Medical Student Disappointed He Was Not Taught to be “Pharma Shill”

“I went through 4 years of medical school and not once were we taught about shilling for Pharmaceutical companies” laments Richards. “All they taught us was stuff like biology, chemistry and anatomy. It was very disappointing.”

Richards has accepted a residency in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, MA and is hoping maybe they will be able to show him how to be a puppet for “Big Pharma”.

“I have a few more years left of training, so hopefully the good people at Mass Gen will show me the ropes when it comes to needlessly pushing pills and collecting my Pharma Shill checks.”

http://thespudd.com/medical-student-disappointed-he-was-not-taught-to-be-pharma-shill/

Yawn.

If I was only listening to my doctor's advice, I would have pulled the trigger a while ago, because I couldn't deal with the symptoms anymore. As hard as it was, I kept researching and trying, until I finally hit that one thing that started helping. And I am climbing out of this hole bit by bit. "Live with it, meditate, reduce stress." Yeah, screw you fuckers... nobody accepted the fact that I had real physiological problems and couldn't handle normal everyday activities because my body was so out of whack. They didn't even want to test me. I had to pay for all the tests myself and they would just wave their hand at the results. No solutions. No help. Wait 6 months for the next appointment while your life goes in front of your eyes in suffering...you're 22? Who gives a shit. Not my problem... and such. Fuck them all.

DeadlyDevice wrote:Yawn.

If I was only listening to my doctor's advice, I would have pulled the trigger a while ago, because I couldn't deal with the symptoms anymore. As hard as it was, I kept researching and trying, until I finally hit that one thing that started helping. And I am climbing out of this hole bit by bit. "Live with it, meditate, reduce stress." Yeah, screw you fuckers... nobody accepted the fact that I had real physiological problems and couldn't handle normal everyday activities because my body was so out of whack. They didn't even want to test me. I had to pay for all the tests myself and they would just wave their hand at the results. No solutions. No help. Wait 6 months for the next appointment while your life goes in front of your eyes in suffering...you're 22? Who gives a shit. Not my problem... and such. Fuck them all.

Yeah, agreed, Doctors are useless. Your story sounds the same as mine. I had one doctor laugh at me, throw his hands in the air and lament joyfully ""There's no cure!"
Another said "if its not cancer and you're not dying don't worry about it!" Another was just a completely cold, dispassionate cyborg. And a dermatologist (the only person they could think of referring me to and I waited 5 months) prescribed me some Daktacort cream. Assholes.

You said "....until I finally hit that one thing that started helping" What was that one thing?

Thanks

"Some of the anti-vaccine cult members are actually not surprised, “you think he is actually going to admit that they taught him to be a Pharma Shill?” laughs Sharyl Wakefeld, noted anti-vaccination advocate. “They’re all part of it. Every medical school, every doctor, basically anyone who doesn’t believe what we believe is clearly a shill for pharmaceutical companies.”

This line from Wakefield was what really stood out to me. This has got to be one of the most frustratingly ridiculous things I've heard this month.

And what scares me as much as big pharma scares the rest, is that people like this have influence. They change and shape peoples opinions, people who don't necessarily have the knowledge to shape their own. And they're being informed with some of the most inaccurate absolutist bullshit. So once again, you've got misinformation coming from both sides. Its a barrage we all have to take responsibility for and not place the blame with any one establishment.

"If someone doesn't share my opinion, they are the enemy." Sounds like every kind of fear-mongering propaganda I've ever heard. Its one of my biggest issues with how issues are handled today. People find a battle to fight and they get off from being the generals on the front lines. You see it in feminism, racist issues, all over the place. People championing a fight. And they use absolutist shit like this because they benefit from getting people emotionally charged and by playing at very primal urges to form teams. Associate with our team or you're the enemy. Bitch, please.

ElmoSuper8 wrote:

You said   "....until I finally hit that one thing that started helping"  What was that one thing?

Thanks

Pregnenolone. I hit a series of nasty symptoms just out of the blue one day (unrelated to hair loss) about a year and a half ago, which put a great handicap on my life because I could no longer function normally, and they would not go away no matter what I tried. The situation was very complex and it took me that long to find even one thing that would bring me relief and worked. I am currently taking that and thyroid hormones for as long as I feel I will need them. Like I said I am not out of the woods yet but I went from planning my suicide to feeling "it's not all that bad, I can deal with this" merely by taking that. I'd say it saved my life. What doctor would have given me it? If pregnenolone is helping it means I have some nasty hormone imbalance, and they do not even want to give me a full hormonal panel, they won't pay for the test (I paid $50 for cortisol test and total about $150 for other hormones and they just say 'whatever your results are not that bad' - my cortisol was around 560), they told me to meditate and go to church? WTF.

After that I can no longer put much trust in the medical institution, unless I need a surgery, and even then the chances of something going bad are worryingly high...

Do doctors actually get paid a bonus commensurate with the amount of medications they prescribe? And I'm not being facetious, but I am certainly ignorant of how the medical/ pharma system works which is why I ask.

But the thought has often crossed my mind that Doctor's are just legal drug dealers. My experience is that they are never interested at getting at the root cause of a problem, they are only interested at throwing drugs at the problem in order to mask any symptoms. That to me is not health care or wellness.

DeadlyDevice wrote:

ElmoSuper8 wrote:

You said   "....until I finally hit that one thing that started helping"  What was that one thing?

Thanks

Pregnenolone. I hit a series of nasty symptoms just out of the blue one day (unrelated to hair loss) about a year and a half ago, which put a great handicap on my life because I could no longer function normally, and they would not go away no matter what I tried. The situation was very complex and it took me that long to find even one thing that would bring me relief and worked. I am currently taking that and thyroid hormones for as long as I feel I will need them. Like I said I am not out of the woods yet but I went from planning my suicide to feeling "it's not all that bad, I can deal with this" merely by taking that. I'd say it saved my life. What doctor would have given me it? If pregnenolone is helping it means I have some nasty hormone imbalance, and they do not even want to give me a full hormonal panel, they won't pay for the test (I paid $50 for cortisol test and total about $150 for other hormones and they just say 'whatever your results are not that bad' - my cortisol was around 560), they told me to meditate and go to church? WTF.

After that I can no longer put much trust in the medical institution, unless I need a surgery, and even then the chances of something going bad are worryingly high...

Hi, what exactly is "Pregnenolone" ? Has it stopped your hair falling out?

By the way, doctors have no clue whatsoever about hair loss. They dont understand anything about it.

There is not as much incentive for physicians to write prescriptions as you might think, really not much at all as far as I know. Actually in most cases, physicians often try to prescribe the cheaper medications when possible, for reasons that have to do with their relationships with healthcare providers.

Most physicians are paid on a fee-for-service basis, which means they charge specific fees for particular services they offer, and those codes are billed to providers who then pay the physician's practice, essentially making most practices like their own small businesses. Physicians choose which networks they will develop contracts with, largely having to do with the compensation structure.  Certain providers are obviously geared for lower income individuals, hence they pay less. The field is actually quite competitive, and it gets more complicated when you get into more populous areas where there are more doctors per capita. In those areas doctors have less power to set their own fees, and instead have to compete with the docs across the street, kind of like gas stations. In more rural areas where doctors are more sparse, they have more wiggle room. But it also has to do with local income levels and cost of living too.

Doctors are primarily paid for services offered at their practice, although they are paid for ordering tests. They don't get paid directly for writing a script. They get paid for their office calls.

Now, where it gets more complicated is that doctors can receive kick backs from healthcare providers for keeping costs low. Say a doctor keeps fees-for-service under a certain level, he/she may get a bonus from that provider. Thus, there may be incentive for doctors to be more conservative with what they order. Aside from that, doctors may have the incentive to order unecessary testing, however the balance usually occurs as a result of their contracts with given provider networks. It isn't a free-for-all.

So if the doctors' biggest priority is money, then by this model, their biggest concern is seeing the most patients they can per unit time. This is why time spent with patients has declined so much over the years. I believe the average today is around 10 minute per patient, just because doctors are trying to cram as many as possible in. The more they get, the more billable their time is. Would you rather get paid more times per hour or less? Obviously though this is at the doctor's discretion. A doctor can take however long he or she pleases, so long as they remain viable as a practice. This is why practices often hire managers, one reason being they help promote the business interests of doctors who may otherwise be more focused on the altruistic aspects of medicine. They keep each other in check.

Doctors do NOT receive direct kick backs from pharmaceutical companies for prescribing medications, at least not out in the open. Pharma reps will often provide lunches to physician's practices or take the doctor out golfing in order to influence his choice on what drugs to prescribe. Its the same kind of pandering you see everywhere. While some physicians may be shills and sell out for anything, most doctors would probably tell you a nice lunch won't effect the way they treat diseases.

To me, the biggest problem in the interface between pharma and doctors occurs in medical schools, teaching hospitals, and conferences. In the past (not sure how pressures of public awareness are effecting this across the board), doctors can be paid by pharmaceutical companies - as experts - to speak about a given drug at a medical school, a conference, or in teaching hospitals. In that way its simply a matter of exposure. Its like pharma's form of advertising. They advertise to consumers with television, and they advertise to doctors through these kinds of functions. Its not that they are operating a secret drug ring. Imagine being a new physician in training, learning about a particular drug for a particular disease state. Maybe they're having an event where one of the guest physicians is speaking about a brand name drug. Its what you learn about, its what you're exposed to. When a contractor goes to build a house, they can use an assortment of hammers. What makes the choice of what hammer they buy? What they are exposed to and learn the most about. And it would probably influence their choice if another contractor was telling them about a particular hammer.

But the environment has been changing quite a bit. A lot of medical schools are now prohibiting any type of pharma presence. Obviously conferences are very commercial to begin with so you'll always have the "trade show" aspect there. But academia is coming down harder on the pharma influence. What it holds we don't know. There will always be financial relationships between SOME companies and SOME physicians out there. Just like in any other part of human society where money trades hands. Something about babies, something about bathwater... But I have heard that a lot of medical schools are working with independent research firms to examine drugs and educate students with these third-party formats, which is exciting.

If the student in that article had been asked whether there was any pharma presence in his first two years at school or during his rotations, you wouldn't be surprised to find there was. Again, its not that there is a secret conspiracy between physicians and pharma. Pharma just sends out its worker bees to expose as many new physicians to their product as possible. What we'd like to think is that most (NOT ALL) of our future physicians are intelligent, free-thinking agents who are at least scientifically minded and make their own decisions based on evidence, not nice lunch spreads.

And to your point, doctors are legal drug dealers, which is the point. We train them, give them intense scientific education, take years from their life, and charge them hundreds of thousands in order that we appoint them able to make decisions about using drugs. It would be like saying cops are legal murderers, or that judges/prisons are legal kidnappers.

Y'all need to stop feeding the trolls.

ElmoSuper8 wrote:

DeadlyDevice wrote:

ElmoSuper8 wrote:

You said   "....until I finally hit that one thing that started helping"  What was that one thing?

Thanks

Pregnenolone. I hit a series of nasty symptoms just out of the blue one day (unrelated to hair loss) about a year and a half ago, which put a great handicap on my life because I could no longer function normally, and they would not go away no matter what I tried. The situation was very complex and it took me that long to find even one thing that would bring me relief and worked. I am currently taking that and thyroid hormones for as long as I feel I will need them. Like I said I am not out of the woods yet but I went from planning my suicide to feeling "it's not all that bad, I can deal with this" merely by taking that. I'd say it saved my life. What doctor would have given me it? If pregnenolone is helping it means I have some nasty hormone imbalance, and they do not even want to give me a full hormonal panel, they won't pay for the test (I paid $50 for cortisol test and total about $150 for other hormones and they just say 'whatever your results are not that bad' - my cortisol was around 560), they told me to meditate and go to church? WTF.

After that I can no longer put much trust in the medical institution, unless I need a surgery, and even then the chances of something going bad are worryingly high...

Hi, what exactly is "Pregnenolone" ? Has it stopped your hair falling out?

By the way, doctors have no clue whatsoever about hair loss. They dont understand anything about it.

Nor do they care.

Pregnenolone is a hormone and a precursor to various other hormones in the body like cortisol, DHEA, progesterone, androstenedione etc. It is quite important. If you have high cortisol I think it can 'eat up' all the pregnenolone and stop it from making all the other good hormones. It hasn't helped with my hair but I am glad I feel better overall.

DeadlyDevice wrote:

ElmoSuper8 wrote:

DeadlyDevice wrote:

ElmoSuper8 wrote:

You said   "....until I finally hit that one thing that started helping"  What was that one thing?

Thanks

Pregnenolone. I hit a series of nasty symptoms just out of the blue one day (unrelated to hair loss) about a year and a half ago, which put a great handicap on my life because I could no longer function normally, and they would not go away no matter what I tried. The situation was very complex and it took me that long to find even one thing that would bring me relief and worked. I am currently taking that and thyroid hormones for as long as I feel I will need them. Like I said I am not out of the woods yet but I went from planning my suicide to feeling "it's not all that bad, I can deal with this" merely by taking that. I'd say it saved my life. What doctor would have given me it? If pregnenolone is helping it means I have some nasty hormone imbalance, and they do not even want to give me a full hormonal panel, they won't pay for the test (I paid $50 for cortisol test and total about $150 for other hormones and they just say 'whatever your results are not that bad' - my cortisol was around 560), they told me to meditate and go to church? WTF.

After that I can no longer put much trust in the medical institution, unless I need a surgery, and even then the chances of something going bad are worryingly high...

Hi, what exactly is "Pregnenolone" ? Has it stopped your hair falling out?

By the way, doctors have no clue whatsoever about hair loss. They dont understand anything about it.

Nor do they care.

Pregnenolone is a hormone and a precursor to various other hormones in the body like cortisol, DHEA, progesterone, androstenedione etc. It is quite important. If you have high cortisol I think it can 'eat up' all the pregnenolone and stop it from making all the other good hormones. It hasn't helped with my hair but I am glad I feel better overall.

Hi, would you say it has helped with stress? And daily fatigue? Sleep problems?

And how much do you take?

Thanks

I definitely think it has lowered my stress hormones, reduced anxiety and helped me feel more grounded and stable. It's worth a try. I bought LEF Pregnenolone 100 mg, 100 capsules. I take 3 of these daily. It's quite a big dose but it's temporary so whatever. Maybe you'd like to start with 50 mg once a day or so.

Effective brainwashing is mostly based upon subtle indoctrination. It's all about keeping the risk of detection and rejection as low as possible. If someone believes educational centers are free from industrial pressure, manipulation and control...

Misirlou wrote:Effective brainwashing is mostly based upon subtle indoctrination. It's all about keeping the risk of detection and rejection as low as possible. If someone believes educational centers are free from industrial pressure, manipulation and control...

Everyone is being educated whether its at a brick-and-mortar public/private university, or on a series of blogs/forums. We're all educated, its the substance of that education that makes the difference. And every "classroom" is not equal.

If you believe the alternative "centers" are free of the same type of propaganda, commercial pressures, and marketing tactics, well you know...

And the alternative side tends to be rife with more sensationalism. As far as I have observed, most drugs I've seen have never claimed to fully cure anything. In the alternative health circles on the other hand, sensational claims are made regularly. Diseases being cured with clay and hydrogen peroxide. Its a short step from nutritional supplements to crystals and sacred geometry.

Trust me Mis, I'm not damning either side totally and that's the point. It requires an equal amount of brainwashing to get anyone to either far side of the spectrum. I can look out at the world, any compartment of it, and find shit wherever I look. It doesn't mean I am going to stay shacked up inside because I'd miss the good happening there too.

AS54 wrote:If you believe the alternative "centers" are free of the same type of propaganda, commercial pressures, and marketing tactics, well you know...

Of course they are free from that!! They're all guarded by the holy aura of Asclepius, protecting them from all bad and evil   
How could u po...why would I think that?   
But just like you say, not all classrooms are they same, hence the manipulation probably looks a bit different depending on who is behind it.

AS54 wrote:As far as I have observed, most drugs I've seen have never claimed to fully cure anything.

I'm not so sure that matters, see "If it rains on the priest, the sacristan gets wet too". In this case, the holy grail is antibioticum and it's prior success story has paved the way for so many others, less effective pharmaceuticals. The public just doesn't seem to get that. If it comes from a doctor, it must be safe. If it comes from a doctor, it's proven effective. If it comes from a doctor, I must take it. I'm simply saying, sometimes the M.D.s stuff isn't that useful and sometimes the alternative doctors stuff is.

AS54 wrote:Diseases being cured with clay and hydrogen peroxide. Its a short step from nutritional supplements to crystals and sacred geometry.

Agreed. However, I'm voting for the guy who invented the word "holistic"  

AS54 wrote:It requires an equal amount of brainwashing to get anyone to either far side of the spectrum.

So you recommend to find balance somewhere in between? Sounds a bit ZEN..

 

Misirlou,

I love you haha.

EDIT: Yes though, I would say I'm very zen about it in some way. I prefer not to make the decisions based on any emotionally charged criteria. When I find myself getting emotional about an issue, I try to look at it as rationally as possible from all angles and see if there are simpler explanations for why something may be going wrong, rather than immediately look for the evil in something. There is usually another explanation for human error related to ignorance/stupidity rather than outright malice. But I have been known to fly off the handle about certain individuals selling total bullshit. But that's usually when I know outright manipulation is involved - but I am biased in that sense, seeming to err on the side of apologizing for organizations while damning individuals.

So I go on evidence. I find evidence for mistakes on both sides and evidence of great value from both sides, granted in different contexts. So I value both for what they are good at and where they can be used the most effectively. Some situations call for different solutions.

And you made a very good point as a counter to mine. People do tend to give way too much away to physicians, as far as their personal sovereignty goes and the trust is too complete. So you're right, in many people's minds its black-or-white. Either doctors prescribe all shit, all the time. Or everything a doctor does is holy. So for me its probably more of an error in human thinking, this click-whirr attitude for judging everything in absolute terms.

whodathunkit wrote:Y'all need to stop feeding the trolls.

With walls of text.

I'm not pointing anyone out in particular, but it seems lately as though some are trying to find a PC middle ground appeasement, instead of attempting to discern where the middle actually exists. Except the pharma beast is insatiable, give em an inch and they take a mile.

BTW, middle ground is far away from even the best doctors. Although, I actually like the term 'integrative' medicine over alternative.

Yeah, simple and overlooked things like pregnenolone and potassium etc., wish more here talked about the stuff. Pregnenolone=mother of all hormones. The more oxidized your blood cholesterol, the older you are, the less you have. And very little is required to get someone on the right track. Forget about hairgrowth, think more about life.

 


Yeah whoever that is should really quit.

But in reality, I don't think I take a PC stance. I call it being rational. The politically correct stance would be to not argue at all; everybody is right kind of thing. No I'm saying both are wrong in different areas and using mistakes to damn an entire establishment is irrational. But there is half the problem with all of this to begin with, people want there to be a battle. People love being on a side. There is so much ego in these choices and people want to identify with one of the camps because they get to externalize themselves on team blue or team red.

I'm taking the only rational stance there is from this distance above the issue. Making wide-sweeping claims about everything as a whole is ridiculous.

Now...if someone wants to call out a particular issue. A specific context where either camp is getting it wrong, then we too can get more specific and address *that* issue. But its the generalized "the system is corrupt", "doctors are bad", "drugs are evil" shit that aggravates me.

Who said I was talking about you? But yeah, the *ginormous* jpeg you at first posted and deleted, similar to a solar eclipse, says to me, "I come here to be entertained and gab"... the health equivalent of Facebook.

Meanwhile for me (and I hope a few others) the information contained on this forum is more serious than a myocardial infarction. We're running out of time; people are slowly dying everyday at the hands of big medicine, in absence of any real information. It's our duty to inform them.

Although I've pretty much given up on the majority of health forums ever being relevant. After a while, you become a caricature of your enemy's own worst portrayal. Or you sometimes even become what you hate most. I'm not here to be on the defense, more like on the offense and control my own destiny.

In regards to hair, it's like feeding the soil, which in turn feeds plants and hair. Words are also the food of minds, so choose with wisdom and care. My own preference is less extraneous fat and more meat and potatoes. In some ways, this place represents a collection (and the last bastion) of anything health-related meaningful to me.

It was satire. (Notice the lady's name "Wakefield"? As in Andrew? I posted it because I thought it was funny.

Like this one:

Man Sees Chemtrails Coming From His Own House

A man in Toronto, Canada is shocked and concerned when he saw chemtrails coming from the side of his own house. Chemtrails are chemicals that are usually sprayed from the back of any and all aircraft with the intention of depopulation. So far, as the global population continues to rise, the effort has been unsuccessful. So you can imagine the surprise when Toronto resident Jason Hannon witnessed chemtrails coming from the side of his own house.

“I was outside doing some yard work, when my wife started to do laundry. Next thing I knew, there were chemtrails pouring out of our dryer vent.”

Hannon immediately went to his neighbor, Peter Griese, PhD. “I tried to explain to Jason that it was just steam coming from his dryer. It’s the same principal with “chemtrails”. When something hot meets something cold, it produces steam or “smoke”.” Explained Griese.

That’s when it hit him. Jason Hannon was living beside a secret government official part of the global chemtrail cover-up.

“It’s shocking. They (the government) have spies everywhere. It’s pretty scary.”

Until next time, keep watching the skies.
http://thespudd.com/man-sees-chemtrails-coming-from-his-own-house/

Ahh, I assumed the student was being sarcastic, but that he was still getting real comments from "Wakefield". Fake story. Got it.

AS54 wrote:Ahh, I assumed the student was being sarcastic, but that he was still getting real comments from "Wakefield". Fake story. Got it.

Yes, but I enjoy your view on these matters; I'm glad it generated some quality comments.

4039 wrote:Who said I was talking about you? But yeah, the *ginormous* jpeg you at first posted and deleted, similar to a solar eclipse, says to me, "I come here to be entertained and gab"... the health equivalent of Facebook.

Meanwhile for me (and I hope a few others) the information contained on this forum is more serious than a myocardial infarction. We're running out of time; people are slowly dying everyday at the hands of big medicine, in absence of any real information. It's our duty to inform them.

Although I've pretty much given up on the majority of health forums ever being relevant. After a while, you become a caricature of your enemy's own worst portrayal. Or you sometimes even become what you hate most. I'm not here to be on the defense, more like on the offense and control my own destiny.

In regards to hair, it's like feeding the soil, which in turn feeds plants and hair. Words are also the food of minds, so choose with wisdom and care. My own preference is  less extraneous fat and more meat and potatoes. In some ways, this place represents a collection (and the last bastion) of anything health-related meaningful to me.

4039, I'm not here to be on the defensive either. I like to incorporate humor where I can, mostly where my reply is going to be innocuous and couldn't really add anything to what's been said already. I would have left that jpeg there had it not been so large, and being so technically illiterate, I'm not sure how to adjust the size.

But I do have to say you make one hell of an assumption there. I'm just here to gab like its a health-related facebook? I'm not saying I've changed lives here, but I think I've offered some decent advice in my time here and at least added some interesting points to the overall conversation. Maybe I'm wrong. But to sum up my interest, or what my stake in all of this is, in such a diminutive way is a bit condescending. The fact that I'm long winded in a lot of my posts, while probably irritating to some, is not because I like to "gab". And it could hardly waste your time, being that you choose to read or not read them.

So I apologize if my long winded post is slowing you down on the crusade to better lives here. But if I'm being honest, I think your irritation here has nothing to do with me being "gabby" and everything to do with me putting a decently thought out, dissenting opinion on the table and making a couple of points that may frustrate. I realize its probably easy to just crush a troll-post, and maybe a little more difficult to just sweep under the rug when a reasonable person is presenting the argument to you. But I'm not throwing half-cocked comments at people here who disagree with me.

I am here to be entertained, because I'm a big science nerd and the content PLUS DISCUSSION/DEBATE is genuinely entertaining AND educating. You can do both at the same time ya know. And my candor/humor (which is actually pretty infrequent, so I'm surprised at that comment) is not a sign that I take for granted how hard health can be for people. Dude I lost my father when I was 19, my grandfather two years later, and my grandmother a year after that... from heart disease. My mother is literally (besides my two younger brothers) the only family I have left...and she has ruined her life with addiction to prescription pain killers she got legally. I lost my hair starting at 18. I've dealt with endocrine issues that have taken some of the best years of my life away from me, and which most men will never deal with. I know the ugliness that can happen in medicine. So again, you may feel my frustration at your assumption I'm just this bouncing fun boy here for a laugh.  I find it intensely condescending that you would assume I am oblivious to death, illness, and the problems people are having here. Am I dreaming or have I been a pretty active member here for quite some time? But I have a laugh now and again, so life must just be a cake walk.

But even in the face of what goes wrong in medicine, I do think for my own integrity of mind, I have to be able to step back and look at these things rationally. Misinformation and fear-mongering rely on emotionally charged, irrational points of conversation.

AS54, I believe he was directing his comments towards my posts.

There is a certain "grimness" to this forum. I understand there's a lot of anxiety, fear, and depression attendant with hair loss. But at some point, hair regrowth or not, the wildness and joyfulness of life should be learned, or re-captured, in order to make life worth living.

We've waited 14 billion years to experience this flicker of existence, how marvelous it all can be.