Tild uncovers a real treasure: a book from the heyday of patent medicines, full of advice specifically for women, and loaded with testimonials for Dr Pierce’s ‘prescription’. When you find out what was in the concoction, you’ll understand why all the accompanying photos show women looking both cheery and glazed.
The results were startling. Richardson’s Concentrated Sherry Wine Bitters had 47.5 percent alcohol; Hostetter’s Stomach Bitters, 44.3 percent; Boker’s Stomach Bitters, 42.6 percent; Parker’s Tonic, “purely vegetable,” 41.6 percent. Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound had relatively little—20.6 percent.
Bok saw a real problem. Women were doctoring themselves and their families with dangerous alcoholic nostrums. Temperance women were turning to “bitters” to cure their sluggishness. Pregnant women used “Doctor Pierce’s Favorite Prescription”, which contained digitalis, opium, oil of anise and alcohol (17 percent).
Ladies, go read it. You’ll get the impression that early 20th century women were all sick and diseased, and also all doped to the gills.
Gentlemen, though, might want to read another link Tild provides. Fellows, do you suffer from Spermatorrhea, or the emission of semen without intercourse? I get the distinct impression from that libertarian thread that there are many here who have not ejaculated healthily into a vagina in quite some time. This is bad news.
The seminal fluid consists of the most vital elements in the human body. It not only assists in maintaing the life of the individual, but communicates the essential, transforming principle with generates another mortal having an imperishable existence. Its waste is a wanton expenditure, which robst the blood of its richness and exhausts the body of its animating powers. No wonder that its loss enfeebles the constitution, and results in impotency, premature decline, St. Vitus’s dance, paralysis, epilepsy, consumption, softening of the brain, and insanity. No wonder that conscience and fear become tormenting inquisitors, and that the symptoms are changed into imaginary spectres of stealthily approaching disease.
Look what happens if you do not heed Dr Pierce’s advice!
And then there’s the moral terpitude instilled by the filthy habit.
The fancy creates an attractive partner, possessed of girlish beauty, a perfect type of goodness, blended with sexuality, and whom the subject worships with all the ardor of passion. Around this beau ideal all his affections are clustered; to her the purest of his blood is offered in sacrifice, and it is no wonder that female associates seem tame and unattractive when such imaginary and consummate divinity is courted. In the sensual delirium is conceived an elysium of carnal bliss, where half-nude nymphs display their charms and invite to sensual enjoyments. Thus we see how this habit makes the spiritual faculties subservient to morbid passion, and by what means elevating influences are prostituted to vulgar and base-born creations.
Oooooh. It all sounded pretty good, except … only half nude? Clearly, we could all give Dr Pierce some better advice in what constitutes a good fantasy. We could also point out that a teaspoon of seminal fluid isn’t exactly a major loss to the body, nor is it exceptionally rich in “vital elements”; it’s also a bit murky on how ejaculating into a vagina transforms the loss of that small quantity of precious fluid into a positive, healthy experience.
I suspect that what made his female associates seem tame and unattractive is that they were all taking Dr Pierce’s patent medicines and they were all permanently blotto. And his female patients were all taking his ‘prescription’ because their male partners were all made anxious and jittery and paranoid by the lies they were being told about a normal and harmless practice. It’s a clever self-perpetuating circular market — he must have gotten rich off of this.
It’s easy PZ. Ol’ Doc Pierce subscribed to that highly advanced Victorian scientific consensus that if something is located between the knees and the neck, it’s ICKY! ICKY! ICKY! OOOOH, IIIIIIICCCCKKKKKYYYYYYY!!!!! unless strictly regulated by religious authorities and their associated governmental assistants.
PZ, I’m a libertarian who was slightly offended by the earlier thread, but this made me spray my morning coffee on my keyboard.
Oh, those crazy 19th-century Capitalist doctors! Clearly what they needed was a good strong dose of socialism – that would’ve fixed them right up and turned them into compassionate guardians of the people’s health and rights!
What’s that? Eugenics? Forced sterilization? No, surely that was the result of libertarians laboring on behalf of their Robber Baron overlords who- it wasn’t?
Huh.
It was the spirit of the times, I suppose. You know how things were in the 19th-century, with all those crazy ide- what, 20th?
Oh.
I keep thinking of Dr Strangelove. Be careful men! Those women are trying to take your vital fluids!
Caledonian, you’ve changed the topic. You read stuff into this post that isn’t there.
Caledonian, you’ve changed the topic. You read stuff into this post that isn’t there.
“The seminal fluid consists of the most vital elements in the human body. It not only assists in maintaing the life of the individual, but communicates the essential, transforming principle with generates another mortal having an imperishable existence. Its waste is a wanton expenditure, which robst the blood of its richness and exhausts the body of its animating powers.”
Does that mean that General Jack D. Ripper was right?
Precious bodily fluids? Strangelovian.
Damn! Denise beat me to the punch!
And my patience with Caledonian is tissue-thin these days…
Given the repeated discussion of how vitally necessary it is for the government to dictate health care and regulate the safety of drugs in the thread that PZ just referenced, it’s not difficult to perceive how PZ’s discussion of patent medicine abuse is related to his libertarian quip.
But you can’t imagine any alternatives between governments given utter responsibility and power for all of their citizens’ needs, and a cruel and ruthless anarchy where the weak and unfortunate are left to perish, so maybe it IS too difficult for you to understand. Or perhaps I’m just too much of a vile, uncompassionate monster to explain it to you – I’d love to go over the details, but I’m late for a KKK meeting and typing with the hood over my head is really rough, y’know?
PZ, why are you mocking science?! Why do you hate reason? The material you are treating so lightly was the Modern Scientific Medicine of its day, along with sterilizing the Dusky Inferior Races. Evidently you are just a stealth mole for Interior, I mean Intelligent Design.
I love the illustration. As a kid I recall one of my friends from a relatively uptight family coming down with a case of blue balls. Was that healthy? You be the judge.
The healthy one in the illustration looks like it’s about to burst.
There is so such thing. Probably just a case of torsion. Or possibly a minor infection.
I’ve got one of this guy’s home health books and he’s a bloody riot. Constantly railing against patent medicines while shilling his own. Eugenics, electrotherapy, homosexualism prevention, his Invalid Hotel has it all. He’s got customer testimonials throughout the book including one next to the picture of a black woman right out of “Uncle Remus”.
Hometown Pride!
[blockquote]There is so such thing. Probably just a case of torsion. Or possibly a minor infection.[/blockquote]
Obviously you’ve never had a sexually-repressed girlfriend. An hour or two on the couch with her and I’d have blue balls so bad I could barely walk. Thankfully I haven’t had a girl like that since highschool.
It’s nothing to do with torsion or an infection… just the result of unrelenting vasocongestion in the testicular veins.
Talking about women being blotto … I remember reading about Englishwomen in India asking their Indian servants to serve special cookies because guests were coming for afternoon tea. The result was that these ladies would sit around having afternoon tea with their lady friends, stoned silly from the hash cookies their servants obediently brought for them. To the servants, that’s what ‘cookies for special occasions’ MEANT.
If they were taking patent medicine as well …
I hope that people understand that patent medications did not represent science at the time. And people were known to say things like, “If we dumped all the drugs in the ocean it would be better for the man worse for the fish”. These things were known to be quackery by real doctors, don’t think that this is what passed for real medicine even then.
The FDA, which started just regulating food in 1910 after the food supply was shown to be dangerous, got authority to regulate drugs as well in 1938. The incident that precipitated this nightmare was a patent medication containing, essentially, ethylene glycol, being advertised as a flu remedy. More than 100 people died, most of them children.
With the FDA came a single rule. If you are going to advertise an indication for a drug, you must have proof. It ended up being the birth of pharmaceutical science. After all, if you can sell a drug that supposedly cures something without having to do expensive research, why would you bother? You make more money selling ineffectual crap without doing R&D than you do taking such big risks and expense to prove efficacy. The requirement that there be proof before advertising indications was simple, and revolutionary.
Thus it is with dismay when I hear libertarians say things like the FDA has killed more people than Hitler, or that we should slacken the regulatory regime. This is total nonsense. It must be increased, altie-meds should be included as well (the patent medications of our day). The FDA is why we have medicines that work, not the free market, which would have provided us with nothing but quackery for eons before discovering new drugs.
America was home to many quacks. It was considered undemocratic to license doctors.
Okay, I’ll grant you this one. The usage of the term I’m most familiar with is extremely informal, and is claimed to result from failure to release all those little babymakers, which is nonsense.
I don’t think even your usage is harmful, although it sounds very painful.
The real problem is that people would buy the drugs without wanting to hear about the expensive research.
And, of course, that the FDA seems to have a little problem with failing to apply standards properly, accepting as evidence the pharmacological companies’ studies while not demanding to see all of their experimental results, while applying unreasonable standards to useful drugs (for example, marijuana), with the end result being that people are just as unthinking in their drug use, but now have a false confidence that the government is watching out for them.
It’s not the FDA’s fault that medical marijuana is squelched. Blame politics, no desire to fund research, and the DEA threatening doctors and patients who prescribe and use it.
As far as not seeing all of the results this won’t be true for much longer as their is a push to make public all data for drug trials. I simply don’t get these schizophrenic attacks on the FDA. It regulates too much or regulates too little, which is it? I think regulation should be tightened, drug companies should be watched far more carefully, ghost-writing should be banned, data should be public.
Ultimately though, we have to recognize that without the FDA or with a weak FDA, patent medications will strike again. The altie-med business is proof of this, they will test the boundaries and carry them as far as they can go to try to suggest claims of efficacy for stuff that is just worthless.
If the argument is that FDA is keeping people from drugs that they’re perfectly capable of judging for themselves whether they can use them, then I know you’re on crack (the myth of the omniscient consumer). Prescription drugs should not be freely available, people should not self-prescribe (not even doctors – medical care is too important to trust yourself to be unbiased about), drugs should be restricted a great majority of the time. They are dangerous, can be misused, and it’s just bad medicine to think that people should have easy access to just any damn substance they please. People are simply not bright enough, and as you see with altie-meds, they simply can not resist experimenting on their children with all sorts of crap. You simply can’t trust people with these things.
MarkH: Desperation is a powerful driving force for recklessness, medical or otherwise.
By Jove! to what profound Waste hath we Men been heretofore spending our very Life’s essence; and were it not for the good Doctor’s intervention, wrought of his unmatched knowledge in matters physic, we should be repeating this shamefull Habit until our organa genitalia wither to the size of mustard seeds.
I AM blaming politics, which is why I’m against diverting society’s resources into a politically-controlled organization to fulfill this function.
When the government is given responsibility for a thing, that thing enters the domain of politics, and politics never works very well even in the best of times.
These are not the best of times.
So you don’t want the government to regulate drugs? Who then? Individuals?
I’m sorry pot isn’t legal, but if legalizing it means we have to take control of substances out of the hands of the government then screw pot and the inevitable boring jam bands that result from its use.
Government should regulate drugs, and it should do it well. I fail to see an alternative that would be non-political yet also not completely fucking idiotic. In minutes you’d see such idiotic misuse of drugs it would blow your mind. You think we have a problem with antibiotic resistance now, sheesh, an unregulated drug system would be a catastrophe.
And yet the children of that era turned out to be The Greatest Generation. How bizarre, how bizarre.
“And, of course, that the FDA seems to have a little problem with failing to apply standards properly, accepting as evidence the pharmacological companies’ studies while not demanding to see all of their experimental results…”
— Caledonian
I’m sorry, but that is horsefeathers. To get a drug approved by the FDA does require showing them ALL the evidence generated in-house.
We are talking about enough data to fill one third of a semi tractor trailer during the days when paper, not electronic, documentation was provided.
And most of this data is never published, as it is not phase three trials.
It never ceases to amaze me how some people think it is easy to fudge studies that are randomized, double-blinded, multi-centered and reviewed in stages by independent expert panels.
#25 MarkH: But the good is the enemy of the perfect, or something. Don’t you see?
Um, no. There’s been a lot of controversy over drug companies cancelling experimental runs when the answer they wanted wasn’t forthcoming, and holding up spurious positive results as definitive.
The companies choose who performs the research, the companies can significantly influence what results are reported, and they like to deny the results derived from experimenting with the drug in the general patient population.
This is why we’ve had such problems with expensive drugs that don’t do better than placebo, and drugs that have serious side effects but were approved anyway.
It’s also been shown that food colorings actually do have neurological side effects in some people, but there aren’t new restrictions on them. Too expensive, says the FDA. Things Generally Recognized As Safe don’t need study and regulation. Too expensive.
That’s exactly the point! If you can force the government to do something well, you don’t need the government in the first place. If you have need of the government to accomplish the end, you don’t have enough power to prevent the government from degenerating.
If you give a government enough power to override economics, what do you control the government with?
“it’s also a bit murky on how ejaculating into a vagina transforms the loss of that small quantity of precious fluid into a positive, healthy experience.”
That’s because of the NSSP (Negative Spermatozoïdal Spiritual Particle). It has not yet been detected, but according to the latest creationist scientific research, it does exist !
Upon landing, each spermatozoïd releases an NSSP. God has made sure that the female vaginal lubricant contains pyridine which has the property of absorbing and destroying NSSPs. Otherwise, there is a risk that some of the NSSPs may be captured by the male cochlea, which can cause deathening and many other irreparable diseases.
But now, thanks to CreationLab’s newly formulated Auditory Cream with Pyridine, masturbation is totally safe. Just ask your priest or pastor and he will gladly sell you a tube.
O, I bet they were!
Damn. I’m gone for a day, and now it sounds like the thread took off. On a weekend, concentrated on healthy ejaculations and other pleasures of the flesh and mind. Guess I have to pop in and leave a wait-for-it note, just in case someone actually read my comments. :-|
I don’t know about drugs, but that applies in spades for medical equipment. If anything is undocumented as per the meticulous standard, scratch that construction and start over.
So add donkeywings to the horsefeathers.
O, I bet they were!
Damn. I’m gone for a day, and now it sounds like the thread took off. On a weekend, concentrated on healthy ejaculations and other pleasures of the flesh and mind. Guess I have to pop in and leave a wait-for-it note, just in case someone actually read my comments. :-|
I don’t know about drugs, but that applies in spades for medical equipment. If anything is undocumented as per the meticulous standard, scratch that construction and start over.
So add donkeywings to the horsefeathers.
A few points:
Food & drug safety. “Libertarians” (the term seems to fit), possibly shills for the food manufacturers and distributers, notoriously suggested that it was an infringement on householders’ freedom to determine for themselves if milk was milk or adulterated with chalk and water (fine if you’re a chemist). I think they fall into the same boat as global laissez-faire warming deniers. “Don’t make the government interfere! Let us go on as we’ve been doing.”
Efficiencies of scale. The ancient Romans had that libertarian attitude: “If you want fire-fighters, contract your own.” We’ve decided it’s more efficient to have one well-equipped force for all households in a region.
Medical equipment. Sadly, documenting the safety of equipment does not prevent mis-use (and it’s not the equipment co.’s fault). We’re seeing a lot of one-use-only, fairly sturdy stuff that’s One Use Only because it’s impossible to sterilize properly. But with the pressure to keep hospital budgets down, there may not be another one on the cart, so…. It’s scary.
True libertarianism would vote for making all illegal drugs legal – but, let’s say, making it a matter of public record who got what from their doctor, and holding non-doctors accountable for any ills suffered by their sale of dangerous drugs.
The reasoning processes of people today aren’t much different than they were back then: we still prefer stories to statistics, and still tend to believe that testimonials and anecdotes — especially our own personal testimonials and anecdotes — are what it means to test something ‘scientifically.’
“Try it for yourself, and see if it works” is not science. There are too many confounding factors, too many opportunities for common errors in interpretation — like confusing correlation with causation, or mistaking placebo (or narcotic) effects for an actual “cure.” But the “health freedom movement” is pushing so-called Alternative Medicine just like the patent medicine pushers did back then, using the same kind of arguments, reasoning, and evidence.
The 19th century stuff on masculine emissions also sounds suspiciously like alt-med: it’s vitalism — the basis of “energy medicine” — in one of its now less-popular forms.
Um, no. There’s been a lot of controversy over drug companies cancelling experimental runs when the answer they wanted wasn’t forthcoming, and holding up spurious positive results as definitive.
And how is the fact that the companies cancel experiments lead to the conclusion that government is the problem? Or, a better question, how is getting rid of government and not companies going to stop this from happening on a larger scale?
Libertarians never seem to take into account that there are ways other than the state to infringe on liberties. And don’t even get me started on the cognitive dissonance necessary to be an Atheist Libertarian, at least if you actually understand what liberties are and where they come from.
That’s not the point. Giving government oversight of the drug market is worthless if you don’t have quality oversight of the government.
We haven’t been able to get quality oversight of the government for generations. Maybe not even since before Jackson.
Name something that works better for drug safety and effectiveness regulation, then. Hint: “the free market” is demonstrably incorrect.
Oh, and by the way, PZ? I’m nearly 57, and I’ve never ejaculated, healthily or otherwise, into a vagina in my life. There is more in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than heterosexuality.
That’s not the point. Giving government oversight of the drug market is worthless if you don’t have quality oversight of the government.
So you are saying that there would be less problems with medicine without government oversight, given that we do not currently have quality oversight of the government*. Then it follows that without government oversight the companies and/or the people would somehow do a better job of oversight. And therefore there would be less “problems with expensive drugs that don’t do better than placebo.”
*I certainly agree that we don’t have oversight of the government.
If Americans elect a Republican for president again (apart from R.Paul), I’m buying a ticket on the next space shuttle. I’ll get a better “view” and it’ll feel more cozy up there.
If the people were wise, the companies that sold harmful things would wither and die.
If the people were foolish, the people would wither and die.
In either case, justice would be done.
Even weirder, it was a regular and lucrative part of medical practice to relieve feminine tensions by masturbating female patienrs, I guess so that their minds wouldn’t be overcome by lust.
sorry my comment #40 was for another thread…
If the people were wise, the companies that sold harmful things would wither and die.
If the people were foolish, the people would wither and die.
In either case, justice would be done.
Actually, what we are worried about is ignorance not foolishness. And the idea that people who are ignorant of the effects of drugs somehow “deserve” to die really shows your true colors. Ha ha stupid people, die.
Although, I imagine you know enough about everything that you’d never be in that camp.
Well, you’d have to be three sheets to the wind to think that a bonehead idea like prohibition could work…
-jcr
” it is with dismay when I hear libertarians say things like the FDA has killed more people than Hitler, ”
Be fair, FDA has indeed killed a hell of a lot of people by keeping drugs off the market that save lives. Don’t know if the number of FDA victims adds up to ten million, but there’s one anti-clotting drug I know of that was keeping heart attack patients alive in Europe for at least a decade before it got past the bureaucracy in the USA.
The proper role for an agency like the FDA is to police whether a drug is genuine or not (ie, if you’re paying for XYZ, they’d better not be slipping you talcum powder), NOT to intervene in the decisions that I and my doctor make about how to treat any diseases I may have.
But far more important than the body count, is the issue of liberty. If the government gets to override your decisions about what you’ll ingest, then they, not you, own your body.
-jcr
” cognitive dissonance necessary to be an Atheist Libertarian, ”
Excuse me? How is rejecting the notion of an ultimate cosmic dictator inconsistent with being a Libertarian?
-jcr
Excuse me? How is rejecting the notion of an ultimate cosmic dictator inconsistent with being a Libertarian?
Well, if there is a justification for the existence of liberties, in the libertarian sense, other than argument from scripture in places such as Locke, then I’ve missed it. And I’ve read extensively on the subject.
Most modern political philosophies are in fact based on arguments from scripture, or at the very least based on arguments from the existence of a deity.
We all understand why your patience is wearing thin with Caledonian, PZ. Why, after you insulted his sex life, he started talking about the patent medicines in your post instead of bending over and saying “Thank you, sir, may I have another!”? How you manage with such rudeness is beyond understanding.
I am surprised nobody has noted the recent research which showed a negative correlation between high emission rates in youth (masturbatory, intercourse or erotic dream related) and prostate cancer risk. Or did that one fall foul of the censors over the pond?
To get back to the actual topic of the thread, if I’d lived in that kind of culture as a woman (it’s bad enough as it is now, thank you), I think I would have been reaching for the patent medicines too. The stronger, the better.
I’m rather keen on being a full legal person, actually. It’s nice.
” I’m sorry, but that is horsefeathers. To get a drug approved by the FDA does require showing them ALL the evidence generated in-house.
Um, no. There’s been a lot of controversy over drug companies cancelling experimental runs when the answer they wanted wasn’t forthcoming, and holding up spurious positive results as definitive.”
–Caledonian
Um, yes. What you are talking about has NOTHING to do with what I was talking about… which was your initial point about the FDA.
Drugs can not be approved unless the FDA gets all the information it wants. And they want everything.
What you are talking about, I think, are clinical trials done after a drug is approved, usually done to garner a further indication, that the pharmaceutical companies do not publish when they don’t like the results.
And that can be a bad thing, as you point out. On the other hand, there is a strong publishing bias against negative results. Journal issues would have to be a foot thick to publish every trial which didn’t give positive results.
“The companies choose who performs the research, the companies can significantly influence what results are reported…” — Caledonian
But they can’t influence how a double-blind randomized trial comes out. And every clinical study presented to the FDA
is analysed into oblivion.
“… and they like to deny the results derived from experimenting with the drug in the general patient population.”
— Caledonian
Results is the wrong word here. I think you are referring to adverse event reporting after a drug is approved and being prescribed by doctors?
And here the problem is – usually – not the company’s fault, but is the fault of the physicians who do not report 99.9 % of adverse events because it is a huge paper chase.
That said, there have been some very despicable examples of pharmaceutical companies sitting on shocking adverse event data.
The problem is that it is IMPOSSIBLE to test enough people before a drug’s approval so that adverse events affecting a very small percentage of patients can be discovered early.
Phase three trials are incredibly expensive – thousands of dollars paid to doctors alone for each patient enrolled. And it’s still hard to get enough recruitment!
There is always going to be some risk involved with taking medicines.
“This is why we’ve had such problems with expensive drugs that don’t do better than placebo, and drugs that have serious side effects but were approved anyway.” – Caledonian
You need to learn more about drug development and clinical trials – you would understand better why the placebo effect is extremely high in certain clinical classes.
Most antidepressants have trouble beating placebo in many depression trials. Not approving these drugs would have resulted in many tens of thousands of preventable suicides.
Like most things in life, there are a lot of shades of gray here – not stark black and white.
I already know that – the conditions they’re ‘treating’ aren’t physiological and the drugs themselves don’t work very well.
And millions of unnecessary, yet expensive, prescriptions.
Interrobang–
Yes, why do you think the women’s movement gathered steam when it did? Women were too busy during WWII to fight their own battle. And before then, they were serene, fulfilled females, content to stay at home– and stay snockered to the gills on patent medicines.
Really, in the early days of the battle for women’s rights, the standard answer to the smug, male question, “Why can’t you stay at home and be happy like my grandmother?” was, “Because we don’t have Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound.” (True, it was only 40 proof. But I believe one of the vegetables in the vegetable compound was the opium poppy.)
So, depression is not physiological and treating it is “unnecessary”?
Whew. You should have stopped while you were still ahead, Caledonian.
So why are people still arguing with the pretentious noisemaker?
Bcs thy njy yr cmpny.
There *are* things to blame the FDA for, however: such as the fact that the branch of the FDA that reviews research is not the same as the branch that actually has the ability to lay penalties and/or fines on those companies whose research is suspect.
And the fact that pharmaceutical review boards’ salaries are now in part paid *by* pharma companies. These are problems that the FDA can take steps to address, but does not (and have become a regular issue in the NEJM editorial pages; the NEJM takes a very strong stance regarding the destruction of the FDA’s policing ability).
Comment by Caledonian blocked. [unkill][show comment]
Killfile rulez.
Oh, the free market would give us those, too, I’m sure. It would just take longer, and it would involve natural selection: everyone who happens to pick a medicine that doesn’t work wins a Darwin Award.
Caledonian will never tell you. The very fact that you are asking proves that you are too stupid ( = don’t think along exactly the same lines as he does, unspoken assumptions included) to understand any explanation anyway, so he will not bother.
Investigative journalism plus elections? The opposition, by means of parliamentary investigation?
And if your doctor makes those decisions all by himself?
“DOCTOR Evil! I haven’t studied at Evil Medical School to be called ‘Mister’ by you!”
Now don’t tell me you make all those decisions on your own.
You haven’t been here for a long time, have you?
Fortunately there is now the Journal of Negative Results. (It is not a joke — a few issues are out –, even though I doubt many people will go to the trouble of writing papers about negative results.)
Oh, the free market would give us those, too, I’m sure. It would just take longer, and it would involve natural selection: everyone who happens to pick a medicine that doesn’t work wins a Darwin Award.
Caledonian will never tell you. The very fact that you are asking proves that you are too stupid ( = don’t think along exactly the same lines as he does, unspoken assumptions included) to understand any explanation anyway, so he will not bother.
Investigative journalism plus elections? The opposition, by means of parliamentary investigation?
And if your doctor makes those decisions all by himself?
“DOCTOR Evil! I haven’t studied at Evil Medical School to be called ‘Mister’ by you!”
Now don’t tell me you make all those decisions on your own.
You haven’t been here for a long time, have you?
Fortunately there is now the Journal of Negative Results. (It is not a joke — a few issues are out –, even though I doubt many people will go to the trouble of writing papers about negative results.)
Hurray for killfiles, but I’m surprised at how long it took for “Silent” Cal’s insipidity, trolling, wanking, and slagging, to land him in PZ’s dungeon (which now, at last, has it’s own sinister midget with a bucket and a mop).
My favorite patent medicine was Radithor which had radium in it.
Yikes!
Give me alcohol and tincture of opium any day.
“Thread jacking whiner with a thin-skin who needs to Just Go Away” gets my vote.
All I can say is I looked at that poor little testicle on the right side of the diagram, and “aawwwwed.”
Poor little guy. No wonder men got all freaked.
And those potions for ladies? I could use some now, with all of my papers due…
Why is a certain human being (re: Twain’s definition) allowed to clog up and attempt to derail this and many other threads?
That certain human being should lock himself in his own blog and throw away the e-key.
I smell bullshit. This is how the BS argument works (this is an actual libertarian argument):
Here’s the deal, aspirin is one of many drugs that if administered right after a heart-attack will help the patient recover by keeping the blood from clotting. By focusing on the FDA not allowing manufacturers to “off label” advertise (even though it doesn’t actually stop off label prescribing) the argument disingenously comes up with some artificially derived cost to the population.
Making it even worse, aspirin went right into off-label use in post-cardiac medicine. Just because Bayer, et. al., weren’t allowed to “advertise” didn’t mean that all the peer-reviewed papers and the very effective doctoral pipeline didn’t get the word around.
And the biggest killer was – drug companies DIDN’T LIKE it known that Aspirin (damn cheap) was as effective as their incredibly expensive prescription medications. Medications they spent millions in developing and advertising like Coumadin, Miradon, Heparin, and Warfarin; all of which are blood thinners and do the same job as asprin and, no doubt, the so called “life saving medication available in Europe but not America.” And make a LOT more money for the drug companies.
One more tidbit: US manufacturers tend to put a lot of the pressure on for keeping European drugs off the US market. So, it’s just not the FDA, it’s also US manufacturers who have a cozy relationship with the board members of the FDA. It’s all a game.
to her the purest of his blood is offered in sacrifice, and it is no wonder that female associates seem tame and unattractive when such imaginary and consummate divinity is courted.
I almost thought he referred to Aleister Crowley, until that last clause. Note that the original Victorian theory did not consider it healthy to ejaculate into a vagina, and doing it too often or too passionately could lead to the same tragic medical results. AC’s response involved ’emptying one’s blood into the cup of Our Lady Babalon,’ which of course is the True Meaning® of the Holy Grail©. Be sure to point this out the next time you meet a Dan Brown fan.
It’s not the FDA’s fault that medical marijuana is squelched.
Legally it is, unless the Secretary of HHS would retroactively choose not to ‘delegate’ legal responsibility for determining risk if they pointed out you could more easily kill yourself using dihydrogen monoxide.
Personally, I’d change the whole system. Restrict the DEA to antibiotics, restrict the FDA to color-coded labels and warnings (“This product has no known use.”)
You know, there are still religions which discourage masturbation, and they usually try to justify it with “secular” sounding arguments like this one. I once had a Mormon friend attempt to explain why their concern about what teens do in private was actually quite reasonable. Even a secular humanist should understand.
If boys masturbate and fantasize, I was told, then they will start to think of women as sex objects, and be unable to really relate to their wives later on, as people. The real live girl will not “live up” to the fantasy. Masturbators dissipate their natural lust, distort their ability to feel romance, and become hardened and coarsened. They can’t love as deeply as those who “save it” for that special someone.
I doubted this, and there didn’t seem to be any research. So no, I couldn’t relate. Sounded like another fantasy story about the special, deeper feelings the religious have over those without God — and also sounded like it would end up having the opposite effect. A person could become so repressed and obsessed they’d objectify the opposite sex even more, not less, and be eager to marry someone, any one, any one at all.
But the argument isn’t that far off from what’s written here.
Or perhaps I’m just too much of a vile, uncompassionate monster to explain it to you
hey, you were the one who likened himself to Arnold Rimmer.
A member of a misogynistic sect with a history of polygamy complaining about women being “objectified.”
…
Dear American Christians: Satire is dead. Stop kicking it, plzthx.
Heh–once I used some graphics software to render a 3D model of the human prostate for a presentation I was giving. As the only homogamete in that session, I didn’t realize that leaving the default turquoise color unchanged would prompt more than a few in the audience to observe that the poor thing looked “cold”, “sad”, and “lonely”.
Next time I gave that presentation, I pinked it up to make it look warmer, and it was *much* better received by all the guys.
–Louisa May Alcott, Perilous Play, 1869
When the government is given responsibility for a thing, that thing enters the domain of politics, and politics never works very well even in the best of times.
sorry, but that most certainly is NOT limited to federally funded institutes of research, and, going the other way, it is often the case that internal structures of federally funded research institutes are specifically designed in order to squelch much of the external political influences.
good science is good science, and in cases where undue political influence is suspect, the science becomes immediately suspect as well.
Research institutes, federally funded or not, operate on similar principles to those that are not. A maintained record of poor science spells doom for them, as for any other research institue.
I learned this firsthand working with folks from NIH. For a more recent case on point, I believe I posted a link in a different thread to reports coming from CDC about health issues related to global warming that were nixed by the current administration.
it wasn’t the CDC that was at fault here, it was the administration.
Politics happened, yes, but clearly they DID NOT influence whether the results were produced by the federally funded research institute to begin with.
It’s just these kinds of things that actually forces highly public research institutes to be even more careful with their analysis. For example, even the FDA can be seemingly TOO conservative in its decisions to disapprove a particular drug. case on point:
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/dn9785-potential-new-adhd-drug-hits-snag.html
anywho, something to think about the next time you want to take a bat to the FDA, NASA, CDC, etc.
The real live girl will not “live up” to the fantasy. Masturbators dissipate their natural lust, distort their ability to feel romance, and become hardened and coarsened. They can’t love as deeply as those who “save it” for that special someone.
hmm. being honest about it, I do notice that masturbation can make a bit more work for a new sexual partner in the purely physical department (and that goes for both sexes – very hard to compete with a good sex toy that is frequently used).
OTOH, the fantasy is unable (obviously) to live up to the emotional interaction available with a real person, and that connection/interaction can lead to far more interesting and fulfilling relationships AND sex.
I’ve always found the ideal solution to be to work your partner’s fantasies right into the normal relationship (er, as much as physically possible, anyway).
the ideal coupling between fantasy and real emotional interaction is just orgasmic IMO, to pardon the pun.
Rey Fox: The greatest generation was born in the 1920s post-war baby boom. They grew up with rising regulation and government intervention in the 1920s and 1930s. (e.g. The first federal money for flood relief and for pregnant women was in the 20s).
—-
If you’ve ever read any 19th century pornography, you’ll find some of the biology amazing. Did you know that your testicles, if you have them, fill up with sperm when you are sexually excited? That’s why they got bigger and bigger during the foreplay sequence in what passes for a plot. Did you know that women could ejaculate, as opposed to lubricating and orgasming? (This has been revived from time to time in women’s magazines like Elle, so it isn’t just an ignorant guy thing. It’s also an ignorant girl thing). There were also theories that women ovulated in response to sex, which may be related to theory that a woman can only get pregnent having sex if she is enjoying it.
—
Actually, the FDA has a fairly good record when you consider the kinds of over the counter notions that were sold in the 19th century, e.g. heroin in baby tonics, and the various quack remedies that have been pushed for in the 20th. I’ve got my own favorite, they should have approved this, and disapproved that list, but that’s just second guessing. If you think driving with a cellphone is dangerous, consider what driving with one of those tonics would be like.
It is impossible to get drug regulation perfectly right. The Europeans had looser regulation, then they had thalidomide babies, and that pushed them to tighten up. The pendulum swings one way and then the other. The Europeans also have all kinds of rules we wouldn’t put up with. You can’t buy ibuprofen in a supermarket or convenience store. You have to buy it at a pharmacist’s stand alone shop, but you can get 800mg hits of it. (I had a headache in Venice, so I know). The French are big on suppositories. If you have a stuffed nose, you’re supposed to pop one in. I imagine this works for some people. In New Zealand, the pharmacist who sold me some nose spray took my blood pressure as a precaution. Granted, I have to show my driver’s license to get my hits of 24 hour sudafed, but we have so many meth labs out here it’s a fire hazard.
Of course, the people who scare me are the medical ethicists. If you read the horrifying history of medicine, you’ll see experiment after experiment, trial after trial, that would never be approved. For example, there is currently no way to test a drug on a child because a child cannot give informed consent. Really. They’re minors; they can’t. This is a serious issue. Thank heavens we’ve grandfathered a lot of drugs, and doctors are allowed to use them in children off label.
Fortunately there is now the Journal of Negative Results. (It is not a joke — a few issues are out –, even though I doubt many people will go to the trouble of writing papers about negative results.)
actually, it’s a fucking great idea, and relates to the issue of replication that is brought up from time to time in almost every scientific journal.
we really don’t replicate experiments nearly enough, and this applies equally well to those that produce “negative” results.
If a study with a good experimental design produces negative results, it’s just begging to be repeated. It’s so hard to get a hold of a lot of this kind of information usually, since it never ends up in the lit. Most of the Master’s programs I’ve been witness to in biology would just love to dig into something like this for ideas for Masters thesis topics.
I do hope that the project becomes not only as popular as it should (it should become a HUGE resource of ideas for repeat or new experiments), but also continues to remain an online Open Source project.
I have observed that having a partner who is inhibited such that their level of sexual comfort falls dramatically short of one’s fantasy life can somewhat undermine sexual satisfaction. I highly doubt that masturbation in itself has anything to do with this (in fact, I think if she’d been masturbating without guilt for longer that would help solve most of the problem).
I have observed that having a partner who is inhibited…
goes both ways, for entirely different reasons, though.
You’re not thinking this is counter to what I said, though, if I am correct?
These 19th and early 20th century quack potions are
the father of modern-day snake oil.
For every “Dr Pierce’s Prescription”,
you’ll find a modern-day bit of snake oil that will
cure you of . . . precisely nothing.
At least you could get mildly illuminated by drinking
a couple slugs of Dr Pierce’s crud. Homeopathic crud
won’t even do that for you.
I’m not sure masturbating or not makes a difference.
“Most modern political philosophies are in fact based on arguments from scripture”
You’re about a century out of date.
-jcr
Moses,
Put away your straw man. Aspirin wasn’t the drug I was talking about. The drug in question had been through the equivalent of the FDA in several European countries, and this was back around 1980 or so that I heard about it.
The question was asked above who would regulate drugs if the FDA didn’t, and I would like to point out that this is a problem that the market has solved on many occasions in many fields. In the case of safety, for example, Underwriters’ Laboratories (UL) is *not* a government agency, but the market pressure is quite sufficient to ensure that very few unsafe electrical products are sold in the USA. (Since, if you wire your house with outlets that aren’t UL-approved, your homeowners’ insurance is probably void.)
A professional association of MDs and pharmacists, whose reputation is their stock in trade, can assume the role of recommending for or against particular drugs, and can do so without coercive power to enforce their conclusions. Just as is the case with homeowners’ insurance and product safety, health insurers can provide a very powerful economic incentive to steer patients to safe and effective treatments. After all, the best possible outcome for an insurance carrier is to have subscribers who rarely get sick, and recover as quickly (read: cheaply) as possible if they do.
Incidentally, I worked on a Mac-based karyotyping system many years ago, which could have sold for about $25K, were it not for the FDA approval process. Add in the costs of satisfying the bureaucrats, and we couldn’t have possibly sold that system for under $150K. Upshot: we couldn’t make the numbers work to bring that product to market. I don’t know what KT systems sell for now, but I know from direct personal experience that they could have been a lot cheaper, many years sooner.
-jcr
Actually there are more than one – your link was for JNR-Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (whose editors include at least one familiar Pharyngula commenter), more pertinent to this thread might be JNR in Biomedicine.
When someone approaches me with this type of argument (e.g. teh gay is a choice), I always ask “How do you know? Personal experience?”.
WRT FDA, is that type of function not related to protecting the citizenry/safety? There’s been a huge push for a number of years to “privatize” government functions in the USA. Profit motive is better? Not when safety is involved, IMHO.
Disclaimer: I work for the FAA, but I don’t think we should worry much about airline profits (which we do).
I apologize for my complete inability to close a tag.
You’re about a century out of date.
Well, I was exaggerating. But that doesn’t change the fact that libertarianism comes from arguments from scripture. And I should have thought of Rawls and the Utilitarians, but I was being intellectually lazy. Even those political philosophies are influenced heavily by norms and mores that come from scripture.
I think it’s great that a lot of effective medicines for the treatment of minor ailments are available over the counter in the U.S. But before I buy something to self-treat my headache, upset stomach, or skin rash, I want to know what’s in it. I’ve legally and safely used properly prescribed narcotics for pain after surgery or injury. I enjoy drinking wine and cocktails in moderation. But I don’t want my OTC cough medicines to be laced with opiates or loaded with alcohol. I don’t want other people to unknowingly give such things to their kids, or to swallow improperly labeled intoxicants and then drive their cars on the expressway under the misconception that it’s a safe thing to do. And, at the other extreme, if I have a headache, I don’t want to take sugar pills containing a homeopathic “dose” of dubious plant extracts. I want to buy and take a predictable quantity of a medicine that’s known to be both effective against headaches and safe when used as directed. And, if I have a bad reaction to a drug, I want to be sufficiently informed to avoid it in the future. (My mother and her brother both have severe allergic reactions to aspirin. In the case of my uncle, it’s bad enough to have once landed him in the ER with breathing difficulties. You can bet that they’re both grateful for complete and truthful labeling of OTC drugs.)
The FDA and the drug industry have their problems — sometimes serious ones. Like all government and corporate entities, both merit watchfulness by citizens and consumers. But FDA regulations have ended the days when selling Lydia Pinkham’s hooch and other flavors of snake oil were considered a respectable business. It’s still perfectly legal to sell many “alternative” items over the counter, and it’s possible that some may be effective. However, the manufacturer can’t advertise that they cure or prevent disease, or even that they’re safe, if there’s no hard evidence to back up the claim. That’s a major step forward, and we can thank government regulation for it.
There is a sexual urban legend I would like to know the truth of. The blue balls effect I know for a fact to be true: Prolonged arousal for a male can indeed be painful, due to the disruption of blood flow. I can confirm that for you all second-hand, as I have a friend who has a strong interest in orgasm denial. A rather kinky friend, who likes few things more than to be tied up while a partner teases him with not-quite-enough stimulation for hours. He knows everything there is to know on the subject to blue balls from personal experience, and assures me that it does indeed happen.
But a similar idea I have heard is that a male will adapt to frequent ejaculation (For all those who mastubate daily!), and that if someone in the habit of frequent ejaculation goes cold-turky this can lead to a painful (But temporary) buildup until their body adjusts.
There is so little reliable information on such matters though, just things gained through dirty jokes and rumor. Does anyone know if there is any true in this unreliable claim? I can see the evolutionary basis that could lead to such a mechanism (Increasing semen production when its needed to boost fertility, turning it down again to save energy when not sexually active), but I dont know if it actually happens.
“Ah! The market! It’s magic.”
It may seem like magic to one whose understanding of economics has been strangled by Marxist instruction, but the market is nothing of the kind. It’s a mechanism for information flow through supply, demand, and prices. When left to operate without interference, it works very well indeed.
-jcr
“that doesn’t change the fact that libertarianism comes from arguments from scripture.”
Like hell it does. Go read what Ayn Rand had to say about “mystics”.
-jcr
Like hell it does. Go read what Ayn Rand had to say about “mystics”.
A Libertarian denouncing mystics has no impact on the fact that modern libertarianism is based on argument from scripture. The idea that liberties exist, in the libertarian tradition, is either taken for granted or based on earlier philosophers, philosophers which relied on arguments from scripture. Nozick is guilty of this, assuming the existence of liberties with no reasons given. One can make an argument for liberties from the utilitarian tradition, as Mill does, but that is well outside the libertarian philosophy.
Isn’t ibuprofen an actual painkiller, as opposed to something (aspirin) you take when you have a headache?
Speaking of which, I think aspirin is only sold in pharmacies over here, too, but of course no prescription is needed. I don’t know if one is needed for ibuprofen… I think I’ve seen ads on TV for it, so probably not.
Such as democracy (Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia, Triad Systems et al.) and the military (
Executive OutcomesSteel FoundationBlackwater).Just a few posts above this assertion of yours was disproven.
Isn’t ibuprofen an actual painkiller, as opposed to something (aspirin) you take when you have a headache?
Speaking of which, I think aspirin is only sold in pharmacies over here, too, but of course no prescription is needed. I don’t know if one is needed for ibuprofen… I think I’ve seen ads on TV for it, so probably not.
Such as democracy (Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia, Triad Systems et al.) and the military (
Executive OutcomesSteel FoundationBlackwater).Just a few posts above this assertion of yours was disproven.
I have no idea about who Nozick might be… but why shouldn’t the existence of liberties be the default assumption, and the idea that “there ought be limits to freedom” (© Fearless Flightsuit) need to be justified?
(Which it can be: my freedom ends where yours begins, and vice versa. It becomes more difficult in practice, but the theory is easy.)
I have no idea about who Nozick might be… but why shouldn’t the existence of liberties be the default assumption, and the idea that “there ought be limits to freedom” (© Fearless Flightsuit) need to be justified?
(Which it can be: my freedom ends where yours begins, and vice versa. It becomes more difficult in practice, but the theory is easy.)
When left to operate without interference, it works very well indeed.
ah, the simplistic mind.
ignorance is bliss, right John?
Your mind conveniently glossed over even the very few examples (prior to FDA, big tobacco, others) that were listed in this thread.
how is having your head wedged up your ass working out for you?
good enough, I suppose, eh?
They work more or less the same way, AFAIK…
I have no idea about who Nozick might be…
Nozick is the prime political philosopher of libertarianism in contemporary times. I’d suggest picking up him book Anarchy, State and Utopia in which he covers the gamut of libertarian arguments.
but why shouldn’t the existence of liberties be the default assumption, and the idea that “there ought be limits to freedom” (© Fearless Flightsuit) need to be justified?
Well, why shouldn’t the existence of God be the default assumption? If we want to posit that liberties exist then we need a decent basis for them other than “god gave them to us,” or “they just exist.”
I was a libertarian atheist and believed that we had rights and all that for quite a while until I started reading the history and seeing where the concept of rights came from and how non-scriptural based libertarian arguments don’t address the issue at all.
When I was a kid there was a christian teenage self help book that was being passed around (sorry, I don’t recall the name or author, but it was quite popular at the time) that said the following:
It is OK to masterbate, but you shouldn’t think about a girl when you do. If you think about someone, it is the same as having sex out of wedlock which, of course, is sin.
Seriously.
I must preserve my bodily fluids! I must preserve my bodily fluids!
What the- scriptural arguments don’t address the issue either. Because if you get to assume that the Bible or God defines morality, I can just as easily assume that I define morality. Think not? Explain why your God has a better right to define rights than Azathoth would, without assuming what you want to prove and without using your own moral feelings as a standard.