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To: Raymond Duray who wrote (61172)	3/18/2005 3:49:57 PM
From: Snowshoe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

>>prime time TV ads warning that "if your erection lasts longer than four hours you should consult with your doctor immediately".<< Things are sure different than when we were kids. Last night in prime time at 7:00 pm the Discovery Channel had a special on the anatomy of sex. They slid a couple into an MRI scanner for 12 minutes of joy, and then displayed the graphic 3D internal views of human copulation from various angles.

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (61172)	3/19/2005 4:43:35 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

<I'm glad to hear that your son got relief via Rituxan. That's a good example where drugs can be wonderful. > Ray, you misread. He did NOT get Rituxan, though I had figured out that it should be used. Now, oncologists have also figured out it should be used for people with his type and stage of disease. It was good luck, not good management, that he is still alive. If there were 1000 people such as him, and they were all given the Rituxan as well as the surgery, CHOP and external beam radiation, there would be about another 20 +/- 10 [I forget the exact statistics] still alive instead of dead. Statistically, that's not a huge improvement, but if you are one of those 10 to 30 people, it's quite important. Those who do die anyway, despite the Rituxan, get extra months or even years of additional life, with quality. The FDA and medical guild STOP people getting the treatment they should have. They forbid people the freedom to decide for themselves, and are proven to be wrong in their judgment - as shown in this instance as just one example. The make it difficult and expensive to produce drugs. Which means drugs to treat only, say, 100 people, are uneconomic to create. It's only big drugs which are economic, because the kleptocratic hoops to be jumped through are so expensive and involved that small-scale drugs are ignored. In recognition of this problem, there are "orphan drug" programmes and other bending of the rules to avoid the worst excesses of the ticket clipping kleptocracy. I thought you were talking about FDA control of Big Pharma and what happens in the cost of drugs, and their availability. I'm not going to enter a censorship debate right now, though I do think things have got way too smutty and gone the way of the lowest common denominator. Mqurice