Welcome to the 2026 International Fat Bastard Competition!

[zacca]

10 hours ago, Hoosh said:

It has been figured out… pharmaceutical companies are collectively the devil and the doctors that prescribe their medicines are the minions.

That’s a dramatic take. Most people are happy to denounce pharma in the abstract…right up until they need antibiotics, anesthesia, or cancer treatment. 

The Steve Jobs route doesn’t really work. Medicine is messy, regulated, and imperfect, and dismissing it entirely is easier than understanding it. 

The loudest critics tend to speak in slogans, not specifics, which is easy to do when you’ve never been in the arena.

[Li Bai]

2 hours ago, zacca said:

That’s a dramatic take. Most people are happy to denounce pharma in the abstract…right up until they need antibiotics, anesthesia, or cancer treatment.

The Steve Jobs route doesn’t really work. Medicine is messy, regulated, and imperfect, and dismissing it entirely is easier than understanding it. 

The loudest critics tend to speak in slogans, not specifics, which is easy to do when you’ve never been in the arena.

Agreed 100%

It's a very sensitive topic, modern drugs and modern medicine are phenomenal tools but one cannot deny that there's too much money at stake to blindly trust the industry.

I'm a Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner and a big part of the job is to bring people back to their physicians (all the more since COVID) in order to work together, not against them. Even in China my teachers were all both TCM/Medicine doctors. 

 

[ha_banos]

11 hours ago, Li Bai said:

Statins have been proven to be useless for more than a decade and cholesterol levels are now known to be irrelevant and yet, millions of people still take those on a daily basis, go figure it out...

Familial high cholesterol level here too 🤝

But there's LDL-C that's the, I believe, Scientifically backed problem. So when we talk about cholesterol problems it's the cholesterol carried by ldl particles that causes problems. Still reading around the ApoB test to give an actual particle count of LDL, VLDL, and IDL. A high density of these is what causes build up apparently ... Then there's lp(a)... Statins of no use against some combination of these, and have side effects. Otherwise if it's a genetic reason the other drugs. 

I'm no doctor!

[Li Bai]

31 minutes ago, ha_banos said:

But there's LDL-C that's the, I believe, Scientifically backed problem. So when we talk about cholesterol problems it's the cholesterol carried by ldl particles that causes problems. Still reading around the ApoB test to give an actual particle count of LDL, VLDL, and IDL. A high density of these is what causes build up apparently ... Then there's lp(a)... Statins of no use against some combination of these, and have side effects. Otherwise if it's a genetic reason the other drugs. 

I'm no doctor!

I'm no doctor either, one could dig and find studies going both ways about ldl-c so there's no clear answer to that problem.

High ldl levels seem to be protective to elderly people in regard to some cancers and other pathologies so.... My post was just meant to point out that there's no certainty when it comes to science, that's the whole point of it 👍

Feel free to DM me if you want to dig deeper, I don't want to hijack the thread 😉

[Ruggerpgh99]

19 hours ago, ha_banos said:

Rugby playing weight...

 

I played 9, not tight head prop. Now, I played 9 at 195-205, which is large for a 9 anywhere. Regardless, that is an impressive transformation.