About Me

After reading my profile, anyone can see how skeptical I am about pharmaceutical companies. I think most of this skepticism stems from my dad, who reads the newspaper front to back each day. Some of it comes from my formal education (MBA - Specialization in marketing) form Lynn University in Boca Raton, FL. Still, another part of it comes from my stepmother who used to work for Westat, an "Independent" research facility in MD.

 I remember as a kid (1997) reading a newspaper article about how Broccoli, one of my favorite veggies with salads or baked potatoes, was the most anti-cancerous food you can eat. Excited, I told my dad how great this was, and how I was going to live forever if I just ate enough broccoli. My dad simply explained to me that the author of the article got their information from a broccoli farmer. To my dismay, I soon found out he was correct. News journalists rarely have time to do months of actual journalistic legwork, so they have a news-query system in place. If you want to be quoted as an expert in a newspaper, all you have to do is pay $80/year and type in come keywords. When a journalist types in those keywords on their query, your name will show up on a list, and they may call you up and quote you as an expert in their article. It's just that simple. You can read "Selling Sucks" to find the website that you need to go to in order to sign up for this news query yourself.

So now I knew that anybody with $80 and internet access could say whatever they wanted to in a newspaper article and be quoted as if they were an expert. But then my step-mom, who worked for Westat at the time, chimed in. She told me about what she did as an analyst for that company. Essentially, her boss would give her a pile of data derived from some scientific study, such as the effects of smoking. She was told that the result needed to show that there was no significant correlation between chain smoking and the occurrence of lung cancer. So what she did was find creative ways of canceling out data from the smokers' group that had lung cancer for various reasons. Maybe they had a history of cancer, so she would cancel out only the smokers in the study with a history of cancer. The non smokers who had a history of cancer were included in the study, so that the end result was that it appeared smoking and lung cancer weren't related. The analysts who couldn't or wouldn't creatively play with the data like this were quickly fired. 

My step-mom said probably someone had done a similar thing to the broccoli study to make it appear that broccoli had magical anti cancerous properties when in reality it was just another veggie. And there you have it: at age 13 I was skeptical of newspaper articles and conventional wisdom in general.

Thanks to an upbringing by some independent thinkers, I can't believe everything I read. Neither should you. 

I have been hearing many new commercials about how you should take Lipitor, not generics. It turns out Lipitor's patent, Pfizer's cash cow, is expiring soon. So they are desperate to get as many people dependent on it as possible before Pfizer starts making the generic version, too.

Cholesterol reducing medicine is probably the single worst thing you can take. We use cholesterol in every cell in our body. There is no "bad" cholesterol: our body makes it and needs it to survive!!!! How can that be bad?! Lipitor and other statins make your muscles weaker, as they tear down cell membranes. Your heart is a muscle. I wouldn't doubt it if those taking Lipitor are much more likely to die from a heart attack from taking Lipitor. Don't believe the statistics that show you how these drugs are good for you, see my other mini blog about the "independent" research companies.