Sicko: Alli “treatment effects” are almost as fun as LOLCATS

In Sicko, Moore interviewed a doctor in London who described how doctors are paid on results. In other words, the more people he can get to stay healthy (join quit-smoking programs, etc), the better he is paid.

In the USA, doctors get paid by treating the sick and are not rewarded (monetarily) by making sure we are well.

So, perhaps doctors and drug companies profit by keeping us sick.

Let’s tie that in with the weight-loss drug Alli and its “treatment effects.”

You know, this is telling you, straight out, you’re going to have uncontrollable, spraying shits in your pants that will resemble the oil on the top of a pizza. Whoa, is that the real treatment? To get people to be so grossed out by what they are putting in their bodies they will stop pigging out on greasy food? Is this really about aversion therapy, or is that just a nice “treatment effect”?

If you feel the slightest bit gassy, “the bathroom is really the best place to go.” Because, again, you’re about to drop a deuce in your Dockers.

Wear dark pants to work. Bring a couple changes to work. Maybe a butt plug, while you’re at it.

I highlighted the last point because it seemed like such a common-sense thing to say, it was like the equivalent of a sewer worker gently daubing a bit of marinara sauce from his moustache while being covered in “oily spotting”.

The lesson of the day is Quit eating like a pig and get some fucking exercise, will ya?

PS–This drug was an OTC item in Australia until they decided to pull it back and regulate it for prescription-only.

Sicko

I remember being told that countries with universal health care had tremendous waiting times for surgeries and that the care was quite below U.S. quality.

A baby born in El Salvador has a better chance of surviving than a baby born in Detroit.

A baby born in the United States has a 36% greater chance of dying than a baby born in Great Britain.

I saw Michael Moore’s new movie, Sicko.

And I am pissed.

Surprisingly enough, for me, this time it’s not at Michael Moore.

I sense a theme this week coming on.

The lesson of the day is Sometimes everything they tell you is wrong.

Hello, ankly, wheezy, and sexy

Here is a screenshot of a Google image search for “girls smoking” (Safesearch Moderately On, unfortunately).

And, for comparison, the same search minus the “smoking” part:

Both sets contain fine specimens. Well, except for that Ziggy dude. I don’t know which group I’d rather take to a desert island, and I absolutely detest smoking.

At a stop light on my way home from work, I saw a mid-nineties Toyota with a couple of dents in the rear fenders and no gas cap flap. It had a gas cap. But not the flap that you cover the gas intake point up with. All its windows were rolled down. I was half a car length behind the vehicle, and in the next lane, so my angle was bad and I couldn’t see the driver or her passenger.

I did see that each of them were dangling a wrist out the window (that sounds somewhat morbid, as though they had carpals hanging from a chain, or perhaps from a volar radiocarpal ligament, like a good luck charm, but you know what I mean), to keep their smoking cigarettes from smoking up the insides of their beat-up car.

I also saw that they each had a foot sticking out the window. Yeah, the driver did, too. So I got a real nice eyeful of some hot white girl leg. That’s not me being sarcastic. Again, I couldn’t see their faces, but by the hue of toenail polish and the cellulite-free state of their thighs, I’d say they had to have been in their early twenties, and were hot as hell. As a matter of fact, I was thinking, I’d fuck the shit out of both of those girls.

Guys think that way, even nice guys, and even dads, and even your dad. They won’t admit it, though, because we’ve kinda been neutered these past few decades, but even though we can’t say it (unless you ladies ask us to. Please ask us to), we think it, and we think it a lot like that. We don’t look at attractive women and think we’d like to take them to a really nice restaurant and get to know them better. You know, as a person. We think that we’d fuck the shit out of them. Not literally. Well, I don’t.

But, back to the purpose of the wrist-dangling (not that I know the purpose of the ankle-dangling, unless their snatches just needed airing out, or they were advertising, or maybe they were just kind of stupid). Back to the cigarettes.

Cigarettes killed my dad. Lost him last year. Not to cancer, but to COPD caused by smoking. COPD is a real bitch, and I’d never heard of it before my dad was diagnosed.

I quit smoking on December 17, 1998. I still have the very last cigarette butt, in a tiny frame. I’m serious. I’ll have to tell you how to quit smoking sometime. I have a great system (guess it worked, huh?).

I’m down on cigarettes, cigarette manufacturers, and smokers, and I’m not real fond of straws, toothpicks, or clouds, either.

And I was thinking at the stoplight how disgusting it was that they smoked, and how glad I am that I quit, but then I realized that if a girl is hot enough, it really didn’t matter whether she smoked. If a girl is hot enough, really, it really probably wouldn’t matter if she smoked crack and injected PCP directly into her clitoris. Most guys would still bang her, if she was hot enough. She’d have to be really hot, a true dime, but guys would still do her. And I thought that, if the situation was reversed, women would still fazizzle men who behaved in ways they found abhorrent, if the man was physically hot enough. Even moms. Even your mom. No, I didn’t think that, I knew that.

That’s not the lesson, though.

The lesson is, we will have sex with beautiful people (almost) no matter what they do because we are driven to reproduce well.

Unless…unless they do bad shit to kids. I wouldn’t want to be with a woman in any sense, no matter if she made Angelina Jolie look like Rosie O, if they beat up their kids, or worse. Wouldn’t touch a bitch like that. But why?Because of the same reason. We must reproduce well, and there is no point in mixing your genes with some goddess’ genes if she isn’t going to treat the offspring well.

You can understand so much through evolution.

The lesson of the day is It is ok to want to have sex with smokers.