Everyone seems to be picking on the poor Food and Drug Administration (FDA) these days, but for vastly different reasons. To the hundreds of thousands of victims (including dead ones) of adverse prescription drug reactions each year, and their families, the FDA is failing to protect the public. These people believe the agency should spend more time and effort making sure drugs are safe and effective before approval. Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical companies feel the FDA is a nuisance, way too fussy about drug safety details and terribly slow with approval.

For breath is life, and if you breathe well you will live long on earth, according to the Sanskrit proverb. When it comes to asthma, modern medicine has apparently breathed new life into the old saying, “The cure is worse than the disease.” Researchers at Cornell and Stanford Universities now tell us that the top-selling asthma medications are responsible for four out of every five deaths from asthma. “We estimate that approximately 4,000 of the 5,000 asthma deaths that occur in the U.S. each year are caused by these long-acting beta-agonists, and we urge that (they) be taken off the market,” they said. I don’t know about you, but I find this slightly alarming. It makes me wonder what our fearless defenders at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are going to do to protect us? How is it possible that 80 percent of asthma deaths are actually caused by the drugs already approved by the FDA for treating asthma?

Today’s topic is Medical Science, one of the most expensive and prominent enterprises in our country. The time has come to give the scientific theories of medicine a checkup and find out how healthy they are. First though, we need to review the basics of real scientific inquiry. “The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline baggage,” said Mike Russell. Clearly, there are loads of scientific theories floating around out there, but how scientific are they?

How is it possible that the wealthiest nation on the planet has an infant mortality rate higher than just about every other industrialized country? Help is finally on the way for solving this dilemma, or so I thought when I first noticed the headlines announcing new recommendations for pregnant moms from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

A report out this week from the US Institute of Medicine (IOM) estimates that 1.5 million Americans are being injured each year as a result of prescribing mistakes related to medications. The errors are costing more than $3.5 billion each year. The report also suggests that 7000 people continue to die each year as a result of wrongly prescribed or errors related to medications.