Medical studies are almost always bogus | New York Post

Medical studies are almost always bogus | New York Post: "Luckily, there is a growing group of people working to expose the ugly side of how research is done. One of them is Stanford professor John Ioannidis, considered one of the heroes of the reproducibility movement. He’s written extensively on the topic, including a scathing paper titled “Why Most Published Scientific Research Findings Are False.”

He’s found, for example, out of tens of thousands of papers touting discoveries of specific genes linked to everything from depression to obesity, only 1.2 percent had truly positive results. Meanwhile, Dr. Ioannidis followed 49 studies that had been cited at least a thousand times — of which seven had been “flatly contradicted” by further research. This included one that claimed estrogen and progestin benefited women after hysterectomies “when in fact the drug combination increased the risk of heart disease and breast cancer.”"



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When the feds won’t give up information the public owns

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There’s no better example of our broken system than the partial Freedom of Information (FOI) response I just got. It’s from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) regarding an Obamacare FOI request I made several years ago when I was at CBS News and investigating the failed launch and serious security risks surrounding the Affordable Care Act national website. A couple of points:

In 2013, I asked for simple public information regarding the website, but the government improperly refused to provide it.

I filed a FOI request, which requires the government to process and provide the material within about 20 days.

The government didn’t provide any of the material in the lawful time frame, which, unfortunately, is currently the typical response from federal agencies in response to FOI requests.

I eventually filed a FOI lawsuit with the help of Judicial Watch.

The government spent your tax dollars defending the lawsuit. It has no incentive to provide the material because drawing out the case and withholding the public information costs us money, but doesn’t cost them money and the desired obfuscation is achieved (at our expense).

The court and HHS agreed I was entitled to the public information all along, but there was no punishment for those who had withheld it.

HHS said there were tens of thousands of pages of responsive documents, that it was too many for them to process on a timely basis, and that it would require massive resources.

I offered to drop the entire lawsuit if HHS would simply agree to one on camera interview so that I could ask questions I posed in 2013 that officials wouldn’t answer. They declined.

They would rather spent their time and taxpayer money processing the tens of thousands of pages of documents.

The court allowed the government to propose a “rolling production schedule” of the documents, producing them periodically over time instead of all at once.

The schedule that HHS proposed meant I would get the final documents in approximately 2029.

(A reminder: I needed the material for reporting I was doing in 2013.)

That would be a 16 year response time for information that was legally due in about 20 days back in 2013.

I argued that was unreasonable.

District Judge Tanya Chutkan agreed, replying:

I’ve done my share of document reviewing in my life. I could do 500 pages in an afternoon. So I don’t understand this. And the plaintiff is right. This is like a 14-year schedule [from the time of the lawsuit]. This is unacceptable. So you need to tell me exactly what’s involved so I can assess this production rate of 500 pages every two months, because that’s not going to fly. –U.S. District Judge Tana Chutkan in Attkisson v. HHS, July 10, 2015

HHS eventually agreed to a speedier schedule that will still take years.

When I received the first batch of documents from HHS under its “rolling production” schedule, I saw that they were heavily, improperly redacted.

I wanted to challenge the redactions, as FOI law entitles me to do, but I was told I had to wait until the production was complete.

I again offered to withdraw the lawsuit and save the government much time and taxpayer money, if an HHS official would do an interview. They declined.

I recently received my latest batch of documents. You can view them here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8X8v8xLHYcXM1hFYjBXVS1vVzA/view

Obamacare is all but dead — and will likely be long gone when I receive the entire batch of documents the government is required to produce. For a story I was working on in 2013.

Preorder my new book “The Smear” today. 

 

 

 

 

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GAO: Biggest Fiscal Threat to U.S. Is Interest on Treasury Debt – Not Social Welfare Programs

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by Pam Martens and Russ Martens, Wall Street On Parade:

On Wednesday, the General Accountability Office (GAO), the bipartisan congressional watchdog, released an in-depth report on the U.S. government’s challenging fiscal outlook. Despite its surprising revelations, the study received little to no coverage by major media outlets.

While most Americans have been led by political rhetoric to believe that government programs like Medicare and Medicaid are the biggest threats to the future U.S. fiscal picture, the GAO study found the following:

“While health care spending is a key programmatic and policy driver of the long-term outlook on the spending side of the budget, eventually, spending on net interest becomes the largest category of spending in both the 2016 Financial Report’s long-term fiscal projections and GAO’s simulations.”

The GAO cited a simulation that showed net interest payments on U.S. debt increasing “from $248 billion in fiscal year 2016 to $1.4 trillion in fiscal year 2045 in 2016 dollars.”

Another measurement of government debt is its percentage ratio to Gross Domestic Product – a means of evaluating how much of a drag it’s inflicting on the overall economy. The GAO study found the following:

“Debt held by the public rose as a share of gross domestic product (GDP), from 74 percent at the end of fiscal year 2015 to 77 percent at the end of fiscal year 2016. This compares to an average of 44 percent of GDP since 1946.”

The report further noted that both the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), and GAO’s own projections indicate that the federal government’s current fiscal path is unsustainable and policy changes must occur.

Key concerns raised by these findings include the fact that federal resources that could be deployed into key priorities like rebuilding the nation’s roads and bridges are being diverted to interest on debt.

Another concern expressed by the GAO is the upward rise in interest rates. While the GAO does not directly mention the Federal Reserve’s recent rate hikes, it does note the following:

Read More @ Wallstreetonparade.com

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Julian Assange just destroyed the FBI, CIA and fake news in an epic tweetstorm

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Arguably, he’s the world’s most wanted man. Hated by governments, loved by the common man, Julian Assange seems determined not to go down without a fight. He’s been falsely accused of date rape, espionage, and subverting foreign governments, including the United States.However, if you ask him, he’ll tell you he’s a journalist who believes governments should be held accountable for their actions. And in his latest Twitter rant, you’ll see why. He takes on ...

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American Democracy: A Dead Man Walking

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Trump’s “sell-out,” as it is called, coming on top of Obama’s eight-year “sell-out,” is instructive. We have now had a Democratic president who sold out the people who elected him and a Republican president who has done the same thing. This is a very interesting point, the meaning of which most people miss.

(Article by Paul Craig Roberts republished from PaulCraigRoberts.org)

But not Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. At the Valdai discussion club, Putin summed up Western democracy:

In the West, voters cannot change policies through elections, because the ruling elites control whoever is elected. Elections give the appearance of democracy, but voting does not change the policies that favor war and the elites. Therefore, the will of the people is impotent.

People are experiencing that they and their votes have no influence on the conduct of affairs of the country. This makes them afraid, frustrated, and angry, a combination of emotions that is dangerous to the ruling elite, who in response organize the powers of the state against the people, while urging them with propaganda to support more wars.

Obama promised to get out of Afghanistan or Iraq or perhaps it was both. He promised to reverse the police state created by the George W. Bush regime. He promised to focus American resources on American domestic problems, such as health care.

But what did he do? He expanded the wars and launched new ones, destroyed Libya and attempted to destroy Syria, but was stopped by British non-participation and Russian objection. Obama overthrew democratic governments in Honduras and Ukraine. He expanded the police state. He began the demonization of Russia and Putin. He betrayed the American people again by allowing the private insurance industry to write his health care plan known as Obamacare. The private interests wrote a plan that diverts public monies from health care to their profits.

All of this is forgotten when the ruling elites and the presstitutes that serve only them refocused the demonization on Trump. Suddenly, it was the president-elect of the United States who was the main danger to the US and the American people. Trump was a Russian agent. He had conspired with Putin to steal the US election from Hillary Clinton and make the White House a partner of Putin’s alleged reconstruction of the Soviet Empire.

The nonsense was hot and furious, and it was effective. Trump succumbed to pressure and sacrificed his National Security Advisor, who was supportive of Trump’s promise to normalize relations with Russia. Trump replaced him with a Russophobic idiot who apparently cannot wait to see mushroom clouds over cities all over the Western world.

Why did two presidents in succession completely sell out the people who voted for them?

The answer is that presidents are not as powerful as the interest groups who make the decisions.

Trump was going to get us out of Syria, so he committed an unambiguous war crime by gratuitously attacking Syria with Tomahawk missiles.

Trump was going to normalize relations with Russia, so his Secretary of State announces that US economic sanctions will stay on Russia until Russia hands over to Ukraine the Russian Crimean naval base on the Black Sea.

It is impossible to normalize relations when the cost to the other party of the normalization is national suicide.

Despite Trump’s complete surrender to the powers that be, today (May 2) on NPR I heard raw propaganda dressed up as “expert opinion” that Trump is biased against the media, when what all of us have seen is massive media bias against Trump, including the program to which I was listening.

For example, NPR had accumulated “experts” who said that Trump had slandered Obama by accusing him of intercepting his communications. NPR said nothing about the Obama regime’s charge that Trump conspired with Putin to steal the election from Hillary Clinton.

If anything was slander, this was, but all the talk was about how Obama could sue Trump.

But, of course, both are public figures, and neither can sue the other.

I wonder why NPR’s “expert” didn’t get around to this point.

Why is the ruling oligarchy still using its presstitutes to campaign against a president who has surrendered to them?

Perhaps the answer is that the real powers that be are going to make an example out of Trump so that never again does a person running for elected office make a populist appeal to the electorate.

Read more at: PaulCraigRoberts.org

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How the Russia Spin Got So Much Torque

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A new book about Hillary Clinton’s last campaign for president — Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign by journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes — has gotten a lot of publicity since it appeared two weeks ago. But major media have ignored a revealing passage near the end of the book. Soon after Clinton’s defeat, […]

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It’s Not Free Speech if You Don’t Have a License

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from The Daily Bell:

Should free speech cover criticizing the government? That is kind of the whole point, right?

An Oregon man is suing Portland for violating his first amendment right to free speech after he was fined $500 for calculating how long yellow lights stay yellow and then speaking publicly about it.

Free speech? No. The city considers making and disseminating calculations about public works “engineering without a license.”

The lawsuit states:

This is a civil-rights lawsuit to vindicate the right of Plaintiff Mats Järlström to talk and write freely without fear of government punishment. Järlström wants to write and speak publicly about a matter of local, state, and nationwide concern: the safety and fairness of traffic lights and traffic-light cameras. Specifically, Järlström wishes to communicate about the mathematics behind traffic-light timing. If he does so in Oregon, however, he will be exposed to government investigation and punishment for engaging in the unlicensed “practice of engineering.” In fact, between February 2015 and January 2017, Järlström was investigated and fined for “critiquing” the standard formula for calculating traffic-light timing and for sharing his ideas with “members of the public.” Under Oregon’s Professional Engineer Registration Act (Act), Or. Rev. Stat. §§ 672.002 et seq., only state-licensed professional engineers are entitled to speak publicly on these sorts of topics. For everyone else—in the words of the Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying (Board)—sharing “reports, commentary, and testimony” on technical subjects is “clearly not protected speech.”

…But speech like Järlström’s is exactly what the First Amendment’s Speech and Petition Clauses exist to protect.

Obviously, the city is just trying to silence and intimidate him so they can keep making money off of red light cameras. His point was that the yellow lights were too short to properly allow motorists to stop.

By the government’s definition of free speech, you basically are not allowed to criticize or even petition the government at all.

What if this same standard was applied elsewhere in government?

We could easily get to a point where any speech about government actions is not protected unless you are an expert in the field–the government, of course, deciding who qualifies as an expert.

Should accountants be the only ones allowed to publicly advocate a tax policy?  Perhaps only licensed law enforcement could criticize the police. And surely if you are not a legislator, the intricacies of bills and laws are off limits to discuss.

What an open and public dialogue that would promote!

And as for the issue of traffic light cameras issuing tickets, that in itself should never have been permitted. The government takes a picture of a car and accuses the owner of a crime, regardless of who was driving the vehicle. And then, you must either pay the fine or prove yourself innocent! So much for due process. So much for the government having to prove you committed a crime. Innocent until proven guilty? What an inconvenience for a government!

Read More @ TheDailyBell.com

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Texas School Triples Recess Time, Cures Attention Deficit Disorder!

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If you had not noticed, our public school system has almost entirely deleted recess and turned PE into a military boot camp.

One school in Texas uncovered one of the remaining people in the world with common sense, put recess back, and made an AMAZING discovery!

It worked! Kids started having better attention spans, were better behaved in the classroom, and were learning more!

As I have been SCREAMING this for years, it comes no surprise to me. I knew this already. It is the administrators of our public schools who are yet clueless on this issue.

According to Today: 

“…the Eagle Mountain Elementary in Fort Worth, Texas, has been giving kindergarten and first-grade students two 15-minute recess breaks every morning and two 15-minute breaks every afternoon to go play outside. At first teachers were worried about losing the classroom time and being able to cover all the material they needed with what was left, but now that the experiment has been going on for about five months, teachers say the kids are actually learning more because they’re better able to focus in class and pay attention without fidgeting.”

The key to the success of the program is ‘unstructured play’ four times a day to break up the physical and mental monotony of the classroom, allowing developing minds and bodies to constructively use their energies, so that their may be more effectively applied in learning.

While administrators in schools trying the program initially thought it would negatively affect testing results, the results have proven that the opposite is in fact true, which is in line with how the American Academy of Pediatrics sees playtime.

The American Academy of Pediatrics agrees, calling recess:

“…a crucial and necessary component of a child’s development.” Studies show it offers important cognitive, social, emotional, and physical benefits, yet many schools are cutting down on breaks to squeeze in more lessons, which may be counterproductive, it warns.”

Medicating restless children for them to better fit in to a dumbed down education system is a grave mistake, criminal even. Programs like these desperately need to be implemented nation wide.

Dr. Debbie Rhea, creator and director of the Liink Program said:

“You start putting 15 minutes of what I call ‘reboot’ into these kids every so often and… it gives the platform for them to be able to function at their best level.”

Check out this video for more!

Our public schools are FAILING!!!!! Liberal idiots have taken over the asylum and test scores are at historic lows.

They spend more time trying to usurp parental sovereignty and teaching their own brand of societal norms than they do reading, writing and ‘rithmatic!

They pilfer through lunches and teach sex and Islam.

Our schools spend all their time teaching to the test.

In the process, good old fashioned breaks have been flushed down the toilet.

Since World War II, inflation-adjusted spending per student in American public schools has increased by 663 percent. Spend more money… spend more money!

Yet kids still are not learning.

One fourth of our school kids graduate High School barely able to read.

It is a MESS! At least one school seems to be getting the big picture.

It is insanity folks, and lack of recess is just an example. Who in their right mind started this nonsense of removing recess? A BUNCH OF MORONS… that is who!

The post Texas School Triples Recess Time, Cures Attention Deficit Disorder! appeared first on I Have The Truth.

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‘Breaking point’: Puerto Rico files for historic $70bn bankruptcy

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The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is seeking the largest municipal bankruptcy filing in US history, after failed negotiations with creditors over its $70 billion debt crisis. That’s more than four times the debt Detroit collapsed under. On Wednesday, the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico announced they had moved to place the US […]

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FBI's James Comey Calls Wikileaks "Intelligence Porn," Dares To Define Journalism

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FBI Director James Comey is talking with the Senate Judiciary Committee about his bureau's investigation of ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Among the highlights? Comey's indignant attacks on Edward Snowden and Wikileaks:

Comey differentiated between WikiLeaks, an "important focus" of investigations, and legitimate news sources.

"It crosses a line when it moves from being about educating a public intelligence porn, just pushing out information…just to damage the United States," later adding, "There's nothing that even smells journalist about some of this content."

Comey said the focus of investigations would almost always fall on leakers during legitimate investigations.

Comey's comments on Wikileaks call to mind CIA head Mike Pompeo's attacks on the organization just a couple of weeks ago. "We can no longer allow [Julian] Assange and his colleagues the latitude to use free speech values against us," Pompeo declared in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "To give them the space to crush us with misappropriated secrets is a perversion of what our great Constitution stands for. It ends now."

Let's be clear: No official should be in the business of defining journalism (and thus implicitly sanctioning government action against whistleblowers and other leakers). But it's especially hilarious when the head of the FBI, an agency that has a long history of patently illegal and typically ineffective subterfuge, gets on his high horse about what's legit media and what's not. In a four-year stretch, for instance, the FBI authorized criminal activity by confidential informants over 22,000 times. It's especially dark, too, when the FBI director is serving a president who has gone above and beyond in singling out specific individuals (such as Amazon's Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post), calling for the "loosening" of libel laws regarding public figures and elected officials, and generally declaring war on the press. That Donald Trump is publicly at odds with Comey over the latter's refusal to recommend charges against Hillary Clinton only makes the spectacle even more bizarre.

Obviously, it's too much to ask U.S. officials to embrace Wikileaks and other sources that reveal the inner workings of the government, but there's no question that Wikileaks has forced transparency in ways that have greatly benefited the public.

Here's the livestream of the Senate's questioning of Comey:

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Comey Says Huma Abedin Sent Anthony Weiner Classified Emails

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Listen to this exchange between James Comey and Sen. John Kennedy, where Comey admits that Hillary Clinton's chief of staff, Huma Abedin, sent her husband, Anthony Weiner, classified emails. Yet, Comey concluded that no crimes had been committed because he could not prove criminal intent.

“Somehow, her emails were being forwarded to Anthony Weiner, including classified information. His then-spouse Huma Abedin appears to have had a regular practice of forwarding emails to him for him to print out for her so she could deliver them to the secretary of state.”

What!?

Kennedy then pressed Comey into admitting that if Weiner had read the emails, he would've been committing a crime. What comes next can only be described as pavement ape logic, where the FBI chief said he didn't think Weiner "ever read the emails."

So, it's alright to send classified emails to Weiner, providing he promised not to open his eyes and read them? His job was simply to print out the stuff and then deliver it to his wife, in between sexting underaged girls. Right, got it.

 

"His role was to print them out as a matter of convenience," Comey said. He noted that the FBI ultimately determined that neither Abedin nor Weiner committed a crime because the bureau could not conclude they had criminal intent.

 

"That was a central problem over the course of the Clinton email investigation — we had to prove that people knew that they were communicating about classified information in a way that they shouldn't have been, and that they were doing something unlawful. That was our burden, and we didn't meet it. We could not prove that the people sending that [classified] information were acting with any kind of criminal intent."

 

Now tell me there isn't a totally separate set of laws for the establishment class and everyone else? This is an abhorrent and obnoxious display of malfeasance, on the part of Comey. He even admitted to not interviewing Weiner -- you kn0w -- because he was really busy being interviewed by other law enforcement officials.

Given Weiner's vulnerable position, who's to say he wasn't passing on this sensitive intel to others?

Onward.

Content originally published at iBankCoin.com

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100% of honeybee colony food found to be heavily contaminated with toxic pesticides

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(Natural News) Honeybee colonies were found to be heavily laden with toxic pesticides, according to a recent study. As part of the study, researchers at Cornell University examined 120 honeybee colonies placed near 30 apple orchards around New York state. The bees were allowed to forage for a few days during the flowering season. The research team then...

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No, the NSA Has NOT Stopped Spying On Americans’ Emails

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The NSA announced Friday that they would stop the controversial program which sweeps up all emails and text messages which an American exchanges with someone overseas that makes reference to a real target of NSA surveillance.

By way of background, if Russia’s Putin was an NSA target, and an American received an email from a Russian saying “I hate Putin”, then that American could be surveilled by the NSA.

Washington’s Blog asked Bill Binney what he thought of the NSA’s announcement.

Binney is the NSA executive who created the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information, who served as the senior technical director within the agency, who managed six thousand NSA employees, the 36-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a “legend” within the agency and the NSA’s best-ever analyst and code-breaker, who mapped out the Soviet command-and-control structure before anyone else knew how, and so predicted Soviet invasions before they happened (“in the 1970s, he decrypted the Soviet Union’s command system, which provided the US and its allies with real-time surveillance of all Soviet troop movements and Russian atomic weapons”).  Binney is the real McCoy.  Binney has been interviewed by virtually all of the mainstream media, including CBS, ABC, CNN, New York Times, USA Today, Fox News, PBS and many others.

Specifically, we asked Binney:

Do you buy it? https://www.yahoo.com/tech/us-nsa-spy-agency-halts-controversial-email-sweep-215107654.html 

Or do you think they’re just collecting under a different authorization/program?

Binney responded:

Short answer, NO.

This is a farce given the bulk continuous domestic data collection and storage from the Upstream programs: Fairview, Stormbrew and Blarney. [Here’s background on Fairview/Stormbrew/Blarney.]

This FAA 702 [Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] has been a charade from the beginning. [Specifically, the NSA is spying on all Americans under Executive Order 12333, and only talking about Section 702 to confuse people as to what they’re doing.]

It was a way to make people/congress/judiciary think that they were trying to conform to the law.

And, by spreading false information, which our useless MSM fail to challenge, it’s a way of subverting our republic – all done in secret with only a few people in the know of what really is going on.

Meanwhile in the background, NSA through program “Muscular” was unilaterally tapping the fiber lines between Google and Yahoo and others data centers; so that when they backed up their data between centers, NSA got it all and the companies did not even know that was happening.

Absolutely nothing has changed.

No, the NSA Has NOT Stopped Spying On Americans’ Emails was originally published on Washington's Blog

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The Existential Question of Whom to Trust

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Special Report: An existential question facing humankind is whom can be trusted to describe the world and its conflicts, especially since mainstream experts have surrendered to careerism, writes Robert Parry. By Robert Parry The looming threat of World War III, a potential extermination event for the human species, is made more likely because the world’s […]

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Pathology of a Fake News Story – Thoughts On Journalism – Medium

Pathology of a Fake News Story – Thoughts On Journalism – Medium:



This is, in fact, very similar to a practice called “astroturfing”, which has been happening all around us for years. Imagine this. You’re an educated person with a bit of time, and you visit the doctor with a long-standing non-threatening complaint. They suggest a medicine you’ve tried before, or perhaps you’d like to try a new one. Prudently, you check out the suggested drug. You read a few articles about it, but they look like the typical marketing literature. You find four or five academic papers on the drug; most of the trials look good, with a benefit in the majority of cases. There’s one that’s inconclusive, but it’s in a less major journal, with a small sample size. You then go and check out a few review sites; most of the reviews are positive — the drug’s no panacea, but it’s better. A few of the reviews are very negative, but seem to be from people who are a little bit crazy, not using the drug right, have many other conditions, and so on. So you conclude, it looks legitimate; none of the stories look controlled, and everywhere you look, you see what you’d expect to see from a decent drug. Except it’s not. Everything you’ve read — all the end-user comments, all the peer-reviewed articles, are shills, put there by the pharma corporation to make their drug look good, and make it look good in a way that “smells” legitimate.

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