Re: antibiotics:side effects of vancomycin, metronidazole and money

"These people are academics [doctors and professors of microbiology and pharmacology] without any connection to the pharmaceutical industry."

You need to bring your background reading on how the microbiology and pharmacology departments are funded up to date. Think about this logically. How can just those departments in that particular university that you attend be the only ones in the whole world not influenced by the money of global pharmaceutical corporations? Your professors with the Ph.d's and M.D.'s who are teaching you are the only ones with lily-white hands who exhibit exemplary behavior when it comes to interpreting test results?
They never shade interpretations one way or the other depending on how it would benefit their own pocket or their job at the university, or the university itself? No perks? So is the rest of the pharmaceutical world looking up to them for this virtuous behavior? Or could it be they just like everybody else? And where do the experts come from that are quoted on T.V. as favoring this anti-acid or that drug if not from the universities? Aren't a lot of them from some department in a University? There are plenty of willing professors in academia and the corporate pharmaceutical world who are willing to give an opinion favorable to who ever is the one paying them for it. (Just ask the lawyers.) If it's some anti-acid drug company then the opinion on T.V. puts that anti-acid in a favorable light so people will buy it.

Everyone wants the opinion of an expert. And who would that expert be but the very professors and doctors who are teaching you. There are many books on the subtle and not-so-subtle monied influence on how the drugs and various Antibiotics you are touting are given final approval as supposedly being safe. They decribe in detail all the steps used to convince the public what they, the manfacturers, want the public to conclude. And also how
the very articles in medical journals warning against various ways of overuse, are ignored year after year by those dispensing and talking about the prescriptions/drugs. Why are these ignored when just about all these doctors/professors want is to follow the people and advice of those published in respectible, peer reviewed, medical journals? Is there yet another meaning to the definition of quack growing here?

Someone posted that in the U.S. I guess the manufacturing and selling of medicines is a $200 billion a year business. How did it get that high? These medicinal manufacturers have manufactured the facts as a companion to the pills they give to the public to swallow. It makes the pills, anti-acids or Antibiotics easier to go down that way.

Read books by people who expose how drugs are actually approved.
What can be a scientific definition of heartburn is not what the general population means by it for they use the term loosely. This is taken advantage of from the beginning to the end. I guess you have not read such books because the cognitive dissonance would be enormous to someone who is almost finished with getting the degree. And we all protect ourselves from cognitive dissonance. High anxiety is very upsetting, right? We have ready-made rationalizations as adults not available to us when we were children. The better to lie to ourselves with.
Like, "They would have told me, they're honest." But then, you do not check out how honest they are by reading books that show the other side of antibiotic/drug approval. Why haven't your professors recommended such books to present both sides of the picture? You are at the University to get a balanced view of life and a picture of your whole field of study. I am sure had such books been recommended by a professor in a class, dozens of students would have read it cover to cover.

Have you read "Trust Us We're Experts" which I think is shown at the top of this page?


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