I love Bill Maher. Something about his demeanor is hugely assholey, true…but I can’t help admitting that I agree with him 99% of the time.
Even with the nutty drug rant (I noticed that the guests looked a bit uncomfy), I did have to agree we seem to jump to antibiotics a bit too quickly. That doesn’t allow us to build up a healthy immune system, right? I mean, that was his point, wasn’t it? I didn’t follow too well.
Also, the fact that he is in PETA pinged my crazy meter. I did watch a documentary on PETA, and I gotta say, finally, they even had me wondering if maybe I should do some more research into the way we allow animals to be treated in this society. Some of those videos surprised me with its ability to open my mind a crack about animal cruelty. Unfortunately, ultimately I got the feeling the leader is just power hungry, crazy and completely overthe top.
But, back to Bill…maybe I agree with him 99.9% of the time. He still sounded crazy though.
Maher has always struck me as one of the most narcissistic self-absorbed and “I think it therefore it is” egomaniacs on television. This goes back to his Politically Incorrect days at least, when he would talk over anyone who disagreed with him regardless of how important a point they were making. I first loathed him when I saw him on LARRY KING going on some rant about how “And all people talk about is how Bill Maher is always at the Playboy Mansion and I’m some sort of horndog, but people don’t know that I go home to my own house 30 nights a month” blah blah whine. I thought at the time “Uh, dude, most people spend 31 nights a month not giving a good goddam where you go, what you do, or who you do it with. I know you as the self important guy who thinks because he asks Werner Klemperer, Sandra Bernhardt, the kid from ET and the guy from the Howard Stern show what they think about pollution that he’s being deep.”
Then when his show was cancelled for his comments post 9-11 and he started whining “Help! I’m being oppressed!” I stopped watching him altogether.
I’ve no idea why the turd is such a favorite of Larry King’s. He seems to be on there at least once a month (unless of course somebody associated with Anna Nicole died that week; if they ever find out Larry Birkhead killed Natalie Holloway then Larry will die from ejaculating blood followed by Nancy Grace bursting into flames, both on live TV).
I agree that people overuse antibiotics for things like a cold, and when people use Purel every 5 minutes, they are either wasting their money or breeding a race of supergems that will kill us all.
But, you know, polio is pretty bad for your immune system too.
I dunno about that. How can a bacteria become resistant to disinfectant? It’s not quite the same as antibiotics which slow growth as opposed to take it apart on a chemical level. Purel can be said to hurt your natural enzymes in your skin, but I don’t think the natural selection works in quite the same way.
My.understanding.of the dangers of over-sanitizing with products like Purell isn’t that it breeds super germs, it’s that it may harm the development of children’s immune systems, since they aren’t exposed to normal levels of bacteria.
Saw it too. Maher’s one of my favorites, but he’s full of shit on this. Odd, too; he’s always excoriating creationists and anti-global warming nutjobs for being anti-science, yet he’s doing the same for the sake of his pet issue. BTW:
Vaccines don’t “weaken the immune system by doing its job for you” (as is often claimed by anti-vacs), they strengthen the immune system by stimulating it in a way that doesn’t make you sick. Many diseases do this too: chicken pox, for example, stimulates the immune system to fight it off, so you get better…forever. That’s why you generally can’t get chicken pox more than once. Vaccines stimulate this response, too…without actually making you sick.
A cleaner environment actually contributed to the polio epidemic of the 1940’s and 1950’s, as this Smithsonian article shows (see page 8 for the part on sanitation).
Speaking of a cleaner environment, there is some indication that our modern day fetish for cleanliness is causing some level of panic amongst our respective immune systems, because it’s not given enough to do.
Yeah, Maher’s guests looked uncomfortable alright. They seemed vaguely embarrassed to be there, like he was the crazy uncle at Thanksgiving going off about the Trilateral Commission, or something.
Maher is still relatively young and in good health. We’ll see how he feels when he gets older, and comes up with something only drugs can cure.
Hmmmm, Larry King ejaculating blood and Nancy Grace bursting into flames, you say? I smell pay per view special!
Another big fan of Bill Maher’s who was more than a little confused by his ranting.
He used to be a lot more reasonable about it. In fact, you could honestly see his point for a bit. He seemed to be saying that Americans eat a ton of crap (by choice and by things put in our food with/without our knowledge) and it is making us sick. He’d mention the lack of exercise and poor eating habits as contributers to poor health.
He’d also assign blame to the doctors who are quick to prescribe medication for most any complaint, and the drug companies for their advertising. He felt that doctors should do more to encourage healthy lifestyles instead of putting people on drugs right away, especially in the case of younger people. He also felt that the government should insist higher standards when it comes to our food.
All of those things I could get behind. This new rant? Not so much.
Several people have made comments to the effect that okay, Maher has a point that all drugs are poison, but he’s clearly gone too far. What exactly does that mean? I had a friend argue once that “All drugs are poisons,” and I didn’t really understand what he was trying to say either. Are drugs any more “poison” than anything else, since the right dosage of virtually anything can kill you?
The concept of “right dosage” and “the dose makes the poison” are foreign to lots of people who go on about “toxins”.
This is why antivaxers love to cite a list of “toxins” in vaccines (available from the CDC, and including minute traces of such things as bacterial culture media and non-mercury preservatives), as though the mere presence of some compound in a vaccine makes it a toxin, no matter what the amount.
Remember, dihydrogen monoxide is a toxin! Throw out your bottles of H2O before it’s too late!!
I didn’t see the show, but I’ll speculate that his point was that just because something is prescribed by an authority figure in a white coat and is manufactured by Lilly, that it is not entirely safe. Prescription drugs are essentially poisons and they are being handed out for everything nowadays for practically anything with less and less concern of their efficacy and safety. Heath Ledger is a perfect example of overmedication and throwing meds at a problem, when there were probably better alternatives, and Heath died for it.
The only suggestion to that effect is from Ledger’s family. The official news release from the N.Y. medical examiner’s office cited “acute intoxication” relating to “the abuse of prescription drugs”, which included a fatal combination of two separate powerful painkillers and three drugs related to Valium, with no details as to how those drugs were obtained or who might have prescribed them.
Here : Heath Ledger is a perfect example of overmedication and throwing meds at a problem, when there were probably better alternatives, and Heath died for it.
What did you mean by “overmedication” if not “prescribed too much”? If I take an entire bottle of Oxycontin when I have been prescribed one a day, is that over medication? An overdose is by definition taking more than the prescribed dose. So, are you suggesting that he took the proper dose and died as a result? If not, he was not over medicated, he overdosed.
Simply, I’m saying he was overmedicated in the sense that these medications should not have been prescribed in the first place. The doctor threw meds at the problem. He had two powerful pankillers and three types of valium, for Pitysake!
We don’t know that one doctor prescribed all those meds, though. Some people who abuse prescription drugs do go to more than one doctor to get several prescriptions of their drugs of choice. I, of course, don’t know that that’s what happened here, but it’s certainly a plausible scenario.
It’s certainly more plausible than one doctor prescribing two powerful painkillers and three types of Valium.
I am curious as to how **devilsknew **is privy to what Ledger’s medical condition was, and what drugs were prescribed under what protocol. Especially since he is asserting that Ledger’s case is indicative of over medication in America, and not simply an overdose by a drug seeking individual.
Well, I guess the real question here is, who is more responsible for Heath’s Death? The Pusher or the Junky?
If you were to follow the precedent and “logic” set by modern drug laws, it would seem the Doctor’s and Pharmaceutical comapnies share the greatest blame and deserve long sentences.
Prescription drugs are also obtainable by other means besides having your doctor prescribe them for you.
There are numerous unanswered questions in this case, which hasn’t stopped the Anti-Big Pharma/Anti-Mainstream Medicine brigades from exploiting it for their own purposes.
And if you were to respect the logic of not going off half-cocked without evidence, you’d STFU.
