aren’t well, people of faith turn to prayer.
During Covid while Joe Biden occupied the White House, it seemed we were in the darkest of times in recent memory. Everyday I would pray that Americans would wake up, stand up, and stop the government from consciously taking away peoples liberties and freedoms. I’d pray that I wasn’t alone. For years it stayed dark, it seemed things would never change.
In times of war, we pray that our soldiers stay safe. That in the darkness of war America will be successful, quickly obtain its goals and that conflict will bring peace.
In the Book of Genesis it begins by telling us how God created everything. The world was in darkness, (“darkness was over the face of the deep,” Genesis 1:2) before God created light. Therefore the first day begins in darkness and ends with light. You would think the first day would start with the sunrise but it doesn’t, it starts in the dark. While some may say this is the setting of a 24 hour day others suggest that in the Bibles view light and hope follow darkness.
It’s incredible that in the darkness, if we didn’t know what time it was, things wouldn’t seem to really change. It could be any time of night, there is no sign that change is taking place. But at 12 midnight, at that one instance, when nothing seems any different, it goes from pm to am, a new day begins. On purpose God chose to start a new day in the dark. It’s symbolic of how He works in our lives. He gives us a promise. He says we’ve come into a new day and light will follow.
The moment we pray the tide of the battle turns. The darkness doesn’t mean things haven’t changed. Darkness is not a sign that God is not working, that he didn’t hear our prayer. We have to walk by faith and not by sight. You may not see it but when you prayed you left the pm and came into the am. It’s a new day, the light is on its way. We all have to live by faith. No matter what we’ve been through, if we have faith and we pray, it may not be immediate, but in Gods time the light of day will shine on you, and you will find your peace. Keep your faith! Happy Sunday!
J.Goodrich
The year is 2021. Your doctor, at risk of losing his medical license and a wealth of incentives, assures you that the new shot is safe and effective. HHS Secretary Becerra, zealous in his federal protections against the hazards sponsored by federal government, announces a door-to-door campaign to benignly urge his beloved fellow citizens to follow the science. According to a report by Zero Hedge, now vanished, citizen responses to the visits were to be recorded on government forms.
https://nypost.com/2021/07/08/sec-becerra-on-covid-vaccine-door-knocks-it-is-absolutely-our-business/