This same person believes that eating raw food and doing colonics (and other stuff) makes you "clean" down to a cellular level. As you get cleaner your start to undo all the damage you did in the past and get younger. Not physically regress, but your body goes to a younger and younger point. So anything bad that happens while you are doing colonics, raw food, and taking the magic supplements, is just your body reliving stuff from the past. It's nothing to do with what's going on now.

Thanks Dr. Kellogg.

There's a colon cleansing place down the street from me. I can't imagine there's actually that much demand for colon cleansing, but they've been in business for years!

And you know, there are supposed to be regulatory agencies policing the shit out of them. I think mostly it does work, which is why it can frustratingly slow to get some great new drug out on the market. But also, less likely to have babies with flippers.

Yup. Full disclosure - I am one of the people in our company responsible for dealing with the FDA. FDA gets a really bad rap but in my experience they are actually very good and do their best to make sure that what a company claims is actually the verified truth. FDA has come a LONG way in 20 years, largely a result of the Prescription Drug Act.

And THANK YOU, Jess, for your entire post.

And thank you Allyson for pre-empting Gavura's Law with the pro-science thalidomide reference!

::whew:: I think I'm all packed. With everything. Absolutely everything imaginable. Shuttle is due in 14 minutes. I should go downstairs. I'm going downstairs.

See you from somewhere that's not West Lost Angeles, hey.

(Exchange with co-worker today: "ita, can I call you back? I'm on another line?" "But I'm on vacaaaaaation!" He called back pretty quickly.)

The problem with buying into the "BIG PHARMA IS EVIL" myth is that the alternative to "big pharma" is a supplement/alt-med industry that is equally as large and corrupt.

Well it is not necessarily a myth, and the alternative may be a more tightly regulated Big Pharma, with more of the research done publicly and less by Big Pharma. And with the FDA given the resources it needs to do everything it needs to do, something that does not happen now. Of course I'm not supporting Big Snake Oil over Big Pharma, but a larger role for the big evil awful Federal Government to do some of the stuff Big Pharma consistently screws up.

What? Regulations? REGULATIONS ARE WHAT KILLED AYN RAND.

I seriously don't get the disconnect between the complete trust in government to provide a militia to protect citizens against catastrophic invasions, but no trust in government to provide scientists to protect citizens against catastrophic illness.

Seriously, isn't the entire military industrial complex just one big regulator against Red Dawn?

Let the market decide who gets to be dictator, I say!

Ok. I'm done now.