Nutritionist Claims His Pre-Packaged Meals Are Dangerous 35
Nutrition guru Gary Null may be best known as an advocate for alternative medicines, or for his stance that HIV does not cause AIDS, but his recent lawsuit may raise more eyebrows. Gary is suing the maker of his pre-packaged "Power Meals," claiming that they will make you sick. From the article: "In a lawsuit filed in New York on April 26, Gary Null alleges that he became severely ill after eating a dietary supplement that caused him to develop a number of painful symptoms. In fact, Gary Null alleges, 'Gary Null's Ultimate Power Meal' almost killed Gary Null."
It just has to be said... (Score:4, Funny)
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Maybe... (Score:2)
Maybe he's counting on jury nullification!
Argh, "micro" and "milli" again (Score:3, Interesting)
Looks like someone read "micro" and thought "milli" again (they used 1000 times too much vitamin D in the mix).
Same thing that happened in that tragic accident that killed all those racehorses some months ago -- someone was supposed to put N micrograms of selenium in their supplement, but instead gave them N milligrams. They died a horrible death.
Maybe we should consider changing one of these prefixes so they don't both begin with "m".
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I always thought micro started with a u.
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It's worse.
In vitamin-word they call a microgram a "mikrogram" (phoenetic) which doens't reeenforce the unit, and instead of g they write mcg. They must be using cheap typewriters.
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OK, so Slashdot appears to be an old cheap typewriter too.
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You are both right and wrong.
It starts with a greek letter mu [wikipedia.org], which is an M, but whose small letter looks nearly like a u.
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Maybe we should consider changing one of these prefixes so they don't both begin with "m".
Or spelling them out when it matters: "use 53 micrograms of Vitamin Foo".
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Well, most uses aren't life-and-death, or nearly so unobvious. 100mg of an unfamiliar medicine doesn't look like an unreasonable amount, even if 100ug is the correct dose. If the correct volume is 1g, though, you'd probably do a double-take if the bottle was mislabeled that each dose was 1kg.
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Even more insiduous is that when MS designed thier symbol font (yes I know it's a deperecated way of doing things but not everyone moves with the times) they put the micro sign at the m position. So if someone uses the symbol font to represent the micro sign and then font information is lost or the font is unavailable the micro sign will be replaced by an m.
Blame Adobe, not Microsoft (Score:2)
Even more insiduous is that when MS designed thier symbol font
As I understand it, it was Adobe's idea to map Greek letter glyphs onto codepoints commonly used for Latin. But then that was before Unicode took off.
units schmoonits (Score:1)
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mcg is standard in medicine, and is important handwritten prescriptions since a handwritten script "m" and a handwritten Greek mu can be virtually indistinguishable, while script "mcg" is far more distinct from "mg", see, e.g., here [aapmr.org].
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This seems to me like a classic case of papering over the symptoms rather than solving the underlying issue* and in doing so creating potential confusion if/when the information is passed to paople of another proffession (as might for example.by the case with these power meals, I bet the people making them aren't medical proffesionals)
*The underlying issue being people using script handwriting (and often bad script handwriting at that) to write out important abbreviations.
Real Ultimate Power (Score:2)
Obviously the Power Meals are loaded with Real Ultimate Power, like what Ninjas have. http://www.realultimatepower.net/ [realultimatepower.net]
You know Ninjas, that flip out and kill people without warning. Obviously the Power Meal was demonstrating its Real Ultimate Power.
HIV does not cause AIDS? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Homeopathy has been proven countless, countless times to do absolutely jack-fucking-shit.
Countless, countless times? I doubt it. We've got pretty big numbers, I think we could count the times. There is no functional difference between "countless" and "countless, countless". You can either count something or not.
Furthermore, homeopathy does work. My leg was bitten off by a shark. Fortunately I knew about homeopathy, so I bought some flake at a take away shop, dried a small portion and ground it to powder then diluted it multiple times as per standard homeopathic practice. I wasn't sure whether t
bravo! (Score:2)
fantastic testimonial!
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The one I find interesting is acupuncture. In what looked like a reasonably well-designed study it was more effective than medication and physical therapy at reducing pain, but so was the "sham" version where they stuck needles into people at random. Apparently humans have evolved to be pin cushions or something.
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Homeopathy has been proven countless, countless times to do absolutely jack-fucking-shit. About five seconds of wiki-ing found this. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1874503/?tool=pmcentrez [nih.gov] There is nothing ignorant or arrogant about disregarding some ancient bullshit when every single piece of legitimate scientific evidence shows that it's just ancient bullshit.
True (on the homeopathy part), though he is correct on the natural and herbal part.
Three quarters of plants that provide active ingredients for prescription drugs came to the attention of researchers because of their use in traditional medicine.
Many of the pharmaceuticals currently available to physicians have a long history of use as herbal remedies, including opium, aspirin, digitalis, and quinine.
Among the 120 active compounds currently isolated from the higher plants and widely used in modern medicine today, 80 percent show a positive correlation between their modern therapeutic use and the traditional use of the plants from which they are derived.
More than two thirds of the world's plant species - at least 35,000 of which are estimated to have medicinal value - come from the developing countries.
At least 7,000 medical compounds in the modern pharmacopoeia are derived from plants.
An interesting side question... I wonder if the ideas behind homeopathy (In the 16th century the pioneer of chemical medicine Paracelsus declared that small doses of “what makes a man ill also cures him", anticipating homeopathy) are in any way related to current vaccines and their purpose and use in the human body - though a slightly different idea, and very different implementation (in doses or lack thereof) there is
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"There is a noticeable corollary?" No, there really isn't, since there's actually a measurable amount of a substance in a vaccine and there's a known and valid mechanism for its function. Neither of those is true for homeopathy - plus, it doesn't work.
As for the bit about herbal medicine: Medicines derived from herbs have been purified and measured into verifiably functional doses. Herbal medicines? Not so much. No requirements for purity, dose size, or function - only safety.
His name is null? (Score:2)
Or is it NULL? Either way he should stay away from the Sacramento Credit Union's online banking service. [boingboing.net]
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That's nothing. I have problems with my email address. I was just at the New Patriot Journal and had to use my Yahoo address because they had to have email from a "valid address" (apparently jnagyjr@joseph-a-nagy-jr.us isn't a valid email address, despite me having used it for several years).
"Newage" == "sewage" (Score:2)
As a wise old pot-head observed, 'They laughed at Galileo, but they also lau
Gary Null (Score:3, Interesting)