Tri-1, Wk15, Day 62 - Harvard Med Students Rebel!

Harvard Medical Students Rebel! 

If I figure out how to make this Harvard link permanent then you'll see it along the right column of my blog as a staple.  The statistics are stunning - 

• drug companies spend $4 billion each year on direct-to-consumer ads in the US
• drug companies spend $16 billion to influence US doctors - that's $10,000 for every single doctor in the United States!
• 70% of doctors regarded drug representatives as an efficient way to obtain new drug information - are you kidding me?!

Other than being a chiro student, I'm basically and average Joe and I have noticed a few things over my 42 years here on earth.  For one thing, I used to think autism was something people are born with but I've noticed over the past 5 or 10 years that autism can be acquired !

How is this happening?  Something else I've noticed is the vast increase in the number of vaccines being either mandated or recommended for children.  I have yet to nail down exact numbers but, from asking other doctors I'm getting figures which indicate there were maybe a dozen vaccines back in the early 80's and around 64 vaccines currently in effect today.

Also, on a YouTube video (I know it needs verifying) but, I noticed a statistic which indicated the rate of autism back in the 80's was about 1 in 5,000 and today that number is around 1 in 600.

I've been noticing these things the same way I was noticing banks doing things they weren't supposed to be doing over this past decade which prompted me to do a little research and then I was able to find out that the Glass-Steagall act which was initially passed back in 1933 in response to the bank failures of the Great Depression was repealed by President Bill Clinton in his last year in office, 1999.  

No disrespect to President Obama but, I had to cringe when I saw him on Leno a few weeks ago and he said there needs to be safe guards in place ....my god - we had safe guards in place and they were repealed in 1999!  Unfortunately, I'm willing to bet less than 1 in 100 Americans are even aware there ever was an Act in place since 1933 to help prevent bank failures in the first place.  

Obviously, take derivatives for example, the world of finance is much more complex than in the 1930's but to take away a fundamental safe guard to our banking system which was doing it's job for nearly 70 years and have nothing to replace it with was foolhardy - 

which maybe brings us back around to the billions of dollars shelled out by the drug companies.  The Glass-Steagall act wasn't repealed overnight - it took some 20 years of lobbying and 300 billion dollars thrown at politicians before they finally caved.  

China still has seperation between investment and commercial banking and that sure won't change anytime soon in light of the global financial fiasco that's been going on.  Incidently, the whole separation between church and state is not something that's in the consitution,  it stems from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to a Baptist association back in 1802 since they were concerned about the government setting up a national religion which, is what we find in the first amendment to the constitution.  "...no law respecting an establishment of religion"  etc. and all that good stuff - 

I've got two final exams today - better switch my thinking over - Philosophy and Histology and I still have brushing up to do in both classes!  Yebo!  :)