The following statement is – most charitably – woefully uninformed.

[Science and medicine] operates in generalities because the pharmaceuticals businesses make more money operating on this premise.

If I seem curt, you may wish to consider your ignorant statement completely slanders me and hundreds – if not thousands – of other people I have worked and trained with.

I’m willing to apologize to you personally if you were offended, but I am going to provide you with my own experiences as examples of how I came to hold such thoughts in my mind.

I’ve got a condition that is one of those types of diseases that have no known treatment because Big Pharma simply won’t do the research to find treatments for less than 50,000 patients worldwide. I am forced to find my own treatments because in my state I am one of about 10 people statewide with this condition.

Pardon me if I have a chip on my shoulder Kirk, it’s not caused by you and your colleagues. It is caused by the bean counters who pay your paychecks. When drugs can be tailored to specific genetic makeups we will finally have the ability to take care of the folks like me that fall through the cracks, but until then it will continue to be a numbers game for the bean counters as to which treatments get R&D $$$.

Bonus question:

Fini, if the tree of allopathic medicinne is really so poisoned, does this mean you have sworn off ALL manufactured meds for life – all surgery – all anesthesia – for you, your parents, yor kids?

Or – is this just a trendy rhetorical pose?

I refuse pharmaceuticals regularly. I use natural remedies for all of life’s little ailments these days. If I get into a situation which will require anesthetic I may go without the surgery, even if it results in my death. I am not afraid to die of natural causes, which is why the medical-pharmaceutical complex exists in the first place.

My parents are both dead. Most recently my mother had a plethora of pharmaceuticals pumped through her body in a failed effort to eradicate lung and brain cancers that took her anyway. I know for a fact after witnessing her experiences firsthand the pharmaceuticals did much more damage than we were told they would do and seriously degraded her quality of life. Having her in a drug induced stupor for the better part of two years only to have her die anyway has left me a little bitter so maybe you’ll forgive my point of view.

Because of my conditions I never married, never had children because I refuse to pass on my genes. I decided to pour my energies into other areas where I can leave a legacy. For me, none of this is a trendy rhetorical pose, it is a lifestyle choice I have made because I have had no other choice available to me.

I would love to get treated, to not have to live the way I do. But as for your umbrage I can only say you need to walk in my shoes and get a different perspective on what you hold sacred. For some of us, what you hold sacred we hold in contempt because we have been abused by the system as it is currently structured.

We both can agree that human suffering is horrible and we both would like to see it lessened. And working in generalities to ease that suffering works most of the time in your business, but I am proof that it doesnt work that way all the time. To pretend that it does slanders me and all the patients abandoned to no treatment or substandard treatment because your sacred system can’t fit us into the program.

An easy read on this can be found here, and just do a web search.

The confusion here is too much estrogen can cause feminization of males, but, that is not the same as being gay. There are many effeminate men who are quite heterosexual, while there are many “manly” men who are homosexual. Something else is at work and it is not soy, as unhealthy as that can be!

YAY, US!

Need to give Christy a hand with shoveling, from the looks of it.

The judge said the Military Commissions Act, passed by Congress in September and signed into law by President Bush the following month, was unambiguous in denying Guantnamo detainees the use of a habeas corpus statute. Like Mr. Hamdan, hundreds of other prisoners at the base have challenged their detention, in similar cases.

It was Judge Robertson who granted Mr. Hamdan’s habeas petition in November 2004, abruptly halting his war crimes trial in the middle of proceedings at Guantnamo by ruling that the process was fatally flawed.

But in his decision Wednesday, the judge said circumstances had changed fundamentally with enactment of the new law. And not only is Mr. Hamdan barred from a challenge under the habeas statute, the judge said, he cannot follow the usual second avenue to bring a habeas challenge — invoking the Constitution — because it is unclear that noncitizens at Guantnamo have that right.

Here is all that the Constitution says on the matter of habeas corpus:

The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.