Naturally Interesting

Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs.

 Petersen writes that drug companies push medicines they know don’t work. They invent “diseases,” such as overactive bladder or compulsive shopping disorder, to wring high profits out of marginal medicines. They obfuscate the science by controlling the publication of clinical trial results and writing bogus journal articles. And they shovel millions of dollars to doctors to boost prescriptions. “Selling prescription drugs—rather than discovering them—has become the pharmaceutical industry’s obsession,” Petersen writes.

On that note, how long do we let a company like Eli Lilly with a 100 year history of corporate malfeasance stay in business?

Review in Business Week.

The news that there are a host of pharmaceuticals in our drinking water has got everyone talking about water. I agree with Stats Blog that we should chill out until there is more information available.  Switching to bottled water doesn’t make a whole lot of sense:

• In many cases bottled water is just reconstituted tap water,
• The bottles leach worse chemicals (phthalates) into your water,
• Bottled water is not as strictly regulated as tap water,
• Producing, transporting, and disposing of all those plastic bottles is bad for the environment.

I’ll stick with tap water and my Sigg bottle for now. On that note Angry Toxicologist reports from Seattle that Bisphenol A still sucks, so stay away from those Nalgene bottles. More on plastic water bottle types here, metal or glass is still the best bet.

If you really want to learn about water check out EWG and NRDC, and EHSO.

Edit: I meant to link to Angry Toxicologist here.

Slate covers the Airborne settlement and why taking Airborne may help you even if it cannot be clinically proven (it is a variant of the placebo effect - it works because you believe it will).  Get your money back from Airborne here