Just kidding. Such a pill has yet to be discovered, and I increasingly doubt it ever will. Nevertheless, every so often, the medical community settles on some supplement or pharmaceutical that everyone (or everyone past a certain age) needs to be on. For a while, it was vitamin C. Then it was a multivitamin a day or maybe just anti-oxidants. But every time this happens, it seems, later studies are published that show the superpill of the month actually does not have any measurable positive effect and may even cause a little harm. The lay press usually never gets the retraction. Meanwhile, many in the 'alternative medicine' community will adopt it as a cause. So people accumulate more useless pills that they dutifully take every day.
The latest to go the way of the dodo is the daily aspirin. The US Preventative Task Force has recommended for years that men over 45 and women over 55 should take a daily aspirin prevent heart attacks. Now, the FDA has warned that for people of any age not at high risk, the small risks of aspirin outweigh its small benefits.
http://www.wcvb.com/health/aspirin-a-day-not-recommended-by-fda/25819604?tru=KLwLP#.U2g914zW2eM.facebook*
I say it all the time, and I'm beginning to believe it. Healthy people should not take pills.
*Thankyou, Dr. Zachary Sholem Berger for posting this article on Facebook.
Tom, Lory again. One of my coworkers was just raving about the "cure" for cancer that Max Gerson came up with in the 1940's. I just read a little bit about it using Google and it sounds like quackery to me. Is there any scientific proof that this method works? We were discussing her aunt who has terminal cancer and is taking chemo - I said I wouldn't take chemo & she started talking about this "proven" cancer cure that is outlawed in the US because of the big pharma lobbyists. Your opinion? Thanks!
ReplyDeleteWow. I've heard about Gerson. It is sheer quackery. Cancer isn't a single disease. It is many diseases, so there won't ever be one cure. The thing that gets me about that sort of thinking is the implied conspiracy (or stupidity) of all the doctors and cancer researchers who have supposedly been keeping this a secret for so long. I'll try to find the article I read about it.
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