Bupropion treats addiction because it modulates dopamine in the brain. Dopamine handles reward feedback (most drugs of abuse give you a huge rush of dopamine; this is why people keep going back to them). Please don't practice psychiatric medicine from your armchair. Sorry. Thanks.

Anecdotal evidence is a poor substitute for facts. Bupropion does indeed cause weight loss in a very significant number of patients. Of all of the antidepressants available in America, it has the highest rate. The reported rate of weight loss (defined as greater than 5 pounds) at 400mg/day is 19%. One in five people. This comes from the prescriber information (aka the package insert). The drug acts as a weak norepinephrine and dopamine reuptake inhibitor (referred to as an NDRI in some literature), and these actions suppress appetite, cause activation (e.g. you move more), and often cause weight loss. The antiaddiction properties come from the dopamine reuptake inhibition, as you have probably heard that "dopamine is the reward neurotransmitter" or something to that effect. It helps you quit smoking and it can help you quit other addictions as well by modulating the reward system in your brain.

Many people have been calling this an SSRI in the comments. Bupropion is not an SSRI. Not all antidepressants are SSRIs. You have SSRIs, SNRIs, the NDRI, alpha-2 antagonists, "SARIs" (Stahl's Essential Psychopharmacology likes to place all of the drugs in classes), dopamine partial agonists, 5HT2a antagonists, and more. Most of the drugs have more than one mechanism of action. The brain is a complicated place.

SSRIs can cause weight gain because they activate all of your 5HT (serotonin) neurons nonselectively. Yes, you say "but it's a SELECTIVE serotonin reuptake inhibitor!" Yes, it selects for 5HT over NE/DA/alpha2/etc., but it does not select 5HT1a (where you get most of your antidepressant effects) over 5HT2a (ideally we want to antagonize this one, activation is where sexual dysfunction side effects come from), 5HT2c, 5HT3 (this is where GI upset comes from with SSRIs, so ideally we want to antagonize it), etc. I recommend trusting me on this. I sound like I know what I'm talking about, don't I? For more information, Stahl's Essential Psychopharmacology is an excellent starting place if you have a background in pharmacology.

http://dailymed.nlm.nih.gov/dailymed/search.cfm?startswith=bupropion&x=0&y=0

Just FYI, drugs wind up in our water supply because we take them, not because we throw them away. A percentage of almost all drugs leave the body unchanged via urine (or feces). Just food for thought. The media got ahold of 'drugs in the water' and instead of, say, asking a pharmacist or someone in the know, they just kind of made up their own reason ("people must be flushing these drugs they're paying out the ass for!").

You do realize you didn't cite a source, right?

... Right?

Is there a reason this wouldn't act like a giant net and trap life forms in what they intend to be pure crude oil?

Won't somebody think of the childr... I mean, won't somebody think of the dolphins?

Surely you know people - or even yourself - who this applies to. I know it applies to me sometimes, and if you read enough comments on /. you can certainly find a number of others. Unblinking rationalism will cause you to lose the ability to appear reasonable to other people. This is, in a sense, "turning off your brain," as the GP stated. And if you're very deep in that rut, it will indeed be very hard to get out of it. You won't want to compromise, because you think your belief is the only right belief. It's important to temper pragmatism with a bit of frivolity or whimsy every now and then, just to balance things out a bit. Being able to consider viewpoints other than your own is always a strength, not a weakness.

To be fair... 504 promises = 3.76% broken = 21.82% kept = 28.57% kept if we count 'compromise' as kept (which I'm fine with) Leaving 67.67% promises stated but not yet completed, kept or broken. I check on the Politifact Truth-o-meter periodically, and over the next two years, I think it's going to be more important whether there's an increasing trend toward promises broken or not. Still have a long way to go. And as was said, how many broken promises is too many? Is it one, or is it more than one? How many promises will you let a friend break, versus the leader of the free world?

I demand more pictures of invisibility cloaks in articles about invisibility cloaks. Theory be damned.

Crazy Professor Says UFO Studies Should Be Taught At Universities.

Actually, the reason the iPhone dominates Android is because the iPhone has been available for several years longer than Android products. It has an established user base. Given that we're talking about several hundred dollar handpieces here, a lot of middle-America is going to wait until they need to switch (or until it's cheapest) before they make that decision again.

You sound a little too hung up on 'cool,' friend. Enjoy what's good. Enjoy what you want. Why is it wrong for someone with money to fund a movie? Why is it cool for someone to risk his immediate fiscal future on a book? I've read some books that I enjoyed, even though some of them were published before I was born. Because I'm taking an interest in it after the fact, does that make me uncool? Just because someone has money doesn't mean that everything they produce is going to be white washed, over done garbage.

Be careful, there are actually several Screamers movies. They released a sequel about a year ago, which is simply god-awful. The first Screamers movie isn't too great, but as a fan of the short story, you may enjoy it simply on principle.

Screamers
Screamers: The Hunting

(also not to be confused with the documentary on System of a Down, Screamers

Oh my goodness. This is one of those sorts of stories pharmacists trade at bars (e.g. the patient who chewed their suppository not knowing where it was supposed to go). Those yogurts, in the yogurt section? They're foods. They aren't for vaginal application. Yes, they may improve vaginal flora, as well as GI flora. Nowhere on the packaging does it say anything about inserting vaginally, because that is NOT what you are supposed to do. From the article you even linked, it clearly states:

PLEASE never recommend anyone apply yogurt to their vagina. That just seems... cruel and unusual. Also, your analysis of how 'bad' flora take over isn't terribly accurate. Our bodies are full of bacteria, we know that. An imbalance of the bacteria in any given area may cause problems, such as overgrowth of a particular species, which may cause problems on a macro scale ('signs and symptoms'). This may occur for any number of reasons, including diet, lifestyle choices, recent illnesses, etc. However, less than 5% of women experience recurrent vaginal candidiasis ('yeast infection'). It is notably inaccurate to say that once you stop taking the drugs, the bad bacteria come back, and that the drugs can never kill everything. One adequate course, taken correctly, will most certainly clear up candidiasis. In more than two thirds of women, they'll never experience another bout of vaginal candidiasis in their lifetime. So please stop telling people the things you tell them.

You can't just jump from rats to tens of thousands of humans. That's why the sample size is 15. That's why it's a Phase I trial. There are four phases of clinical pharmaceutical testing that follow preclinical (animals, in vitro, etc.) testing. Phase I normally tests a treatment in healthy humans in order to see the negative effects of the treatment (this is not necessarily the case in cancer treatments because all cancer treatments have significant negative effects). Phase I trials are only a couple dozen people, max. Successful Phase I trials allow for Phase II trials. These usually have one or two hundred people with the disease the therapy is intended to treat. In Phase II, they are mainly gathering pharmacokinetic data (half life, metabolism, volume of distribution, etc.). Phase III is where you start to see the trials you're clamoring for. These are typically done in several thousand patients, all with the disease in question. These trials are placebo-controlled, randomized, double-blind studies (the hallmark of research). Statistical analysis then allows you to determine if the therapy was effective in improving outcomes. If so, the drug goes to the FDA. 30 days later, it is officially on the market. Phase IV studies begin here, and continue perpetually. They are called post-marketing surveillance, and they study long-term effects (because previous trials are not long enough to do this), as well as very rare adverse effects (where the sample size in previous trials may have been too small to correctly detect the progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy that occurs in 0.1% of patients treated).

So don't claim the study size wasn't big enough - it wasn't supposed to be. Phase III trials are what you want. Phase I and II trials are of no interest to anyone outside of health professions, really.

If Google Health isn't covered under HIPAA, it's illegal for any of these healthcare providers to enter any protected information into the system without the written consent of the individual patient. There are serious fines attached to this breach, per patient.