My son hates those commercials and by extension Robert Jarvik. I explained what a great man he was for inventing the artificial heart, but my son just thinks of him as the creepy Lipitor guy. I do admit the guy has a creepy spaced-out stare.
I don’t disagree, but there could be bigger whores out there. I don’t worry about the drug pusher down the block, I worry about the drug pusher that’s wearing a white coat with a nice title.
Are there issues with Lipitor that make it unsafe?
He’s a loser becasue his pump has a huge, glaring flaw that he can’t see because his gigantic ego is in the way. Jarvik made a continuous-flow pump, but the human body isn’t equipped for continuous flow. Sure, some folks’ll tell you that the capillaries and whatnot are not pulsitile, but that’s complete and utter bullshit/nonsense. The circulatory system needs the ebb and flow of a rythmic beat to support general well-being. If you need proof, I encourage you to find your pulse (place the first finger of your left hand on the inside of your right wrist). So, he’s second-guessing nature, and selling a false bill of goods to some very trusting and naive people. There oughtta be a law, is what I’m saying.
And yes, an artificial heart is clever and all, but Jarvik’s device isn’t an artificial heart - it’s a pump. Anyone can make a pump. He never did figure out a way to make it fully-implantable, and the base unit is like the size of a small refrigerator or something. If you’re going to tether some poor fool to a hunk of medical equipment like that, with parts of the appliance inside their body, and parts outside their body, why not just put them on an LVAD, or build a proper external pump? Or something? Anyways, that’s another big problem - if you’re going to make an artificial heart, it needs to be fully implantable. If not, the patient doesn’t have mobility and runs the risk of infection because you’ve got wires/tubes/whatever breaking the plane of the flesh and so you’re treating a chronic open wound on a patient that’s got a lot of other problems, too. My point is there are treatment options better than the Jarvik heart, and better science out there to turn to.
Have a look at Abiomed. These people are doing the real science in this field, not Jarvik. They’ve got a fully-implantable artificial heart. They’ve figured out a way to recharge it from outside the body. The main drawback is that the device is large, so large, in fact, that only medium- or large-framed men are potential recipients , but they’re working on a smaller model.
And, someone asked in the other thread what they do with these devices when the recipient dies. They take them back to the lab and study them to figure out what went wrong (if anything), where improvement can be made, and so on. They study them for years and years, and never re-implant.
Damned skippy. The brillo skullet and the dead fish eyes make me skeeved out.
He has a ZOMBIE STARE! :eek: His commercials are so creepy that I have to turn the channel–and I can sit through just about anything (including the bugs/pins in the feet commericials).
To my knowledge, not Lipitor specifically, but just the fervor of the perscription drus as a whole. That kinda unnerves me.
Bullshit, you guys. 
Aside from your comments being bullshit, who freakin’ cares about his looks?
It may give you a skullet and a zombie stare.
So that’s what a skullet is. You intellectuals come up with this really deep-thinking stuff, and I have to go to wiki to see what’s going on.
My goodness!
Loser? Would a loser be married to Marilyn vos Savant? 
The thing that bugs me about one of the latest commericals with Jarvik is it shows a brief clip of a picture of his father, and in that flash of a second I think I am watching one of those creepy commericals that has Orville Reddenbacher brought back to life to sell popcorn. In that split second, his dad is a dead wringer for Reddenbacher.
God, Winston… did Jarvik force you to submit to testing of his artificial heart or something? Chill. This commercial isn’t advertising his artificial heart. The Lipitor people probably backed up a dump truck of money to his house and he agreed to do a commercial for them. A heart surgeon with a big ego… wow, breaking news, details at 11. A doctor accepting large payments from a pharmaceutical company to endorse a product, another shocker.
Should I tune my outrage meter here, or did I just work for doctors for so long that I’m way cynical about them?