Dr. Robert Jarvik is now doing commercials for Lipitor. What a sack of shit. His artificial heart design is a fucking failure, so he’s trying to parlay is miniscule name recognotion to sell drugs. The commercial doesn’t mention that the FDA has banned the Jarvik heart, thus lending an unearned and inappropriate credibility to his name.
He should be fucking ashamed of himself.
Why is his heart banned?
It’s not. It’s banned as a permanent solution because most patients have died within four to six months, but it can still be used in a patient to tide them over until a transplant can be found.
Jarvik was instrumental in the early development of artificial hearts and the progress made to date owes a LOT to him. Why the OP has a bug up his ass about Jarvik, I can’t imagine.
FYI, His wife is the smartest person in the known universe, Marilyn vos Savant.
On preview, I’ll just chop out the majority of my lengthy post and say: what RickJay said.
You’d have to be open to a fairly loose definition of “failure” and “banned” to come to the OP’s conclusion, but the reality is that no one who receives an artificial heart of any design lives very long- the record is 17 months- and prior to the Jarvik 7 those receiving artificial hearts were dead within days. While it certainly wasn’t the solution they anticipated, and while they don’t use it as a permanent installation, the fact remains that it is still in use in some circumstances, and is hardly a failure. If Jarvik wants to shill for the drug companies to support his research into a new heart pump, then more power to him.
And where’s the gaggy smilie when you need it?
I’ve got a problem with him using his name recognition to sell drugs, when the actual status ans eficacy of his invention isn’t made clear.
Can you please transcript the commercial, or give a link to it? I’m having a hard time empathising with your pain if all he says is “Hi, my name is X Jarvik and I endorse this medicine.” I mean, hell, you could change that name for mine for all it actually means.
However, if he’s actually saying “Hi, I’ve invented great artificial replacements for human hearts (without implying their temporary status) and this medicine might as well have been made by me!” then I can, to a certain extent, get behind you in this attack.
At least he’s a real doctor, and doesn’t just play one on TV.
Which leads me to ask - do they reuse the still-shiny artificial hearts from the recipients who die so quickly? I mean, those things are expensive.
I found this partial transcript online.
Credibility, sell-out, yada yada yada. The real crime of that commercial is his fucking hair. He’s in a national ad campaign for a pharmaceutical company, and he’s got a near-skullet going on.
Is it clear that that’s where Jarvik’s compensation is going?
In one of the earlier commercials, there’s a narrator (not Jarvik) who said “Dr. Whatsit Jarvick, inventor of the artificial heart.”
fwiw-I’ve seen the ad, this sounds accurate however iirc, there is reference to the Jarvick heart, if not audio, at least some typeface - I recognized the name but not why, except for the info inthe ad.
Eh, C. Everett Koop has fallen and he can’t get up, why not some other former well-known doc?
I can understand being annoyed by doctors getting involved in crass commercialism, but I guess to me, it doesn’t seem that bad because statin drugs like Lipitor do have a legitimate use in medicine as a valid therapy for people with high cholesterol. I would be far more upset if he were appearing on ads for shady weight loss schemes or penis size enhancers.
Incidentally, I’m not sure that it’s fair to judge him just based on the Jarvik-7. It seems that he has been continuing to work on trying to find new technology to help heart failure patients. For example, see this article from 2002 on an LVAD he was working on at the time: http://www.umm.edu/heart/jarvikQA.html
Of course, most people in the general public would have no clue what an LVAD is, so there wouldn’t be any point in mentioning that in the ad. However, it doesn’t seem to me like he’s just trying to coast on the limited success of his original artificial heart.
Then he should be doing ads for Viagra.
I have trouble thinking of inventing something artificial that that can be implanted into a human’s chest and keep that person alive for months as anything but a miraculous achievment.
Hear, hear!