House Probes Artifical Heart Pioneer Jarvik's Role in Drug Ads

Fox News ^ | Wednesday, January 23, 2008 | Greg Simmons

[Cold Heat]

Ummmmmmmmmmm..................

This is nuts!

He can endorse anyone or anything he cares to. He gets paid to do it. Big surprise.

What is wrong with these Dems? They aparently are getting paid as well.

Drug money! LOL

[TankerKC]

Guess I will go with him.

I've done the same.

[TankerKC]

And what are Congressman Dingleberry’s accomplishments?

I believe he is the Dingle in Dingle Norwood.

[metesky]

Bingo!

Both their top contributors are health related:

JOHN D. DINGELL (D-MI)
Top Industries

The top industries supporting John D. Dingell are:

1	Pharmaceuticals/Health Products	$108,686
2	Electric Utilities	$101,500
3	Health Professionals	$86,500
4	TV/Movies/Music	$66,100
5	Lobbyists	$55,100
6	Lawyers/Law Firms	$50,690
7	Automotive	$28,300
8	Industrial Unions	$27,950
9	Oil & Gas	$22,500
10	Insurance	$22,000
11	Real Estate	$19,200
12	Securities & Investment	$17,100
13	Telecom Services & Equipment	$16,500
14	Telephone Utilities	$16,000
15	Misc Energy	$15,000
15	Beer, Wine & Liquor	$15,000
17	Building Trade Unions	$14,500
18	Chemical & Related Manufacturing	$14,000
19	Health Services/HMOs	$13,250
20	Business Services	$12,000

Percent of Contributions Coded

BART STUPAK (D-MI)
Top Industries

The top industries supporting Bart Stupak are:

1	Health Professionals	$50,074
2	Electric Utilities	$28,800
3	Lawyers/Law Firms	$27,916
4	Automotive	$21,000
5	Lobbyists	$19,350
6	TV/Movies/Music	$17,850
7	Transportation Unions	$14,000
8	Industrial Unions	$13,000
8	Telecom Services & Equipment	$13,000
10	Public Sector Unions	$12,500
11	Hospitals/Nursing Homes	$12,150
12	Building Materials & Equipment	$11,000
13	Building Trade Unions	$7,000
14	Insurance	$6,750
15	Telephone Utilities	$6,500
15	Casinos/Gambling	$6,500
17	Oil & Gas	$5,800
18	Chemical & Related Manufacturing	$5,500
19	Credit Unions	$5,000
20	Steel Production	$4,600

Percent of Contributions Coded

Source

[Secret Agent Man]

First off, to be clear: I’m not a doctor, and I am not happy about how the drug companies and FDA have their own love-fest going on. Not even a great proponent of the self-absorbed medical establishment that poo-poos anything that didn’t cost a billion dollars before they’ll shove it down your gullet.

But for the life of me, if a doctor cannot be taped endorsing a drug, that they also personally take, then apparently only drug spokesmen with NO medical backgrounds will be hawking drugs. He’s not saying anything else that a voice-over guy could say while you watch vacuous family montages of first, sad or depressed people, then fill in to the drug name with pretty text, then happy, energetic people.

It’s absurd. I would never take Lipitor. I’ve seen what it does to people. I would sooner up my garlic and a few other safer blood thinners. But then again the wacko med people downplay this that it doesn’t work because someone couldn’t patent it and get “F-DA” approval and thus be able say ‘this cures x.’

[traderrob6]

I feel much the same way.

[traderrob6]

“Well my doctor is convinced. Guess I will go with him.”

That’s what they’re counting on.

[Wolfie]

Shhhhhhh. I have stock in Pfizer.

[dfwgator]

Doesn’t the government have more pressing things to worry about?

Yes, they need to get back to doing the real business of the American people, like going after baseball players for using steroids.

[traderrob6]

I have stock in Merck (Mevacor).

[Wonder Warthog]

"The bottom line is they can’t prove a causitive relationship between Tot cholesterol LDL or oxidized LDL and heart attacks period and they never will because they are not the cause. started in 1996 The arterial plaques are composed of ~3% LDL C and 50%+ Lipoprotein a."

Well, mostly true--because the indicative feature is the LDL/HDL ratio. High LDL/low HDL = bad situation. And there is plenty of evidence that the lipoprotein metabolism IS directly related to plaque buildup. This was proven pretty much conclusively by the study of the population of a particular Mediterranean island (I forget which one), in which essentially the entire population had inherited a gene that caused them to over-express UHDL (ultra-high-density-liprotein). Problems due to circulatory system plaque were pretty much non-existent. I "think" I recall reading about a follow-on study which actually administered UHDL's to "non-mutants" (i.e. all the rest of us), and it actively removed existing plaques from the wall of blood vessels.

"I am not trying to convince you of anything but there is a lot of research out there that should cause much of the conventional wisdom to be questioned. It’s totally up to you to either look into it or ignore it completely."

So post some links. At least "some" of it ought to be online.

[traderrob6]

“And there is plenty of evidence that the lipoprotein metabolism IS directly related to plaque buildup.” Where?

You’re thinking of the apo-IMilano Lipoprotein mutation in which cysteine is substituted for arginine in vitro . This population actually had vey low HDL levels in relation to LDL but very little heart disease. The benefit has been hard to prove other than the initial study by Nissan (you mentioned) at the Cleveland Clinic who is btw responsible for 3/4 of all the positive studies on statin efficacy hmmmmm. Anyway what they have been able to show is that this variants positive effects if any appear to be related to it’s unique antioxidant activity rather than it’s “artery cleansing ability” that’s the so called experts have been espousing.

You can start with this ...

http://www.jpands.org/vol10no3/colpo.pdf

[toddlintown]

I’d just call him in to tell him to get a hair cut.

[Lancey Howard]

Maybe Jarvik’s wife Marilyn vos Savant, the REAL smartest woman in the world, should adress these idiotic, corrupt, scumbag Democrats in her next column.

[Lancey Howard]

By the way (wow, is this ever an obtuse segue), does anybody else remember the "Monty Hall problem"?:

(From Wiki):

Perhaps the most famous event involving Marilyn vos Savant began with the following question in her 9 September 1990 column:

"Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors. Behind one door is a car, the others, goats. You pick a door, say #1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say #3, which has a goat. He says to you: 'Do you want to pick door #2?' Is it to your advantage to switch your choice of doors?"
—Craig F. Whitaker, Columbia, Maryland

This question, named "the Monty Hall problem" due to its resemblance to situations on the game show Let's Make a Deal, existed before vos Savant addressed it, but was brought to nationwide attention by her column. Vos Savant's answer, that you should switch because door #2 has a 2/3 chance of winning whereas door #1 has only a 1/3 chance, provoked thousands of letters in response, nearly all arguing that she was wrong and that the doors are equally likely to win. A follow-up column affirming her answer only intensified the debate, which soon spread through the media, even reaching the front page of The New York Times. Among the ranks of her opponents were hundreds of academics with Ph.D.s, some of them professional mathematicians scolding her for propagating innumeracy.

Despite the criticism, vos Savant's answer was correct under the most common interpretation of the question, in which the host always opens a losing door and offers a switch; see Monty Hall problem for details. (In other interpretations, the host may open a door at random, or offer a switch only if your initial choice was correct. The question says only that the host knows what is behind the doors, but vos Savant specified in her original answer her understanding that the host "will always avoid the one with the prize", noting in a follow-up that "[a]nything else is a different question.")

After a second follow-up in which vos Savant explained in more depth her reasoning and the conditions on which it was based, many readers, including academics who had previously argued against her, wrote to admit that she was right. She also called on school teachers across America to simulate the problem in their maths classes. In a final column, she announced the results: out of more than a thousand schools which had performed the experiment, nearly 100% had found that it pays to switch. A majority of readers now agreed with her answer, and half of those whose letters had been published wrote to retract their arguments.

[Niuhuru]

Ah, good point.

On a mroe serious note, it infuriates me that our government still behaves as if terrorism doesn’t exist and that we have the luxury of not having to worry about more pressing things.

[omega4179]

House probes famous doc and baseball players while a staggeing 9 trillion debt grows by the second and 20 million illegal aliens walk our streets and clog emergency rooms. The government is our problem we are not THEIR problem!

[carjic]

I think you need to take your tin hat off and look around. Everything is not always a conspiracy.

[Wonder Warthog]

"You’re thinking of the apo-IMilano Lipoprotein mutation in which cysteine is substituted for arginine in vitro ."

No. That is nothing like the situation the article I read referred to. Nothing in it about either cysteine or arginine, and last I heard, Milan wasn't a Mediterranean island (which it had to be, in order to conserve and propagate the mutation through a large fraction of the population). The article specifically referred to the isolation of the group, and the mutation was specifically related to the over-expression of UHDL relative to "normal" populations.

I don't recall if the experiment of isolating UHDL's and giving them IV to "normal" (those without the mutation), and seeing plaque "dissolve away" was in that same article or a related one.

Thanks for the link. I'll give it a read.

[traderrob6]

“I think you need to take your tin hat off and look around. Everything is not always a conspiracy.”

I don’t believe in conspiracies and this is no exception.