FSM Friends’ News and Articles
An open letter to Alternative Medicine: “In reality, it feels like you are often simply exploiting people, Alternative Medicine. You are leveraging significant, systemic health-care issues in order to sell unproven (and often potentially harmful) stuff to people who may be desperate for answers or comfort. Marketing misinformation is not a form of empowerment”.
General
Newsmaker – Orlando Bloom and when wellness mockery turns dark: “The reality is that celebrities and their modern cousins, social media influencers, have enormous sway over their followers. And even if someone isn’t directly harmed by using a questionable dietary product (see: brain octane oil) or wellness habit, it may lead them to neglect other, proven health behaviours. Plus they waste their money in the process.”
Today’s Abused Health Concept
Regulation of supplements – Banned substances again found in supplements: It has often been noted that supplements are regulated like food, with products assumed to be safe until shown otherwise, which is problematic to say the least. Yet even when products are shown to be non-compliant, even when they are LABELLED as containing banned ingredients, very little action is taken by regulatory bodies. “Pieter Cohen, MD, of Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance in Massachusetts, and co-authors examined the makeup of 17 brands of over-the-counter supplements in the U.S., purchased online, that were labeled to include deterenol, a beta-agonist that has never been approved for use in the U.S., and which FDA banned from supplements in 2004. Researchers found nine stimulant compounds that are not allowed in supplements, and eight different combinations of stimulants [in more than half of the samples]. These stimulants included phenpromethamine (Vonedrine), BMPEA, oxilofrine, octodrine, higenamine, 1,3-DMAA, 1,3-DMBA, and 1,4-DMAA.”
This is not new information. This problem has been previously documented for years, even by FDA scientists. Yet the FDA has taken no action to warn the public, nor even ‘advised’ manufacturers to remove the PROHIBITED ingredients. “It’s really unfortunate it would require any new information like publishing our study to get the FDA to act,” Cohen said, “and they haven’t …The FDA is not removing the lowest-hanging fruit, not even warning consumers about their finding” … Sometimes “it’s a matter of FDA reading the label and doing its job,” Cohen said. FDA inspected less than 5% of registered supplement facilities annually pre-pandemic … “The rate of non-compliance when we do inspect is very high — probably the highest it is for any FDA-regulated commodity, with frequent deficiencies in fundamental requirements.” Why is it so difficult to have regulatory bodies actually protect consumers?
Great Moments in Health and Science
The hilarious and compelling origins of the Pap Smear: For some context: cervical cancer was the number one cancer killer of U.S. women in the early 1900’s… Dr. Papanikolaou is quoted as saying his “ideal in life was neither to become rich, nor to live happily, but to work, act, create and do something worthy of a man who is moral and strong.” This humble man, his heroic wife, and his long-suffering guinea pigs surely met that ideal, and contributed to a 70% reduction in cervical cancer mortality.
Lesser-known Health Professions
Organ and tissue procurement technician: Also known as tissue recovery technicians, these medical professionals work to harvest organs and tissues in patients who died as organ donors. They possess special training in aseptic recovery, proper collection techniques, and ways of transporting the harvested materials so they can be used in another in-need patient.