Correct. If you read the Amazon one star review they point out how the test results were biased and could only prove vitamins didn't work. When your only test patients are only very sick guys that happens.

Ben Goldacre in his Ted Talk exposes how and why this happens.

Wikipedia lists the fines levied against the pharmaceutical companies. Go look at it. It's impressive.

Wiki will also point out, Iatrogenesis, death as a side effect of modern medicine is the third leading cause of death in the US.

Number of deaths from vitamin overdoses: 0. In over 100 years. Deaths from patent medicines: 30,000 a year in the US alone.

Article is an excerpt from a book written by a guy that sold vaccines for big pharma. I'm not against vaccines, they're a good thing (although there is still plenty of room to be nervous without believing in autism/mercury).

But you have to keep in mind the vaccine industry has been at war with Pauling since he showed a IV drop of C will cure Polio. If you actually look it up you can find where he did that, and unlike everybody else here will have verified something in the article.

Because every claim made by the author in that article is probably wrong.

Shame on The Atlantic for this puff piece. They usually have good science.

Please see "Nutrition in a nutshell" by Wiliams (1961) to learn about the biochemistry of enzyme absorption in the human diet and an explanation as to why large dosages are required.

If you've read this and have a specific fault with either his logic or premises I'd like to hear it.

Otherwise I'm guessing you literally don't actually know what you're talking about.

Pauling was way before Davis. Look it up.

Also look up the medical consensus on the "facts" claimed in the article.

Either he's unaware of them, or flat out lies. But he's clearly and verifiably wrong in nearly every paragraph he wrote.

A few evenings with Google scholar will verify that. The whole thing is misleading.

It makes it sound like Pauling died prematurely of cancer. He was 93 ffs.

In fact all the greats in the field Pauling invented died in their 90s.

Now go look at the ages of the people who claimed they're quacks died at. I think you might be a little surprised, that is, if nothing else, advocates of the sort of medicine Pauling espoused - which if, unlike the author of the hack article, is actually based on sound science if you care to research it, all die at a statistically significantly older age than average.

For I assert that when these proponents all die in their 90s while their critics mostly pass on before 60 then it might be worth taking the time to read their work more carefully.

And the interesting thing is if you do do that you'll read how they state how the drug companies deliberately improperly test these things to deliberately get false results.

For example the article mentions C and the cold a few times as if it did nothing. This is not true, if you look it up there is consensus that is limits the number of sick days and makes the symptoms less. That's in what Pauling would call a small dose, in higher doses the symptoms are even more diminished.

Yet the article pretends this isn't true. Why?

In each case the author makes a point about something nor working or being harmful it can be shown there is an other explanation than the one being offered; some of these are egregiously faulty test designs (See the one star reviews on Amazon to explore this further, they're well documented there). Lazy or lying? Which one?

The author implied that C is of no use in cancer. Currently, C has a higher cure rate than Chemo and radiation put together. He's unaware of this or is he lying?

Ignore this article. It's utter rubbish.

Look up some actual values then try that again. You're not even close.

You have no idea what you're talking about.

Go look up some numbers. Compare them to 10 and 100 years ago. Notice the nutritional density has gone down?

Now compare it with 100,000 and 1.5Mya.

When you can do that off the top of your head and can quote numbers I'd be inclined to agree. Otherwise it sounds like you're just making it up. Because what you said absolutely isn't true for a number of reasons. If you knew enough biochemistry to understand this you would never say a thing like that so it would be very difficult to explain this to you, or at least lengthy.

I remember the BSD daemonette. I guess I don't mind having my balls grabbed as much as you do Bruce.

Ginger beer.

Go through old books and papers - stuff going back to the victorian era is well represented.

Find the animal/plant that interests you and cut out the photos and grab test and curate them properly into the web.

That stuff could very easily go away. A lot of it already has.

I wouldn't pay much attention to copyright either. There's no point in protection of information that goes extinct.

I'm probably a good person to ask that question of, it's on my thinkpad despite my starting with Unix in 1977; in my entire professional career as a program I had only one Windows gig the rest was Unix or embedded assembly. I really do c/unix stuff, for work and fun. So why then do I still use XP?

Cause it works finally.

If it were as bad as it were 10 years ago, I'd be using Unix on my laptop, but xp has stopped pissing me off with stupid shit and does the very little I ask of it reasonably well, although my expectations of it are so low I'd be equally happy with a BIOS that boots to a web browser.

It does need daily reboots and sometimes goes for weeks on end without a need for a reboot and (touch wood) doesn't seem to crash any more.

So, under the "don't fix what aint broken" maxim, I'll leave xp on this machine. Would I "upgrade"? Not a chance in hell. If I used anything else I'd put BSD on it instead.

What's he doing keeping stuff in MS apps for? Then when they don't work 5 years later he's all like OMG THE NET WILL BREAK.

Idiot. He knows better. Or should.

I used to laugh at Americans making fun of Canadians saying "aboot" too. Then I moved to California and in a few weeks I heard "aboot" whenever anybody said and and I was indeed saying it. When you're used to it you can't tell...

This is a joke, right?

That would have been an 8088, not 8086, yes? The latter were comparatively rare, PC's used the former.

"Maybe someday I'll find a Socket 4 in a dumpster "

Good place for them. They were vile.