In the US, Canada and most industrial countries, the largest funders of medical research on new drugs are the manufacturers themselves. These tests determine which drugs the government will approve for sale. A favorable outcome on a drug trial can mean millions, even billions in profits for the drug companies. We should all be skeptical [...]
Who says big business can’t help out the environment? Let’s see if Coke is willing to make this change in their marketing and production.
It’s a seemingly small change but considering the amount of Coke being sold each day, reducing the production and recycling process by a single step and removing the amount of paint used [...]
It is possibly the single most important thing on the planet for all living organisms and recent studies suggest that water is going to become an even more precious resource as world water demand exceeds the supply. For many of us in first world countries, it is hard to imagine there being a shortage of [...]
I’m sure by now you’ve all been subjected to the media hysteria surrounding swine flu or the H1N1 virus. Everyday we’re hearing about shortages of vaccines and the rare cases of deaths as a result of being infected. Personally, I dismissed much of this as another case of “Fox News”-style reporting, propaganda spread for the [...]
As I am of Chinese descent, the whole issue of shark fin was completely off my radar until very recently. As a kid, despite having to hang around hordes of boring adults at traditional Chinese banquets, I would brave my surroundings for the delicious multi-course meal that usually includes favorites like crab and lobster, crispy [...]
Addicted to Plastic
I recently watched this documentary and despite what the title makes you think, it isn’t about nosejobs or facelifts. It’s about the mass amount of plastic that our society manufactures and quickly disposes of and how it is negatively affecting the way we live and the planet we live on.
Of course, it doesn’t [...]
This past week I had the opportunity to visit one of my very special aunts, Ruth. I had seen her a few times over this past year and kept in touch by phone. She has been courageously working at getting cancer out of her body. When the medical profession told her that it was stage [...]
I have been stumbling across articles lately around the issue of safety concerns of CT scans. This health debate makes me nervous, because last march when I was in the hospital for 12 days, for a transverse diverticulitis attack, I had 2 CT scans in less then 2 weeks.
First, the doctors in emergency decided to [...]
Many concerned citizens are furious to hear that as President Bush leaves office, he is determined to sign as many “midnight regulations”as possible, many of which will affect how the USA environmental practices are implemented. One proposed change would be to eliminate the input of federal wildlife scientists in some endangered species cases, allowing the [...]
The Journal of the American Medical Association researched back in 2006, the issue of a possible conflict of interest between the pharmaceutical industry and doctors. I found the results to be quite startling. They found that doctor’s who took free samples, accepted research grants, and or honorariums, all significantly increased their prescriptions of the [...]
