http://www.medicationsense.com/index.html

Also, statins deplete and stop the body’s NATURAL production of Co-Q-10, which guards the heart NATURALLY.

Canada’s law FORCES this info re: Co-Q-10 to be put on prescriptions, but the USA does not.

There is a LOAD of reading on this subject on the web.

Also, check out the VitaminC Foundation’s web site, and take a peek at that! Vit. C, …. Now THERE ya’ go with the CURE!

Best wishes, and KEEP READING, and get OFF the JUNK!

We have all been hyper-sensitized about problems in the expenditure of public monies. We remain virtually uninformed about the far larger scale of “private” squandering.

There’s also the issue of the FDA being understaffed for the amount of applications they receive, and any political pressure. And the issue of pharmaceutical companies rushing drugs to market despite problems that they don’t always report.

As you say, there’s a great deal of deceptive advertising and advertising in general. NPR did a decent story last year on all those drug ads, and how viwers tend to remember the images, but not the patter. (Every time I hear about the cost of a marketing campaign, or a political campaign, or the cost of the Super Bowl halftime show, or an ICBM “missile defense” system, I have to wonder about what else could have been done with that money.)

Overall, the definition of what constitutes fraud in advertising is laughably lax, if you understand how the marketing process works and how utterly central planned deception is within it.

But this particular case easily crosses even the ridiculously faux-naive standards that are supposed to be in place. The planners of this affair belong in prison, and the corporations involved ought to be severely penalized, if not simply nationalized and restructured.

None of that will happen, of course. Law enforcement is strictly for the little people in this country.

I’m not trying to protect people from themselves. I’m trying to protect them from our super-rich overclass, which insists on pushing a wide range of defective and dangerous products.

Moreover, it’s simply not valid to talk about people being inherently stupid until you remove the lavishly-funded tricks and conundrums foisted by our economic planners. Do that, wait 50 years for the cultural habits they’ve created to recede, then we can start talking about people harming themselves.

I agree with you 100-percent about single-payer, btw. This is not an either-or choice, though. In fact, it strikes me as being just the opposite: The case for public insurance gets stronger and gains more supporters when we explain the impact of unrestrained corporate priorities on other fronts.

P.S. Car crashes kill 40,000+ U.S. residents every year.

But I would also hesitate to downplay the role of marketing in all this. They are quite consciously and carefully pushing people to go ask their doctors for these pills. And for doctors to prescribe them, too…

What we really need is a completely open debate over the dynamics of health and illness and medicine. Ain’t gonna happen without a big push, though. Too much money to be made by our present ongoing disaster.

I presumed in this piece that people had heard the basic stories — that Vytorin doesn’t work as claimed, and that Jarvik is not a doctor and only became “grateful” for Lipitor after Pfizer started paying him to misrepresent himself and their pill.

I’m not saying all cholesterol meds are bogus, btw. They may prove to be that or worse, but the jury is still out on that question.