"Schoolteacher Fired for Recommending Students Eat Plant-Based Diet
by David Gutierrez
A middle schoolteacher in Fox River Grove, Ill., was fired in April after encouraging his students to eat a vegan diet.
Dave Warwak, an art teacher at Fox River Grove Middle School, got in trouble while guiding his students through an administrator-approved program that sought to teach students to be kind to animals by having them take care of marshmallow "Peeps" as pets. According to administrators, Warwak attempted to educate students about animal rights by placing the Peeps in cages, pots or pans, or between slices of bread. Accusing Warwak of abandoning his curriculum and "turning his classroom into a forum on veganism," Principal Tim Mahaffey fired him.
"The problem was when it turned into a PETA [People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals] advertisement and it was against the school lunch program," Mahaffy told the Illinois Board of Education during a hearing into Warwak's dismissal.
Like all public elementary, middle and high schools, Fox River Grove only eligible for National School Lunch Program reimbursements if it promotes consumption of dairy products, including by putting up life-sized celebrity milk endorsement posters. These posters are sent unsolicited to schools by the National Dairy Council.
During Warwak's hearing, former Cornell University professor of nutritional biochemistry T. Colin Campbell testified that schools are harming their students by pushing dairy.
"The consumption of dairy, especially at the younger ages, is a problem," Campbell said, and has been linked to substantially higher risks of osteoporosis and a wide variety of cancers.
Along with his son Thomas M. Campbell II, Campbell is the author of "The China Study," a book on the connection between disease and diet that the New York Times called the "Grand Prix of epidemiology."
Campbell noted that the dairy health claims on school posters were written by USDA dietary committee replete with conflicts of interest.
"Six of the 11 members of the committee, including the chair, had an association with the dairy industry," Campbell said. "And the chair himself had taken more money without telling the public about it than he was allowed under the law.""
Redicilous, yet a Reality...
I have nothing left to say after reading this article, so I will let you read it and draw your own conclusions...
Staying Well during the Flu and Cold Season
So, it seems that the cold and flu season is upon us. I don’t have to watch the news or be a scientist to come to the conclusion—I am surrounded by an army of co-workers and family members with runny noses, watery eyes and itchy throats. The common cold is responsible for about 30 million days of lost work in the U.S. alone each year. It seems such a harmless virus, yet no cure has been or will be found for it.
The flu shots are not a real help—the “scientists” can never predict the next flu strain, without which everything that is done is like shooting in the dark—useless. I am mostly concerned with the people that will fall under the pressure of modern medical commercialism and succumb to getting the flu shot. Most of them will never think about asking their physicians about the contents of the shot. Amazing, isn’t it? When we go out to eat we meticulously examine the menu and the ingredients of the food that will pass through us, yet we don’t bother to do the same with medicine that stays in our bodies for much longer than the food.
Here is a comic approach to the truth about the flu shot, but every bit of it is a 100% true.
The flu shots are not a real help—the “scientists” can never predict the next flu strain, without which everything that is done is like shooting in the dark—useless. I am mostly concerned with the people that will fall under the pressure of modern medical commercialism and succumb to getting the flu shot. Most of them will never think about asking their physicians about the contents of the shot. Amazing, isn’t it? When we go out to eat we meticulously examine the menu and the ingredients of the food that will pass through us, yet we don’t bother to do the same with medicine that stays in our bodies for much longer than the food.
Here is a comic approach to the truth about the flu shot, but every bit of it is a 100% true.
So, you might ask me: “What can be done instead? How can I do to stay healthy this season?” There are many natural approaches and remedies. I will share with you what has helped me and my family so far and has been very effective. But before I delve into the method, I have to tell you how I “discovered” it.
One of my sisters had an infection a few weeks ago and was prescribed to go on antibiotics. Knowing that I use natural means to stay well, she contacted me to see if there were any alternatives to antibiotics. I was quite preoccupied at the time and did not have much time to search out a suitable answer myself, so I did the next best thing—I contacted my friend, who is a RAW VEGAN, and has a degree in Nutrition, and asked her to help me. She quickly responded (thank God for good friends) with a list of things that can be done. One of the things on her list was OREGANO oil. I did a quick look up and found that essential oils are anti-viral and are very potent in fighting infections, colds, flu, and many other infectious diseases.
My sister gladly went to the local health food store and bought a small container of Oregano oil. She took it instead of the prescribed antibiotic. The results were great. The infection was gone, and her immune system did not have to suffer at all.
At about the same time my Mom came down with a cold. I found out about it early in the morning, while getting ready for work. I heard her sniffling, coughing and moaning because she had a headache. Poor woman got no rest all night. I immediately gave her 3 drops of oregano oil with a glass of water. I also made her chamomile tea with freshly squeezed lemon juice and honey. Before I left for work I gave her a glass of green smoothie. I called her in a couple of hours and found out that the headaches were gone. My husband made her another glass of green smoothie. I asked my Mom to commit not to eat anything of animal origin that day (my dear mother is a carnivore), including all dairy products. At lunch time I went home and made her another glass of chamomile tea (same as in the morning), a glass of green smoothie with another 3-4 drops of Oregano oil and soup that I made especially for the occasion. To make soup I boiled a few potatoes, then ground them up with water, raw onions, raw garlic, raw dill, salt and seasoning. It was very simple, but potent and loaded with vitamins that would fight the virus. I repeated the “treatment” in the evening. By 7 pm that night, my Mom was feeling as good as new and even went to church. She had no headaches, her nose stopped running and she was neither coughing nor sneezing. I did not stop with the treatment that day, however. I had to make insure that the virus was completely gone, so I followed up with two more days of the same kind of diet and administered Oregano oil at least twice daily.
A few days after that my husband was coming down with the virus. I repeated the same treatment on him—he got well within a day and a half, and no time down. I made sure not to get sick myself by following the same steps—I had to keep my immune system strong and healthy.
Recently I found an interesting article on essential oils. You can read it in its entirety by clicking on the link. But here is a quick summary of different oils and their properties:
“A brief look at some essential oils and the results of research so far:
Oregano is very aggressive against all microbes and it helps with digestive problems and is anti-inflammatory. Oregano and cinnamon tested at 95% efficiency against candida, E. coli and streptococcus strains.
Thyme oil is very powerful oil on viruses and has demonstrated protective properties for liver, kidneys and the heart due to its very high antioxidant properties.
Fennel oil, strengthens digestion, expels parasites and supports and raises overall metabolism.
Fennel and Juniper together exert a warming effect on the kidneys; very helpful during winter.
Cinnamon is 99.9% effective against all viruses. Ebola virus cannot survive in the presence of pure unadulterated cinnamon.
Rosemary is effective for parasites, fungi and, therefore, candida.
Clove is highly protective, and is the most powerful antioxidant in nature.”
Oregano oil worked well for us, but some might respond better to other oils.
If you are following a whole foods vegan diet you should get through this season quite easily. Just remember to stay hydrated, eat plenty of raw foods, and stock up on some of the essential oils, in case of emergency :) To fight seasonal viruses externally, add a little bit of Tea Tree soap (I use Dr. Bronner’s) to your hand soap and body wash.
Stay Healthy this beautiful season, and Enjoy Life!!!
One of my sisters had an infection a few weeks ago and was prescribed to go on antibiotics. Knowing that I use natural means to stay well, she contacted me to see if there were any alternatives to antibiotics. I was quite preoccupied at the time and did not have much time to search out a suitable answer myself, so I did the next best thing—I contacted my friend, who is a RAW VEGAN, and has a degree in Nutrition, and asked her to help me. She quickly responded (thank God for good friends) with a list of things that can be done. One of the things on her list was OREGANO oil. I did a quick look up and found that essential oils are anti-viral and are very potent in fighting infections, colds, flu, and many other infectious diseases.
My sister gladly went to the local health food store and bought a small container of Oregano oil. She took it instead of the prescribed antibiotic. The results were great. The infection was gone, and her immune system did not have to suffer at all.
At about the same time my Mom came down with a cold. I found out about it early in the morning, while getting ready for work. I heard her sniffling, coughing and moaning because she had a headache. Poor woman got no rest all night. I immediately gave her 3 drops of oregano oil with a glass of water. I also made her chamomile tea with freshly squeezed lemon juice and honey. Before I left for work I gave her a glass of green smoothie. I called her in a couple of hours and found out that the headaches were gone. My husband made her another glass of green smoothie. I asked my Mom to commit not to eat anything of animal origin that day (my dear mother is a carnivore), including all dairy products. At lunch time I went home and made her another glass of chamomile tea (same as in the morning), a glass of green smoothie with another 3-4 drops of Oregano oil and soup that I made especially for the occasion. To make soup I boiled a few potatoes, then ground them up with water, raw onions, raw garlic, raw dill, salt and seasoning. It was very simple, but potent and loaded with vitamins that would fight the virus. I repeated the “treatment” in the evening. By 7 pm that night, my Mom was feeling as good as new and even went to church. She had no headaches, her nose stopped running and she was neither coughing nor sneezing. I did not stop with the treatment that day, however. I had to make insure that the virus was completely gone, so I followed up with two more days of the same kind of diet and administered Oregano oil at least twice daily.
A few days after that my husband was coming down with the virus. I repeated the same treatment on him—he got well within a day and a half, and no time down. I made sure not to get sick myself by following the same steps—I had to keep my immune system strong and healthy.
Recently I found an interesting article on essential oils. You can read it in its entirety by clicking on the link. But here is a quick summary of different oils and their properties:
“A brief look at some essential oils and the results of research so far:
Oregano is very aggressive against all microbes and it helps with digestive problems and is anti-inflammatory. Oregano and cinnamon tested at 95% efficiency against candida, E. coli and streptococcus strains.
Thyme oil is very powerful oil on viruses and has demonstrated protective properties for liver, kidneys and the heart due to its very high antioxidant properties.
Fennel oil, strengthens digestion, expels parasites and supports and raises overall metabolism.
Fennel and Juniper together exert a warming effect on the kidneys; very helpful during winter.
Cinnamon is 99.9% effective against all viruses. Ebola virus cannot survive in the presence of pure unadulterated cinnamon.
Rosemary is effective for parasites, fungi and, therefore, candida.
Clove is highly protective, and is the most powerful antioxidant in nature.”
Oregano oil worked well for us, but some might respond better to other oils.
If you are following a whole foods vegan diet you should get through this season quite easily. Just remember to stay hydrated, eat plenty of raw foods, and stock up on some of the essential oils, in case of emergency :) To fight seasonal viruses externally, add a little bit of Tea Tree soap (I use Dr. Bronner’s) to your hand soap and body wash.
Stay Healthy this beautiful season, and Enjoy Life!!!
The Art of Branding a Condition
I am in the process of reading a book review. The book is “Selling Sickness” by Alan Cassels and Ray Moynihan. It was only about a couple of sentences into the review when I started to become outraged. What I was reading was not news to me, it simply reawakened the ever-present awareness about the monster that lives in our country—Pharmaceutical companies.
I am going to quote the authors on what I find is very interesting and what the public should be made aware of.
“Thirty years ago the head of one of the world’s best-known drug companies, Merck, made some over-candid comments. The aggressive chief executive, Henry Gadsden, who was close to retirement at the time, told Fortune magazine of his distress that Merck’s potential markets had been limited to sick people; he said he would have preferred Merck to be more like the chewing-gum manufacturer Wrigley, because then Merck would be able to “sell to everyone”; it had long been his dream to make drugs for healthy people. His dream has since come true.
“The marketing strategies of the world’s biggest drug companies now aggressively target the healthy. The ups and downs of daily life have become classified as mental disorders, common complaints are transformed into frightening conditions, and more and more people are turned into patients. The $500 billion pharmaceutical industry is changing what it means to be human, with promotional campaigns that exploit our deepest fears of death, decay and disease. Rightly rewarded for saving life and reducing suffering, the global drug giants are no longer content with selling medicines only to the ill. As Wall Street knows well, there is a lot of money to be made telling healthy people that they’re sick…
The epicenter of this selling is the United States, home to many of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies. The US has less than 5% of the world’s population but represents almost 50% of the global market in prescription drugs. Pharmaceuticals spending in the US continues to rise more rapidly than anywhere else, increasing by almost 100% in just six years, not only because of steep increases in the price of drugs, but because doctors prescribe more and more of them.”
The authors go on to mention Vince Perry’s publication ”The Art of Branding a Condition.” Vince Parry is “an expert in advertising who works from his mid-town Manhattan office in New York, Parry specializes in the most sophisticated form of medicine salesmanship: he works with drug companies to help create new diseases.
In an astonishing publication, The Art of Branding a Condition, he recently revealed the ways in which companies are involved in fostering the creation of medical disorders. Sometimes a little-known condition gets fresh attention, sometimes an old disease is redefined and renamed, and sometimes a whole new dysfunction is created. Parry’s personal favorites include erectile dysfunction, adult attention deficit disorder, and pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder (which is so controversial a classification that some researchers say it doesn’t exist).”
I was curious enough to start searching for the publication. I could not find the entire document available on-line, however, I did find enough to get me going for a couple of months.
Rather than tell you what Vince Parry wrote in his publication, I will instead quote from it—it is better to get the news straight from the horse’s mouth, it’s been said.
“Branding is about the ownership of ideas: giving customers a new way to think about things, and - in the process - transferring the values of this experience to a situation or commodity.
… within the pharmaceutical industry, marketing professionals have increasingly taken branding to the next level by branding the disease or condition that a particular product is capable of treating.
The idea behind "condition branding" is relatively simple: If you can define a particular condition and its associated symptoms in the minds of physicians and patients, you can also predicate the best treatment for that condition.
This concept is by no means new. Warner-Lambert was looking for an opportunity to expand its market for Listerine in the 1920s. Although the product was being marketed for everything from dandruff to wound irrigation, sales were flat. Warner-Lambert found its answer by creating awareness - and anxiety - around a serious-sounding medical condition: halitosis. Whereas the harmless concept of unpleasant breath would not cause much of a stir, halitosis - through effective branding or the ownership of ideas - was demonized for a range of social casualties from lack of career advancement to divorce. As the antidote, Listerine saw sales increase from $100,000 to $4 million over the next six years, and helped make halitosis a household word.
If done appropriately, condition branding has numerous benefits, the greatest of which is how it creates consensus internally and externally. Such consensus serves to keep brand managers and the clinical community focused on a single story with a lock-and-key, problem/solution structure. Internally, the activity fosters motivation and momentum, maximizing the product investment by initiating comprehensive marketing efforts early in the process. The product can better own customer perceptions about evolving/existing disease states, define new patient segments with currently unmet needs and drive attitudes about new scientific modalities that promise greater treatment benefits.
Externally, the value of company-sponsored activity helps forge better relationships with thought leaders seeking to shape the debate around therapeutic approaches, and with members of the clinical community who are always interested in mentoring patients on new perspectives in treatment.
There are three principal strategies for fostering the creation of a condition and aligning it with a product:
* elevating the importance of an existing condition
* redefining an existing condition to reduce a stigma
* developing a new condition to build recognition for an unmet market need.
In 1986, GlaxoSmithKline successfully launched Zantac for ulcers, but it faced the challenge of broadening its reach into the heartburn market. Heartburn, after all, did not seem to warrant a prescription drug and was perceived to be well managed by over-the-counter remedies. GERD elevated the medical importance of the condition by presenting it as an acutely chronic "disorder" with an underlying physiologic etiology and the potential for serious longer-term consequences if left unresolved - a far cry from the "plop-plop, fizz-fizz" perception of heartburn.
The company launched a well-coordinated initiative by creating the Glaxo Institute for Digestive Health (GIDH), which served as a platform for education and awareness. The GIDH sponsored research awards in the area of GI health, discussed GERD in the context of other, more serious gastrointestinal (GI) diseases, involved powerful third-party advocates such as the American College of Gastroenterology and fielded a public relations effort called Heartburn Across America. Not only did GSK double the percentage of physicians who perceived them as leaders in GI health, but it helped them drive annual sales for Zantac to over $2 billion at peak, 65 percent of which was accounted for by GERD.
Perhaps the most well-recognized example today of a company redefining an existing condition to reduce stigma is Pfizer and its successful effort to link erectile dysfunction, or ED, with the drug Viagra (sildenafil citrate). Impotence has long existed as a recognized medical condition, but it was associated either with disability linked to physical trauma, or more commonly, with a loss of libido - both of which contribute to low self-esteem in a patriarchal society. Furthermore, the remedies over the years were often invasive and their implementation indiscreet. The term "erectile dysfunction" refocused the condition from being associated with a lack of potency (i.e. male virility) to the more enlightened concept of a physical loss of function that could be simply reversed. Like GERD, ED was captured in an acronym suitable for mass DTC promotion and functioned as an easy password between physician and patient to initiate a formerly difficult conversation. Furthermore, the brand personality of ED - simple, discreet and empowering - aligned beautifully with that of Viagra, an elegant and effective solution to this redefined condition.
No therapeutic category is more accepting of condition branding than the field of anxiety and depression, where illness is rarely based on measurable physical symptoms and, therefore, open to conceptual definition. Watching the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) balloon in size over the decades to its current phonebook dimensions would have us believe that the world is a more unstable place today than ever. In reality, the increasing number of identified emotional conditions has resulted from breaking the problems into their component parts to better assess treatment options. Not surprisingly, many of these newly coined conditions were brought to light through direct funding by pharmaceutical companies, in research, in publicity or both.
A legendary example of this condition branding strategy was the development of Xanax (alprazolam) for panic disorder in the 1970s… Upjohn, the makers of Xanax, helped fund this early research, as well as publications and speaking tours to cardiologists to help raise awareness of the heart-brain connection in the minds of panic disorder patients… Xanax was the first to receive an exclusive indication, thereby maintaining its leadership in anxiety disorders. Since the release of DSM-III in 1980, which first recognized panic disorder as a distinct condition, its incidence has grown 1,000-fold, and newer antide-pressants have stepped in to foster expanding ideas about panic.
A recent example is the recognition of premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) in DSM-IV and the subsequent indication for Sarafem (fluoxetine hydrochloride). PMDD is a severe form of premenstrual syndrome, or PMS.
As many industry insiders know, Sarafem is identical in formula and dose to Prozac (marketed at the time by Lilly), so the branding strategy that helped build awareness for both the condition and the drug were fascinatingly integrated. A company-sponsored prelaunch initiative built awareness for the new condition, recasting diagnosis to conform to the new criteria. While the condition effectively captured the branded concept of unwellness associated with hormonal transition, the remedy (Prozac) evoked conflicting notions of a mental disorder. By changing the brand name from Prozac to Sarafem - packaged in a lavender-colored pill and promoted with images of sunflowers and smart women - Lilly created a brand that better aligned with the personality of the condition for a hand-in-glove fit.”
This is only a small portion of the publication. The author goes on to give an advise on how to make the “product” (medical drugs) more marketable and to own the market by following certain steps.
Amazing? No, I would rather say that it is appalling. Ridiculous indeed. Yet the public is blindly following the “industry leaders” into leading drug-induced lives, rather than solving physical problems with a whole-foods diet and exercise.
Until next time, folks, remember: EAT HEALTHY!!! LIVE HAPPY!!!
I am going to quote the authors on what I find is very interesting and what the public should be made aware of.
“Thirty years ago the head of one of the world’s best-known drug companies, Merck, made some over-candid comments. The aggressive chief executive, Henry Gadsden, who was close to retirement at the time, told Fortune magazine of his distress that Merck’s potential markets had been limited to sick people; he said he would have preferred Merck to be more like the chewing-gum manufacturer Wrigley, because then Merck would be able to “sell to everyone”; it had long been his dream to make drugs for healthy people. His dream has since come true.
“The marketing strategies of the world’s biggest drug companies now aggressively target the healthy. The ups and downs of daily life have become classified as mental disorders, common complaints are transformed into frightening conditions, and more and more people are turned into patients. The $500 billion pharmaceutical industry is changing what it means to be human, with promotional campaigns that exploit our deepest fears of death, decay and disease. Rightly rewarded for saving life and reducing suffering, the global drug giants are no longer content with selling medicines only to the ill. As Wall Street knows well, there is a lot of money to be made telling healthy people that they’re sick…
The epicenter of this selling is the United States, home to many of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies. The US has less than 5% of the world’s population but represents almost 50% of the global market in prescription drugs. Pharmaceuticals spending in the US continues to rise more rapidly than anywhere else, increasing by almost 100% in just six years, not only because of steep increases in the price of drugs, but because doctors prescribe more and more of them.”
The authors go on to mention Vince Perry’s publication ”The Art of Branding a Condition.” Vince Parry is “an expert in advertising who works from his mid-town Manhattan office in New York, Parry specializes in the most sophisticated form of medicine salesmanship: he works with drug companies to help create new diseases.
In an astonishing publication, The Art of Branding a Condition, he recently revealed the ways in which companies are involved in fostering the creation of medical disorders. Sometimes a little-known condition gets fresh attention, sometimes an old disease is redefined and renamed, and sometimes a whole new dysfunction is created. Parry’s personal favorites include erectile dysfunction, adult attention deficit disorder, and pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder (which is so controversial a classification that some researchers say it doesn’t exist).”
I was curious enough to start searching for the publication. I could not find the entire document available on-line, however, I did find enough to get me going for a couple of months.
Rather than tell you what Vince Parry wrote in his publication, I will instead quote from it—it is better to get the news straight from the horse’s mouth, it’s been said.
“Branding is about the ownership of ideas: giving customers a new way to think about things, and - in the process - transferring the values of this experience to a situation or commodity.
… within the pharmaceutical industry, marketing professionals have increasingly taken branding to the next level by branding the disease or condition that a particular product is capable of treating.
The idea behind "condition branding" is relatively simple: If you can define a particular condition and its associated symptoms in the minds of physicians and patients, you can also predicate the best treatment for that condition.
This concept is by no means new. Warner-Lambert was looking for an opportunity to expand its market for Listerine in the 1920s. Although the product was being marketed for everything from dandruff to wound irrigation, sales were flat. Warner-Lambert found its answer by creating awareness - and anxiety - around a serious-sounding medical condition: halitosis. Whereas the harmless concept of unpleasant breath would not cause much of a stir, halitosis - through effective branding or the ownership of ideas - was demonized for a range of social casualties from lack of career advancement to divorce. As the antidote, Listerine saw sales increase from $100,000 to $4 million over the next six years, and helped make halitosis a household word.
If done appropriately, condition branding has numerous benefits, the greatest of which is how it creates consensus internally and externally. Such consensus serves to keep brand managers and the clinical community focused on a single story with a lock-and-key, problem/solution structure. Internally, the activity fosters motivation and momentum, maximizing the product investment by initiating comprehensive marketing efforts early in the process. The product can better own customer perceptions about evolving/existing disease states, define new patient segments with currently unmet needs and drive attitudes about new scientific modalities that promise greater treatment benefits.
Externally, the value of company-sponsored activity helps forge better relationships with thought leaders seeking to shape the debate around therapeutic approaches, and with members of the clinical community who are always interested in mentoring patients on new perspectives in treatment.
There are three principal strategies for fostering the creation of a condition and aligning it with a product:
* elevating the importance of an existing condition
* redefining an existing condition to reduce a stigma
* developing a new condition to build recognition for an unmet market need.
In 1986, GlaxoSmithKline successfully launched Zantac for ulcers, but it faced the challenge of broadening its reach into the heartburn market. Heartburn, after all, did not seem to warrant a prescription drug and was perceived to be well managed by over-the-counter remedies. GERD elevated the medical importance of the condition by presenting it as an acutely chronic "disorder" with an underlying physiologic etiology and the potential for serious longer-term consequences if left unresolved - a far cry from the "plop-plop, fizz-fizz" perception of heartburn.
The company launched a well-coordinated initiative by creating the Glaxo Institute for Digestive Health (GIDH), which served as a platform for education and awareness. The GIDH sponsored research awards in the area of GI health, discussed GERD in the context of other, more serious gastrointestinal (GI) diseases, involved powerful third-party advocates such as the American College of Gastroenterology and fielded a public relations effort called Heartburn Across America. Not only did GSK double the percentage of physicians who perceived them as leaders in GI health, but it helped them drive annual sales for Zantac to over $2 billion at peak, 65 percent of which was accounted for by GERD.
Perhaps the most well-recognized example today of a company redefining an existing condition to reduce stigma is Pfizer and its successful effort to link erectile dysfunction, or ED, with the drug Viagra (sildenafil citrate). Impotence has long existed as a recognized medical condition, but it was associated either with disability linked to physical trauma, or more commonly, with a loss of libido - both of which contribute to low self-esteem in a patriarchal society. Furthermore, the remedies over the years were often invasive and their implementation indiscreet. The term "erectile dysfunction" refocused the condition from being associated with a lack of potency (i.e. male virility) to the more enlightened concept of a physical loss of function that could be simply reversed. Like GERD, ED was captured in an acronym suitable for mass DTC promotion and functioned as an easy password between physician and patient to initiate a formerly difficult conversation. Furthermore, the brand personality of ED - simple, discreet and empowering - aligned beautifully with that of Viagra, an elegant and effective solution to this redefined condition.
No therapeutic category is more accepting of condition branding than the field of anxiety and depression, where illness is rarely based on measurable physical symptoms and, therefore, open to conceptual definition. Watching the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) balloon in size over the decades to its current phonebook dimensions would have us believe that the world is a more unstable place today than ever. In reality, the increasing number of identified emotional conditions has resulted from breaking the problems into their component parts to better assess treatment options. Not surprisingly, many of these newly coined conditions were brought to light through direct funding by pharmaceutical companies, in research, in publicity or both.
A legendary example of this condition branding strategy was the development of Xanax (alprazolam) for panic disorder in the 1970s… Upjohn, the makers of Xanax, helped fund this early research, as well as publications and speaking tours to cardiologists to help raise awareness of the heart-brain connection in the minds of panic disorder patients… Xanax was the first to receive an exclusive indication, thereby maintaining its leadership in anxiety disorders. Since the release of DSM-III in 1980, which first recognized panic disorder as a distinct condition, its incidence has grown 1,000-fold, and newer antide-pressants have stepped in to foster expanding ideas about panic.
A recent example is the recognition of premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) in DSM-IV and the subsequent indication for Sarafem (fluoxetine hydrochloride). PMDD is a severe form of premenstrual syndrome, or PMS.
As many industry insiders know, Sarafem is identical in formula and dose to Prozac (marketed at the time by Lilly), so the branding strategy that helped build awareness for both the condition and the drug were fascinatingly integrated. A company-sponsored prelaunch initiative built awareness for the new condition, recasting diagnosis to conform to the new criteria. While the condition effectively captured the branded concept of unwellness associated with hormonal transition, the remedy (Prozac) evoked conflicting notions of a mental disorder. By changing the brand name from Prozac to Sarafem - packaged in a lavender-colored pill and promoted with images of sunflowers and smart women - Lilly created a brand that better aligned with the personality of the condition for a hand-in-glove fit.”
This is only a small portion of the publication. The author goes on to give an advise on how to make the “product” (medical drugs) more marketable and to own the market by following certain steps.
Amazing? No, I would rather say that it is appalling. Ridiculous indeed. Yet the public is blindly following the “industry leaders” into leading drug-induced lives, rather than solving physical problems with a whole-foods diet and exercise.
Until next time, folks, remember: EAT HEALTHY!!! LIVE HAPPY!!!
Product Review: Essential Oil
As I mentioned in my previous post, I was on a mission to find a natural fragrance—a worthy substitute to chemical laden perfumes. This weekend Demetrye and I went to the Whole Foods store in Vancouver, WA (the nearest store is 45 minutes away, but it’s worth the drive) to do our monthly shopping of foods that we cannot buy from a local CSA farm. While there I visited their personal care department and got to sample difference essential oils. I am happy to report that I found one that I liked… better yet, Demetrye liked it as well. It is an essential oil made by Kuumba Made, called Persian Garden.
A little roll-on bottle cost me less than $9, and should last a while… and even if didn’t it’s still worth the money I spent on it. The scent is very light, clean and pleasant, with a hint of flowery smell, but not overpowering. Essential oils are just that—naturally occurring oils, there are no chemicals involved. You don’t have to worry about any ill-effects, and you get a peace of mind feeling great about smelling good.
Today I should be getting my all natural roll-on deodorant. I will report on it as soon as I can, after testing it not only in normal conditions, but during a grueling work out as well.
Until next time: Live Healthy!!! Be Happy!!!
A little roll-on bottle cost me less than $9, and should last a while… and even if didn’t it’s still worth the money I spent on it. The scent is very light, clean and pleasant, with a hint of flowery smell, but not overpowering. Essential oils are just that—naturally occurring oils, there are no chemicals involved. You don’t have to worry about any ill-effects, and you get a peace of mind feeling great about smelling good.
Today I should be getting my all natural roll-on deodorant. I will report on it as soon as I can, after testing it not only in normal conditions, but during a grueling work out as well.
Until next time: Live Healthy!!! Be Happy!!!
Drug Free America... how can it be?
It is Friday--one of my favorite days of the week!
I came across this cartoon on NaturalNews site, and thought it is worth sharing. Enjoy the weekend!
I came across this cartoon on NaturalNews site, and thought it is worth sharing. Enjoy the weekend!
And remember: Eat Healthy!!! Stay off Drugs!!! (even the "prescription" kind)
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