To: Casaubon who wrote (8655 ) 11/23/2004 12:44:38 AM From: Stephen O Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 9523 The stock market is marking down the prices of the drug companies for a reason. They have been run unethically for years. Marketing an unnecessary product to people at a far higher price than an equally effective drug is IMMORAL. The doctors are in cahoots with the drug companies. They push the latest thing from the salesman. The Business Week article you so admired had the opinion that in most cases Vioxx was prescribed unnecessarily. Sure at times it could have been the right drug, but mostly it was not. As regards older people, they are the ones most in thrall with their doctors, they are afraid to go against the learned man. You use words like unmitigated gall and sophist. Exactly the sort of words some doctors would use to an elderly patient. My retired dentist was prescribed Vioxx when it first came out instead of Ibuprofen for no reason other than it was new and the doctor wanted his brownie points from the Merck salesman. He had an adverse reaction to Vioxx and now just uses Ibuprofen when needed. That was UFB. Well fortunately the boomers are coming along and they are much more savvy, much more questioning, much more able to do their own research, to read data deliberately hidden or kept secret by drug companies. ps my dictionary defines sophist as a noun, one of a class of public teachers of rhetoric, philosophy in Ancient Greece. I think that you meant to use the adjective sophistic. What a way to run from an argument by stating that you don't have time. Point 2 was ably stated by Dr Joseph Lau. Here it is again companies tend to bury data from trials that show safety problems, says Dr. Joseph Lau, a professor of medicine at Tufts University