Word: pills
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...pill has been shown undeniably to work in clinical trials, it is the sugar pill, along with its close cousin, the sham treatment. The placebo, as such inert and cost-free remedies are known, can relieve depression as effectively as Prozac, ease discomfort as effectively as acupuncture, and reduce as much disability and back pain as a widely used vertebral surgery that costs...
...what do you do instead? Make a show about something. Showtime's Nurse Jackie (starring The Sopranos' Edie Falco), which aired over the summer, is a sort of civilian M*A*S*H, focusing on a pill-popping, overworked nurse, devoted to her work but cheating on her husband. Likewise, while it has polarized critics, HBO's Hung (about a high school coach turned gigolo in suburban Detroit) is at its best a darkly comic story about surviving after an economic bubble pops. These shows (like Showtime's multiple-personality comedy United States of Tara) handle deeper, more mature themes...
...next time you're tempted to buy Viagra, Lipitor or some other medication online, ponder this: there's a high likelihood that what you buy will be fake. The pill or vaccine may contain a much smaller dosage than stated, or it may lack any active ingredient whatsoever. Worst of all, it could be toxic. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 50% of drugs sold online have either been falsified or altered in some way. And Internet sales are just the tip of a much bigger problem. Falsified medicines are especially prevalent in developing countries...
...would call for the stop of such underperforming treatments, and this is not so unreasonable. Consider the complications that can result from surgery, and the antibiotic resistance that can develop from an improperly administered regimen—especially if the antibiotics aren’t doing anything a sugar pill couldn’t do. Doctors perform over 600,000 back surgeries a year to the tune of $20 billion. Surely some of the savings from eliminating back surgeries alone could go a long way toward funding health-care reform. This idea gains even more traction when you consider that...
...percentage of new products cut from development after Phase II clinical trials, when drugs are first tested against placebo, rose by 20 percent.” And 50 percent of drugs that fail during clinical trials do so because they cannot improve upon the sugar pill. Pills for Crohn’s disease, schizophrenia, and depression have unexpectedly come up short against the placebo. Even surgical procedures and gene therapies have been proven no better than a skin incision or saline solution, which are in themselves placebo treatments...