Saving the children of India (video)

Ashley Wells, Pat Macpherson, Wisdom Quarterly; Rocky Braat "Blood Brother"

(BBD) Rocky Braat met a group of Indian children diagnosed with HIV while drifting through India. He wanted to save them all, but in reality he couldn't cure even one of them. They teach him, daily, that love is the only thing that makes life worth living. The truth is, he needs them as much if not more than they need him. (BloodBrotherFilm.com/Facebook/twitter) 

Reaction: "Let's get them low cost drugs!"?

[Not covered in the film: Why do they really have this diagnosis? Poverty and poor nutrition from processed foods like white rice and Monsanto's chemcial-laden agricultural products. And why will they die? Capitalism and the commodification of Big Pharma "health care" that wants more and more such diagnoses -- that will show up if anyone taking an "AIDS test" has a flu, malnutrition, is generally sickly or normally fending off an infection AND is interpreted as being in an at-risk group by test result interpreters -- whether in gay and poor neighborhoods in the USA or in the developing world, all to boost sales of their products with the help of government and NGO funds for more misguided R&D.]

The C-Word Monologues (video)

Wisdom Quarterly; Eve Ensler (eveensler.org), Krista Tippett (OnBeing.org, 11-14-13)

Buddhist Eve Ensler has helped women all over the world tell the stories of their lives through the stories of their bodies. Her play, The Vagina Monologues, has become a global force in the face of violence against women and girls. She herself also had a violent childhood. And it turns out that she herself was like so many of us Western women, obsessed with our bodies and yet not inhabiting them -- without even knowing we were not inhabiting them. Until she got a wake up call from that unspeakable C-word, cancer.

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Why I love METH (cartoon)

Pat Macpherson, CC Liu, Dhr. Seven, Wisdom Quarterly; Seth Macfarlane, "Family Guy"

Crystal meth (methamphetamine, "speed") is a synthetic chemical developed by Nazi scientists (as Pervitin) to get soldiers to kill more. There is perhaps no faster way to contact and be overtaken by inner demons than meth, exceeding even the speed of rum consumption. It might not be so bad if it were sustainable. But most of the obviously bad effects of meth stem not from the stimulation and exhaustion of one's life force reservoir so much as the toxic excipients (extra ingredients). One may as well swim in a large corporation's sludge pond. Dioxin, petroleum byproducts, Drano, match heads... Is it any wonder teeth fall out, pock marks form on the skin, insane itching begins as the skin -- the body's largest organ of elimination -- tries to detoxify? 

Peter Griffin shares a baggie of crystal meth with his son

 

Actual toxic waste goes into meth!

 

Warning: Do not swim in sludge ponds!

The Nazis were onto something. Imagine a cheap pharmaceutical that could take the place of cocaine. It is rumored that Adolf Hitler was an addict. To be sure other inner party Nazis were. Why would the CIA continue to promote expensive and risky crack addiction in American ghettos when methamphetamines are so much easier to produce without the trouble of cross-border transporting?

Yum, it's sugarcoated "Toxic Waste" candy

And why leave the middle class out of the fun? Now meth is available in a variety of dance-quality colors, flavors, and grades, not the least of which is old MDMA sold as the "new and improved" Molly. Those who would never dream of drinking Drano things in dad's garage would, somehow, consider taking hits of Ecstasy. Even America's own father, scoot over Homer Simpson, is not immune to the lure of toxic sludge. Of course, he's only joking.

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Meth first, then prostitution?
Cartoons make it cute, but addiction of any kind is ugly ugly ugly

Crystal Meth: The Hardest Drug
(BBC) 2013 documentary on the effects of methamphetamine use. No comment necessary.

(Late Night with Jimmy Fallon)  "Breaking Bad" parodied in "Joking Bad"

featuring cameos by Bryan Cranston, Bob Odenkirk, and Aaron Paul.

The harm DRUGS do

Pat Macpherson, Wisdom Quarterly; The Economist "Scoring Drugs" (The Lancet*)

In a scientific ranking that appeared in The Economist, based on research profiled in the medical journal The Lancet, mushrooms came in as the LEAST harmful (Wiki).

 

Iatrogenesis (death by MD) is the major killer

Researchers asked drug-harm experts to rank the listed legal and illegal drugs on various measures of harm both to the user and to others in society.

These measures included damage to health, drug dependency, economic costs, and crime. The researchers claim that the rankings are stable because they are based on so many different measures and would require significant discoveries about these drugs to affect the rankings.

Note that alcohol, despite being legal, is by far the most harmful, far more harmful than any other intoxicant listed. Not only is it the most damaging to societies, it is also the fourth most dangerous to users. Most of the drugs were rated significantly less harmful than alcohol, with most of the harm falling on the user.

The authors explain that one of the limitations of this study is that drug harms are functions of their availability and legal status in the UK. So other cultures' control systems could yield different rankings.

 

*SOURCE: "Scoring Drugs," The Economist (Nov. 5, 2011), data from "Drug Harms in the UK: a Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis" by David Nutt, Leslie King, and Lawrence Phillips on behalf of the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs. The Lancet, Nov. 6, 2010 [376(9752):1558-65. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(10)61462-6, PMID:21036393].
 

Modern Medical Sickness

Big Pharma's big money makes it okay.

Iatrogenesis ("originating from a physician") is the criminally careless or innocent and inadvertent adverse effect or complication resulting from medical treatment or advice. This includes drug dispensing, surgery, and invasive treatments by physicians, pharmacists (Greek "sorcery, poisoning"), surgeons, psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, nurses, or dentists. It is not restricted to conventional medicine, but that is where the extraordinarily high numbers and irony are. Consumer beware. It may even result from complementary medicine and alternative treatments. In the United States an estimated 225,000 deaths per year have iatrogenic causes [B. Starfield, July, 2000) "Is US health really the best in the world?" (PDF). JAMA 284 (4), PMID 10904513)]. But Dr. Gary Null, who focuses on public health and nutrition, asserts that the figure is 750,000 a year or higher, making it the biggest killer in America. This means that drugs and invasive treatments kill more patients when used as directed and even when used under direct medical supervision by a doctor! Some iatrogenic artifacts are clearly defined and easily recognized, such as a complication following surgery. Some less obvious ones can require significant investigation to identify, such as complex pharmaceutical drug interactions. Other conditions have been described but are as yet unproven, such as the detrimental effects of vaccines (which can cause death, Downs Syndrome, autism, and spectrum disorders such as Asperger syndrome.

Sex Doctor gets Penis Cancer (video)

Pat Macpherson, Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly

He's not Dinah Cancer; he's Dr. Drew, America's sex and addiction therapist for 30 years.

 

Physician, heal thyself with your own advice.

"Doctor Drew," 55 (radio  host Dr. Drew Pinsky, M.D.), announced today that he is suffering from prostrate cancer, which is ironi c since a health professional of his caliber should be able to heal himself. Natural remedies like saw palmetto (extract) and a healthy sex life, in conjunction with an alkalizing diet (rather than the acidifying S.A.D. or "standard American diet") and a serene (rather than stressful) lifestyle would have kept him well. But as a doctor who promotes invasive surgery, deadly radiation treatments, and toxic allopathic pharmaceutical poisons all in the name of "medicine," this is what Drew and his patients can look forward to. He has, by his own admission, already submitted to voluntary surgery. Can it be long before he confesses to intentional radiation exposure and a regimen of chemotherapy?

Funnier and saltier than Dr. Ruth

Starting Wednesday he will be the guest on a barrage of television and radio shows promoting harmful cancer screenings, which seem to do more to cause cancer than cure it. He is already a white haired, neurotically nervous overachiever (formerly a sufferer of intense panic attacks that even his former radio co-host, Adam Corolla, could barely help him with), who began Loveline with the show's originator DJ Poorman on KROQ FM in his hometown of Pasadena, California.
 

Now he has an media empire consisting of a podcast with Latino heartthrob and former addict Mike Catherwood as well as their nationally syndicated, ever-fresh, ever-educational Loveline Radio Show (lovelineshow.com), an off-again-on-again rehab celebrity TV show, former MTV show, and a much more tame HLN talk show. Drew may not be much of a healer, but he is a well tuned "medical intuitive" showing off his skills in short call in spurts and an addiction medicine specialist. Everything we have ever learned about aberrant sexual behavior, sexually transmitted diseases, and philosophical quandaries about why humans repeat dysfunctional patterns over and over again -- answered with stunning clarity by addiction specialist Dr. Gabor Mate, M.D. -- we learned from Dr. Drew. He may not be, but to us he will always be a real Schmendrick.

(32:00 mins) This is the introduction to the third Zeitgeist film, "Moving Forward," featuring Dr. Gabor Mate. It covers truths about human nature, genetics as non-determinants of disease, health, and concepts and popular misconceptions about "Nature vs. Nuture."

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• MacArthur Genius Grant recipients' list announced!
• 
  This year's 24 recipients of MacArthur Foundation "genius grants" include a physicist whose work was inspired in part by a NPR report he heard a decade ago. As Carl Haber of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory explains in a video posted by the foundation with Wednesday's awards announcements:
  

  "About 10 years ago I happened to hear a report on NPR about the Library of Congress and their large collections of historic sound recordings, which described them in some cases as being delicate, damaged, deteriorating, and so forth." More