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There's no thrilling anticipation of the day's first cup of coffee...nor the eye-closing delight of that first swallow of sauvignon blanc in the evening. We cats have no access to everyday mood-enhancing substances. Apart from humble catnip, there is no pharmaceutical refuge if we're suffering from boredom, depression, existential crisis, or even an everyday headache.
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David Michie (The Dalai Lama's Cat (The Dalai Lama's Cat, #1))
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Think of cocaine. In its natural form, as coca leaves, it's appealing, but not to an extent that it usually becomes a problem. But refine it, purify it, and you get a compound that hits your pleasure receptors with an unnatural intensity. That's when it becomes addictive.
Beauty has undergone a similar process, thanks to advertisers. Evolution gave us a circuit that responds to good looks - call it the pleasure receptor for our visual cortex - and in our natural environment, it was useful to have. But take a person with one-in-a-million skin and bone structure, add professional makeup and retouching, and you're no longer looking at beauty in its natural form. You've got pharmaceutical-grade beauty, the cocaine of good looks.
Biologists call this "supernormal stimulus" [...] Our beauty receptors receive more stimulation than they were evolved to handle; we're seeing more beauty in one day than our ancestors did in a lifetime. And the result is that beauty is slowly ruining our lives.
How? The way any drug becomes a problem: by interfering with our relationships with other people. We become dissatisfied with the way ordinary people look because they can't compare to supermodels.
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Ted Chiang (Stories of Your Life and Others)
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As James Surowiecki noted in a New Yorker article, given a choice between developing antibiotics that people will take every day for two weeks and antidepressants that people will take every day for ever, drug companies not surprisingly opt for the latter. Although a few antibiotics have been toughened up a bit, the pharmaceutical industry hasn’t given us an entirely new antibiotic since the 1970s.
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Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
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For work: I bought some pens. Normally, I used makeshift pens, the kind of unsatisfactory implements that somehow materialized in my bag or in a drawer. But one day, when I was standing in line to buy envelopes, I caught sight of a box of my favorite kind of pen: the Deluxe Uniball Micro. “Two ninety-nine for one pen!” I thought. “That’s ridiculous.” But after a fairly lengthy internal debate, I bought four. It’s such a joy to write with a good pen instead of making do with an underinked pharmaceutical promotional pen picked up from a doctor’s office. My new pens weren’t cheap, but when I think of all the time I spend using pens and how much I appreciate a good pen, I realize it was money well spent. Finely made tools help make work a pleasure.
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Gretchen Rubin (The Happiness Project)
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Giving people favors is a time-honored way of gaining loyalty. Pharmaceutical reps do it. The salespeople manning cosmetic counters do it. Lobbyists do it. Men with big crushes on impossibly beautiful women do it. Gifts work on our feelings in a couple of ways: they change the way we experience something, and they push our "reciprocate!" button. When we have the mandate to be objective and an incentive not to be, our biases often win the day-even if we don't think they will. Favors deeply affect our preferences and our loyalties.
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Dan Ariely
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In those days, Doc Susie used medications interchangeably between humans and animals. That was before pharmaceutical houses discovered a fundamental economic principle. Label a medication for human consumption, and a higher price could be charged.
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Virginia Cornell (Doc Susie: The True Story of a Country Physician in the Colorado Rockies)
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The first something to be implied by all the nothing was in fact two somethings, who were God and Satan. God was male. Satan was female. They implied each other, and hence were peers in the emerging power structure, which was itself nothing but an implication. Power was implied by weakness.
Satan [...] couldn't undo anything God had done. She could at least try to make existence for His little toys less painful. She could see what He couldn't: To be alive was to be either bored or scared stiff. So she filled an apple with all sorts of ideas that might at least relieve the boredom, such as rules for games with cards and dice, and how to fuck [...] Satan had a serpent give Eve the apple. Eve took a bite and handed it to Adam. He took a bite, and then they fucked."
[...]
"All Satan wanted to do was help, and she did in many cases. And her record for promoting nostrums with occasionally dreadful side effects is no worse than that of the most reputable pharmaceutical houses of the present day.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
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Until fairly recently, every family had a cornucopia of favorite home remedies--plants and household items that could be prepared to treat minor medical emergencies, or to prevent a common ailment becoming something much more serious. Most households had someone with a little understanding of home cures, and when knowledge fell short, or more serious illness took hold, the family physician or village healer would be called in for a consultation, and a treatment would be agreed upon. In those days we took personal responsibility for our health--we took steps to prevent illness and were more aware of our bodies and of changes in them. And when illness struck, we frequently had the personal means to remedy it. More often than not, the treatment could be found in the garden or the larder. In the middle of the twentieth century we began to change our outlook. The advent of modern medicine, together with its many miracles, also led to a much greater dependency on our physicians and to an increasingly stretched healthcare system. The growth of the pharmaceutical industry has meant that there are indeed "cures" for most symptoms, and we have become accustomed to putting our health in the hands of someone else, and to purchasing products that make us feel good. Somewhere along the line we began to believe that technology was in some way superior to what was natural, and so we willingly gave up control of even minor health problems.
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Karen Sullivan (The Complete Illustrated Guide to Natural Home Remedies)
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At the nurses’ station the night-shift RNs cluster on chairs, looking like birds wanting to shove their tired heads under a free wing. Their lined faces and heavy-lidded eyes show how hard it is to stay awake and alert for an entire night. I don’t work a lot of nights, but when I do I feel it. I hit a wall at 2:00 a.m., then again at 4:00. The hospital’s strong tea, bad coffee, Diet Coke from the vending machine—they all help, but nothing non-pharmaceutical will really make me feel awake for the entire night, and I’m not going down the pharmacologic road. The day after, even if I sleep all morning and afternoon, it feels as though I’m seeing the world through gauze.
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Theresa Brown (The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients' Lives)
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The pharmaceutical companies were going to use Theranos’s blood-testing system to monitor patients’ response to new drugs. The cartridges and readers would be placed in patients’ homes during clinical trials. Patients would prick their fingers several times a day and the readers would beam their blood-test results to the trial’s sponsor.
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John Carreyrou (Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup)
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Even if we do manage to get our act together, the goalposts for what counts as “good enough” seem always to remain frustratingly out of reach. We must be smart and fit and fashionable and interesting and successful and sexy. Oh, and spiritual, too. And no matter how well we do, someone else always seems to be doing it better. The result of this line of thinking is sobering: millions of people need to take pharmaceuticals every day just to cope with daily life. Insecurity, anxiety, and depression are incredibly common in our society, and much of this is due to self-judgment, to beating ourselves up when we feel we aren’t winning in the game of life.
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Kristin Neff (Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself)
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We have to remember that the use of stimulating drugs was more common in the 1930’s and 40’s, and much less frowned upon, than it is today in the 1950’s. Let’s remember that Bayer, which I think is probably still the largest German pharmaceutical company, they invented their two wonder drugs in the 1930s, Aspirin and Heroin. They were intended to go hand in hand, if you remember back then (Aspirin = Hope, Heroin = Heroism.) You could get Heroin very easily from a pharmacist, just like Aspirin. Today
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Holger Eckhertz (D DAY Through German Eyes 2)
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In 1993, the FDA granted approval to Monsanto for its genetically engineered recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), brand-named Posilac, for use by the nation’s dairy farmers. It increases milk production by about 10 percent over a cow’s life cycle. It’s the largest-selling cattle pharmaceutical in the United States. But Posilac has always been controversial. More and more cancer specialists are apprehensive, because it may increase the risk for breast, colon, and prostate cancers in humans. Unless the milk you’re drinking is clearly marked “organic” or “rBGH free,” it probably contains this hormone. Incidentally, Posilac is banned in Europe, Canada, Australia, and Japan. This should tell us something.
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Vani Hari (The Food Babe Way: Break Free from the Hidden Toxins in Your Food and Lose Weight, Look Years Younger, and Get Healthy in Just 21 Days!)
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But for this—” She stopped herself. He didn’t know. “Where is he now?” Marina asked. She could not bring herself to say his body. Anders was not a body. Vogel was full of doctors, doctors working, doctors in their offices drinking coffee. The cabinets and storage rooms and desk drawers were full of drugs, pills of every conceivable stripe. They were a pharmaceutical company; what they didn’t have they figured out how to make. Surely if they knew where he was they could find something to do for him, and with that thought her desire for the impossible eclipsed every piece of science she had ever known. The dead were dead were dead were dead and still Marina Singh did not have to shut her eyes to see Anders Eckman eating an egg salad sandwich in the employee cafeteria as he had done with great enthusiasm every day she had known him.
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Ann Patchett (State of Wonder)
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More panic. More emergencies and disasters. Soon, emergencies fell into a sort of natural ranking: drop-everything emergencies, do-what-you-can emergencies, and you’ll just-have-to-wait emergencies. Disasters, too, had their own ratings: unavoidable, did-the-best-we-could, my fault/your fault. Then there were godlike moments when a decision had to be made as to who most deserved to die. By the afternoon of her second day, Dtui wondered whether her heart had shrunk. She felt less. People had become less human. Death had become less of a tragedy. Her patients weren’t blacksmiths or housewives, they were percentages. “With this little skill and this little pharmaceutical backup, this patient—let’s call her number seven—has a forty percent chance of survival.” It amazed and saddened her that, in order to do her job properly, she had to stop caring.
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Colin Cotterill (Disco for the Departed (Dr. Siri Paiboun, #3))
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Another common practice, the reps told us, was to take fancy meals to the entire doctor’s office (one of the perks of being a nurse or receptionist, I suppose). One doctor’s office even required alternating days of steak and lobster for lunch if the reps wanted access to the doctors. Even more shocking, we found out that physicians sometimes called the reps into the examination room (as an “expert”) to directly inform patients about the way certain drugs work. Hearing stories from the reps who sold medical devices was even more disturbing. We learned that it’s common practice for device reps to peddle their medical devices in the operating room in real time and while a surgery is under way. Janet and I were surprised at how well the pharmaceutical reps understood classic psychological persuasion strategies and how they employed them in a sophisticated and intuitive manner.
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Dan Ariely (The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves)
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He generally traveled to Europe four or five times a year. The pharmaceutical empire he ran had research centers in Germany, Switzerland, and France, and huge laboratories and factories in England. It was always interesting coming over here, exchanging ideas with their research teams, and exploring new avenues of marketing, which was his real forte. But this time it was far more than that, far more than just a research trip, or the unveiling of a new product. He was here for the birth of “his baby.” Vicotec. His life’s dream. Vicotec was going to change the lives and the outlook of all people with cancer. It was going to dramatically alter maintenance programs, and the very nature of chemotherapy the world over. It would be Peter’s one major contribution to the human race. For the past four years, other than his family, it was what he had lived for. And undeniably, it was going to make Wilson-Donovan millions. More than that, obviously, their studies had already projected earnings in the first five years to well over a
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Danielle Steel (Five Days in Paris)
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With Britain preoccupied by World War II and the United States not yet in it, the quest to produce bulk penicillin moved to a U.S. government research facility in Peoria, Illinois. Scientists and other interested parties all over the Allied world were secretly asked to send in soil and mold samples. Hundreds responded, but nothing they sent proved promising. Then, two years after testing had begun, a lab assistant in Peoria named Mary Hunt brought in a cantaloupe from a local grocery store. It had a “pretty golden mold” growing on it, she recalled later. That mold proved to be two hundred times more potent than anything previously tested. The name and location of the store where Mary Hunt shopped are now forgotten, and the historic cantaloupe itself was not preserved: after the mold was scraped off, it was cut into pieces and eaten by the staff. But the mold lived on. Every bit of penicillin made since that day is descended from that single random cantaloupe. Within a year, American pharmaceutical companies were producing 100 billion units of penicillin a month.
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Bill Bryson (The Body: A Guide for Occupants)
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your antioxidant levels with supplements that will help you detox and counter the negative effects of metals in the body. Focus on glutathione, alpha-lipoic acid, zinc orotate, and good old vitamin C. •Regularly bind the metals you are exposed to by taking activated charcoal, 500 mg to 5 grams per day, and/or modified citrus pectin, 5 to 15 mg per day, both away from food or pharmaceuticals. Take some chlorella tablets when you eat fish. •If you feel you are aging faster than you’d like or have a reason to believe you’ve been exposed to high levels of heavy metals, see a functional medicine doctor to get your urine levels tested. If they are indeed high, consider IV chelation therapy or suppository EDTA chelation therapy under a doctor’s supervision.
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Dave Asprey (Super Human: The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and Maybe Even Live Forever)
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Tim Tigner began his career in Soviet Counterintelligence with the US Army Special Forces, the Green Berets. That was back in the Cold War days when, “We learned Russian so you didn't have to,” something he did at the Presidio of Monterey alongside Recon Marines and Navy SEALs. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, Tim switched from espionage to arbitrage. Armed with a Wharton MBA rather than a Colt M16, he moved to Moscow in the midst of Perestroika. There, he led prominent multinational medical companies, worked with cosmonauts on the MIR Space Station (from Earth, alas), chaired the Association of International Pharmaceutical Manufacturers, and helped write Russia’s first law on healthcare. Moving to Brussels during the formation of the EU, Tim ran Europe, Middle East, and Africa for a Johnson & Johnson company and traveled like a character in a Robert Ludlum novel. He eventually landed in Silicon Valley, where he launched new medical technologies as a startup CEO. In his free time, Tim has climbed the peaks of Mount Olympus, hang glided from the cliffs of Rio de Janeiro, and ballooned over Belgium. He earned scuba certification in Turkey, learned to ski in Slovenia, and ran the Serengeti with a Maasai warrior. He acted on stage in Portugal, taught negotiations in Germany, and chaired a healthcare conference in Holland. Tim studied psychology in France, radiology in England, and philosophy in Greece. He has enjoyed ballet at the Bolshoi, the opera on Lake Como, and the symphony in Vienna. He’s been a marathoner, paratrooper, triathlete, and yogi. Intent on combining his creativity with his experience, Tim began writing thrillers in 1996 from an apartment overlooking Moscow’s Gorky Park. Decades later, his passion for creative writing continues to grow every day. His home office now overlooks a vineyard in Northern California, where he lives with his wife Elena and their two daughters. Tim grew up in the Midwest, and graduated from Hanover College with a BA in Philosophy and Mathematics. After military service and work as a financial analyst and foreign-exchange trader, he earned an MBA in Finance and an MA in International Studies from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton and Lauder Schools. Thank you for taking the time to read about the author. Tim is most grateful for his loyal fans, and loves to correspond with readers like you. You are welcome to reach him directly at tim@timtigner.com.
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Tim Tigner (Falling Stars (Kyle Achilles, #3))
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The generally recommended dosage for hypericum is 300mg, 3 times a day, however with any psychotropic herb or pharmaceutical, I usually recommend people to start on a lower dose and work up. Hypericum
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James Lee (Chill Pills & Mood Food - Restore calm and happiness with powerful supplements and neurotransmitter-boosting food)
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Modern medicine has failed us in many ways but health is a journey that is never too late to begin. The failures above are only a few of many and I believe that we can only achieve optimum health when we learn to provide our body with the nutrition it needs. When we get sick, we are not deficient in a pharmaceutical drug…we are out of balance and deficient in some nutrient most of the time. Pharmaceuticals only cover up symptoms. They don’t heal us…only our body has the ability to repair and heal itself.
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Jeffrey Blair (Unleash Your Inner Health!: Harness Your Body's Desire to be Healthy & Fit in 21 Days!)
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You work at that run-of-the-mill pharmaceuticals company down the road,” he continued. “The place is a hive of idiots, and unfortunately it can be difficult for a good man – a smart man – to rise through the ranks. As I'm sure you've noticed, idiots look after their own.
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Amy Cross (Days 109 to 116 (Mass Extinction Event, #8))
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Arthur found a job in the pharmaceutical industry, at Schering, the drug company where he had freelanced as a copywriter in his student days.
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Patrick Radden Keefe (Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty)
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STEP THREE: MAXIMIZE YOUR ENERGY & REGENERATION Consider what aspects of Vitality Pharmacy (Chapter 10) might help you accelerate your energy, your strength, your vitality. Or help you to recover from challenges you may be facing. 1. Are you going to expand your capacity by optimizing your hormones through H.O.T. (hormone optimization therapy)? 2. Would peptides be something you may want to consider? Are there any peptides that you’d like to look into that could make a difference in anything from your immune system to sexual desire and drive? 3. What are some of the pharmaceutical-grade supplements that you might want to have to start your day with energy or to get yourself to sleep at night without side effects? 4. Or would you like to tap into NAD3 or other NMN-like products to maximize your energy and vitality? STEP
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Tony Robbins (Life Force: How New Breakthroughs in Precision Medicine Can Transform the Quality of Your Life & Those You Love)
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STEP THREE: MAXIMIZE YOUR ENERGY & REGENERATION Consider what aspects of Vitality Pharmacy (Chapter 10) might help you accelerate your energy, your strength, your vitality. Or help you to recover from challenges you may be facing. 1. Are you going to expand your capacity by optimizing your hormones through H.O.T. (hormone optimization therapy)? 2. Would peptides be something you may want to consider? Are there any peptides that you’d like to look into that could make a difference in anything from your immune system to sexual desire and drive? 3. What are some of the pharmaceutical-grade supplements that you might want to have to start your day with energy or to get yourself to sleep at night without side effects? 4. Or would you like to tap into NAD3 or other NMN-like products to maximize your energy and vitality?
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Tony Robbins (Life Force: How New Breakthroughs in Precision Medicine Can Transform the Quality of Your Life & Those You Love)
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The reporting machine purred intimately, 'Who do you feel is responsible for the passage of the McPhearson Act and der Alte's willingness to sign it into law?'
'You know who,' Dr Superb said, 'and so do I. Not the army and not Nicole and not even the NP. It's the great ethical pharmaceutical house, the cartel A.G. Chemie, in Berlin.' Everyone knew that; it was hardly news. The powerful German cartel had sold the world on the notion of drug-therapy for mental illness; there was a fortune to be made, there. And by corollary, psychoanalysts were quacks, on a par with orgone box and health food healers. It was not like the old days, the previous century, when psychoanalysts had had stature. Dr Superb sighed.
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Philip K. Dick (The Simulacra)
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Xuan pulled out his phone and searched Google. He had to ask for the correct spelling of the drug. He wanted more real information about how much of a financial burden he would be to his parents. Money was a big concern. Possibly a deal breaker.
“Several sites—it’s around five hundred dollars a day! That’s fifteen thousand a month! How could I let my parents pay that much for me?”
Fifteen thousand dollars. I gasped, appalled. I staggered to the chair and collapsed into it. He’ll never agree to that.
Xuan opened his mouth and closed it again, in shock. The atmosphere in the room plunged from friendly and informative to frigid with mathematical figures and calculations.
I sat with my elbows on my knees, my face buried in my hands. Saints, I knew cancer treatment was expensive, but I never imagined it was that expensive. That was too much. Ironically, I didn’t know if I could live with myself, knowing my parents were working day and night to keep me alive. That would be a huge financial responsibility. I just couldn’t imagine allowing it, month after month. Sadly, I wondered how many people died every year because of the cost of medication in the United States. In a way, it seemed like pharmaceutical companies were getting away with murder.
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Kayla Cunningham (Fated to Love You (Chasing the Comet Book 1))
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We are in a noble and inspiring business. The essence of our industry is to help people get better, manage their conditions, and extend their lives. What an awesome reason to get up every day and go to work!
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Scott Weintraub (RESULTS: The Future Of Pharmaceutical And Healthcare Marketing)
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Yes,” he replied right away. “Something happened to me. Like…physically. And I’m gonna need your help identifying this shit. I mean, you’re the doctor.” “I’m a pharmaceutical tech, Mavi. I can tell you if you have the flu, shit like that.” “Whatever. Maybe I do. I can’t eat. All day, I didn’t eat shit and now, I can’t eat nothing.” Gaby swallowed hard, her heart rate picking up pace. The bitch in her whispered, ‘Good’. “I’m tired as fuck, but I can’t close my eyes. But even before today, I’ve been fucked up. I can’t sleep without thinking about you, Gabrielle.” She should take him off speakerphone. “I can’t talk to somebody, or have a simple-ass meeting or do anything without thinking about you. I wait all day when you’re working to call you and as soon as I hang up, I wanna call you right back. But I know how that would make me look, like a fucking desperate nut, right? So I don’t do it... When you leave me I’m already thinking of when I’m going to see you again. And the crazy shit is, everything I do, I already know I want to do it with you. I don’t care if it’s going to the grocery store or going to Saint Tropez, whatever, I know I want you next to me from now on.
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Takerra Allen (An Affair in Munthill)
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In universities and pharmaceutical labs around the world, computer scientists and computational biologists are designing algorithms to sift through billions of gene sequences, looking for links between certain genetic markers and diseases. The goal is to help us sidestep the diseases we're most likely to contract and to provide each one of us with a cabinet of personalized medicines. Each one should include just the right dosage and the ideal mix of molecules for our bodies. Between these two branches of research, genetic and behavioral, we're being parsed, inside and out. Even the language of the two fields is similar. In a nod to geneticists, Dishman and his team are working to catalog what they call our "behavioral markers." The math is also about the same. Whether they're scrutinizing our strands of DNA or our nightly trips to the bathroom, statisticians are searching for norms, correlations, and anomalies. Dishman prefers his behavioral approach, in part because the market's less crowded. "There are a zillion people looking at biology," he says, "and too few looking at behavior." His gadgets also have an edge because they can provide basic alerts from day one. The technology indicating whether a person gets out of bed, for example, isn't much more complicated than the sensor that automatically opens a supermarket door. But that nugget of information is valuable. Once we start installing these sensors, and the electronics companies get their foot in the door, the experts can start refining the analysis from simple alerts to sophisticated predictions-perhaps preparing us for the onset of Parkinson's disease or Alzheimer's.
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Gary F. Marcus (The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates The Complexities of Human Thought)
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In universities and pharmaceutical labs around the world, computer scientists and computational biologists are designing algorithms to sift through billions of gene sequences, looking for links between certain genetic markers and diseases. The goal is to help us sidestep the diseases we're most likely to contract and to provide each one of us with a cabinet of personalized medicines. Each one should include just the right dosage and the ideal mix of molecules for our bodies. Between these two branches of research, genetic and behavioral, we're being parsed, inside and out. Even the language of the two fields is similar. In a nod to geneticists, Dishman and his team are working to catalog what they call our "behavioral markers." The math is also about the same. Whether they're scrutinizing our strands of DNA or our nightly trips to the bathroom, statisticians are searching for norms, correlations, and anomalies. Dishman prefers his behavioral approach, in part because the market's less crowded. "There are a zillion people looking at biology," he says, "and too few looking at behavior." His gadgets also have an edge because they can provide basic alerts from day one. The technology indicating whether a person gets out of bed, for example, isn't much more complicated than the sensor that automatically opens a supermarket door. But that nugget of information is valuable. Once we start installing these sensors, and the electronics companies get their foot in the door, the experts can start refining the analysis from simple alerts to sophisticated predictions-perhaps preparing us for the onset of Parkinson's disease or Alzheimer's.
”
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Stephen Baker (The Numerati)
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The main cargo is drugs, roughly 240 million pills a day. The pharmaceutical distribution business is one of high volumes and razor-thin profit margins. So, understandably, efficiency has been all but a religion for McKesson for decades.
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Steve Lohr (Data-ism: The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and Almost Everything Else)
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As a wildlife warrior, Steve fought against age-old practices that were destroying entire species. He felt it was time to focus on the nonconsumptive use of wildlife. Poachers were still hunting tigers for their bones, and bears for their gallbladders, all for traditional medicines that have been far surpassed by modern pharmaceuticals.
It should be simple. We should be able to take an aspirin instead of powdered rhino horn, make whaling something that we read about in history books, and end our appetite for shark-fin soup, which is causing one of the world’s most ancient and important species to vanish from the oceans.
Until the day comes when the senseless killing ends, we will all have to fight like wildlife warriors to protect our precious planet.
Steve came back from his Antarctica trip with renewed determination. In his last documentary, Steve showed how penguins actually play. He tried to demystify the fierce reputation of the leopard seal. He talked about how humpback whales have a family structure similar to ours, that they are mammals, they love their children, and they communicate.
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Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
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Medical doctors and cardiologists who practiced medicine in the 1940s and 50s provided Dr. Lee’s whole food concentrates to patients. Over time, they are becoming a rarity. Why are modern day medical doctors choosing not to incorporate whole food nutrition into their practice when it was used by the doctors before them with great success? A look into history shows us that many medical doctors took a detour down a slippery slope and never found their way back to the road of healing with whole food nutrition.
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Gerald Roliz (The Pharmaceutical Myth: Letting Food be Your Medicine is the Answer for Perfect Health)
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In his early AIDS days, Dr. Fauci had thrashed FDA as inhumane for demanding randomized double-blind placebo studies at the height of the pandemic. Now, here he was doing what he had condemned by blocking an effective treatment simply because it would compete with his expensive patent-protected pharmaceutical, remdesivir, and vaccines.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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Whether you’re falling in love or receiving bad news at work, grieving a loss or feeling overwhelmed by the suffering in the world, you have choices both in how you relate to the experience and in how you respond. Mindfulness helps you become more conscious of your impulses in those moments. Often when times are hard (and sometimes when joy is intense), our instinctive response is to turn away from the discomfort and turn toward an external escape to take the edge off: perhaps it’s TV, pharmaceuticals, shopping, social media, or a bottle of wine. Although you might get relief, it’s only temporary. The wiser response is to bring attention to what is hard, and you can do this with mindfulness. Our freedom and happiness are in our power to choose how to show up for the life that is right here and now.
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Laurie J. Cameron (The Mindful Day: Practical Ways to Find Focus, Calm, and Joy From Morning to Evening)
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Some individuals just have addictive personalities and are prone to abuse any substance you make available to them. This attitude was typical in the pharmaceutical industry: it’s not the drugs that are bad; it’s the people who abuse them. “There are some people who just get addicted to things—almost anything. I read the other day about a man who died from drinking too many cola drinks,” Frank Berger, who was president of Wallace Laboratories, the maker of Miltown, told Vogue.
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Patrick Radden Keefe (Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty)
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Merck, the $200 billion, New Jersey–based pharmaceutical giant, was hit early on the morning of NotPetya’s judgment day. It lost fifteen thousand Windows computers in ninety seconds,
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Andy Greenberg (Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers)
“
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Jason Dawson (Darien Connors and the Necromancy of Eridu)
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Living with akathisia is akin to enduring a relentless storm, where extreme anxiety, distress, and a distorted sense of reality besiege one’s being. The symptoms are multifaceted: dizziness, uncontrollable movements, overwhelming agitation that scorches the soul, leading to a sense of decay that seems to spread from within to the outside world. Fraud, deceit, theft, and abandonment by those who once provided love and protection add layers of torment, fueling an intense remorse. This condition cripples one’s day-to-day functioning, reducing it to a mere shadow of its former state. In our desperate search for any sliver of hope, many find solace in the confines of their beds, foregoing essential self-care or any semblance of self-love. The excruciating ordeal feels like a relentless nightmare, with regular flare-ups and an omnipresent sense of doom.
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Jonathan Harnisch
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Joey Tomlinson, in his much-needed and timely book, The Day of Trouble: Depression, Scripture, and the God Who Is Near, masterfully tackles the issues of mental health and well-being from a Christian and biblical perspective. Speaking with a pastor’s heart, Tomlinson helps his readers wrestle with the spiritually, mentally, and physically debilitating scourge of depression. In seeking to help hurting people, Tomlinson draws from years of pastoral ministry as a counsellor, as well as drawing from the Bible, current medical and pharmaceutical studies, and tried-tested-and-true insights from other godly writers, preachers, and pastors both past and present. The result is a book that gives readers a well-grounded, balanced, applicable, and effective dose of biblical wisdom, godly encouragement, and convicting exhortation. This book is extremely helpful for all Christians–whether you’re managing personal challenges with mental health or helping others in treating theirs. Tomlinson doesn’t mince words in his direct and honest dealings with the subject, but his Christ-like love for his readers is evident on every page. The Day of Trouble is a well-written, sincere, and highly practical gift to the church, a book that sheds gospel-transforming light on an often overlooked and ignored area of the Christian life. I hope and pray that it is widely read among God’s people, for I know it will be a healing balm used by the Triune God to restore Christian joy to the minds and hearts of suffering souls.
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Jeremy W. Johnston (J.R.R. Tolkien: Christian Maker of Middle-Earth)
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in the hands of a few; any meaningful distinction between private and public sectors had disappeared; captains of commerce lived in a ceaseless anxiety that drove them to expand their empires ruthlessly; ordinary citizens lived in ceaseless fear of being fired and ceaseless confusion about which powerful private interest owned which formerly public institution on any given day; and the economy was fueled largely by the elite’s insatiable demand for luxury. (In Vilnius, by November of that dismal autumn, five criminal oligarchs were responsible for employing thousands of carpenters, bricklayers, craftsmen, cooks, prostitutes, barkeeps, auto mechanics, and bodyguards.) The main difference between America and Lithuania, as far as Chip could see, was that in America the wealthy few subdued the unwealthy many by means of mind-numbing and soul-killing entertainments and gadgetry and pharmaceuticals, whereas in Lithuania the powerful few subdued the unpowerful many by threatening violence.
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Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
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If you plan to live longer than you’re supposed to, CoQ10 must be on your short list of supplements at 100 to 200 mg per day. Advanced anti-aging experts often recommend idebenone, a synthetic pharmaceutical that is similar to coenzyme Q10 and is shown to improve skin and help brain cells stay healthy35 and improve learning and memory in mice.
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Dave Asprey (Super Human: The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and Maybe Even Live Forever)
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Even infants were used in research studies; for example, two-day-old babies were fed bismuth, a metal-like substance used in the manufacture of some pharmaceuticals, and then exposed to extensive X-rays to chart the course of different foods in their stomachs.
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Allen M. Hornblum (Against Their Will: The Secret History of Medical Experimentation on Children in Cold War America)
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Anxiety disorders are the most common psychological ailment today, yet even for those not suffering from a disorder, mild feelings of anxiety often linger in the background for the greater part of one’s day. Most are of the opinion that anxiety is an emotional state that offers no positive value, and thus many attempt to alleviate their anxious feelings through frantic activity, stimulating distractions, or a concoction of pharmaceutical and recreational drugs. Those who have spent time studying this emotion, however, have realized that the role anxiety plays in our lives is not so cut and dry.
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Academy of Ideas
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Tim Tigner began his career in Soviet Counterintelligence with the US Army Special Forces, the Green Berets. That was back in the Cold War days when, “We learned Russian so you didn't have to,” something he did at the Presidio of Monterey alongside Recon Marines and Navy SEALs. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, Tim switched from espionage to arbitrage. Armed with a Wharton MBA rather than a Colt M16, he moved to Moscow in the midst of Perestroika. There, he led prominent multinational medical companies, worked with cosmonauts on the MIR Space Station (from Earth, alas), chaired the Association of International Pharmaceutical Manufacturers, and helped write Russia’s first law on healthcare. Moving to Brussels during the formation of the EU, Tim ran Europe, Middle East and Africa for a Johnson & Johnson company and traveled like a character in a Robert Ludlum novel. He eventually landed in Silicon Valley, where he launched new medical technologies as a startup CEO. In his free time, Tim has climbed the peaks of Mount Olympus, hang glided from the cliffs of Rio de Janeiro, and ballooned over Belgium. He earned scuba certification in Turkey, learned to ski in Slovenia, and ran the Serengeti with a Maasai warrior. He acted on stage in Portugal, taught negotiations in Germany, and chaired a healthcare conference in Holland. Tim studied psychology in France, radiology in England, and philosophy in Greece. He has enjoyed ballet at the Bolshoi, the opera on Lake Como, and the symphony in Vienna. He’s been a marathoner, paratrooper, triathlete, and yogi.
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Tim Tigner (The Price of Time (Watch What You Wish For #1))
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Imagine anything at all, for after all one is free to do it here. That is the purpose of this place; it was made for you to be mad in. And when you give in and have a real fine bout, they have won. And then they have their evidence as well. But the temptation in the long hours is hard to resist, and it comes over you like the drowsiness of the powders. . . .
The moments of clarity are the worst. You burn in humiliation remembering yesterday's folderol, your own foolish thoughts. Not the boredom of here, the passive futility of reality, but the flights of fancy, which would convict you, are the evidence that you merit your fate and are here for a purpose. The crime of the imaginary. The lure of madness as illness. And you crumble day by day and admit your guilt. Induced madness. Refuse a pill and you will be tied down and given a hypodermic by force. Enforced irrationality. With all the force of the state behind it, pharmaceutical corporations, and an entrenched bureaucratic psychiatry. Unassailable social beliefs, general throughout the culture. And all the scientific prestige of medicine. Locks, bars, buildings, cops. A massive system.
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Kate Millett (The Loony-Bin Trip)
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sobs” (sanglots). Some days I enter poetic melancholic states, what the Portuguese call saudade or the Turks hüzün (from the Arabic word for sadness). Other days I am more aggressive, have more energy—and will write less, walk more, do other things, argue with researchers, answer emails, draw graphs on blackboards. Should I be turned into a vegetable or a happy imbecile? Had Prozac been available last century, Baudelaire’s “spleen,” Edgar Allan Poe’s moods, the poetry of Sylvia Plath, the lamentations of so many other poets, everything with a soul would have been silenced. … If large pharmaceutical companies were able to eliminate the seasons, they would probably do so—for a profit, of course. There is another danger: in addition to harming children, we are harming society and our future. Measures that aim at reducing variability and swings in the lives of children are also reducing variability and differences within our said to be Great Culturally Globalized Society.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder)
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Pill bleeds are pharmaceutically induced bleeds that are arbitrarily coordinated into a 28-day pattern to reassure you that your body is doing something natural. Having the occasional pill bleed is necessary to prevent breakthrough bleeding, but it doesn’t have to be monthly. A pill bleed could just as easily be every 56 days or every 83 days, or any number of days you’d like.
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Lara Briden (Period Repair Manual: Natural Treatment for Better Hormones and Better Periods)
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He padded his training with substances to improve his abilities, though he was hardly the only one. Strychnine stimulated muscle activity. Nitroglycerine improved his breathing, though it risked hallucinations and exhaustion. Ether deadened his pains, even while he rode, one hand removed from the handlebars, a handkerchief lifted to his face. It was tolerated by everyone—pharmaceutical companies advertised in l’Auto, and the drugs were freely given out by team trainers. Henri rubbed chloroform against his gums and dropped liquid cocaine into the corners of his eyes. He avoided alcohol due to its lingering effects the next day, but in that year’s Tour, it was unclear what the state of drinking water would be in cities closer to the front.
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Adin Dobkin (Sprinting Through No Man's Land: Endurance, Tragedy, and Rebirth in the 1919 Tour de France)
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Sodium bicarbonate is not a pharmaceutical drug it is a nutrient the body needs for survival every day.
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Mark Sircus (Sodium Bicarbonate: Nature's Unique First Aid Remedy)
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Cause for Concern.” Produced by Meditel, the film described the material from the FOIA documents, exposed the crooked AZT trials as rank fraud, and chronicled the terrible toxicities of the drug. The next day, the charity, Wellcome Foundation, divested itself of most of its stock in Wellcome Pharmaceuticals, the parent company of Burroughs Wellcome, the manufacturer of AZT. Burroughs Wellcome stocks plunged, and the company suffered a series of hostile takeovers by SmithKline Beecham and then by Glaxo. Millions around the world viewed the UK documentary, but neither it nor any of the Medical AIDS-critical documentaries have ever been broadcast in the US.102 AZT is the most toxic drug ever approved for long-term use. Molecular biologist Professor Peter Duesberg has explained AZT’s mechanism of action: It is a random terminator of DNA synthesis, the life process itself.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)