Hi everyone,
So, a few days after my "Call to Action" post, I walked into the BMC student lounge to find this:
So, a few days after my "Call to Action" post, I walked into the BMC student lounge to find this:
In all, we donated 37 cans (beans, tuna, assorted veggies), 3 tins of peanut butter, 2 jams, 5 boxes of pasta, a couple of 3-lb bags of rice, 3 packages of dried beans, a multi-pack of applesauce, and several packs of crackers and flatbreads. This is quite impressive, considering that I only gave you a few days notice before Thanksgiving Break!
So did we solve Rhode Island's poverty and food crisis? Probably not. But I think we deserve a collective pat on the back for putting forth our best small-scale effort. :-)
So did we solve Rhode Island's poverty and food crisis? Probably not. But I think we deserve a collective pat on the back for putting forth our best small-scale effort. :-)
Hunger and food insecurity remain major challenges in Rhode Island and in other cities across the United States. As med students and physicians, we should try our best to be aware of these issues and their connection to health. If you want to find out more--or better yet, if you want to develop your own project--please visit the RI Community Food Bank website:
Have a Happy Thanksgiving!
Margret
2 comments:
It is not true that drug companies do not do comparative studies. They do them all the time as marketing studies. They only publish the results of favorable studies.
For example Merck compared Celebrex to Vioxx and found that Vioxx was a worse drug (more side effects & no efficacy advantage). (Study 906)(www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/ac/07/slides/2007-4290oph1-01-Egilman.ppt) Merck never provided the FDA with the results and when the FDA publically requested the data from any such studies on Vioxx or Arcoxia they lied and denied the studies existed.
(See transcript of arcoxia ACM) http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/ac/cder07.htm#ArthritisDrugs
These studies were quitre relevant since Merck & its astroturf organization were arguing that although the RCT did not show arcoxia to be any more effective than any comparator it might work on "some" as yet unidentified" mystery patients.
tha tlast post was a boo boo
Here is what it was supposed tto day.
Not to be critical except in the spirit of critical analysis here is the beginning of an editorial on food donations:
When Handouts Keep Coming, the Food Line Never Ends
By Mark Winne
Sunday, November 18, 2007; B01
How can anyone not get caught up in the annual Thanksgiving turkey frenzy? At the food bank I co-founded in Hartford, Conn., November always meant cheering the caravans of fowl-laden trucks that roared into our parking lot. They came on the heels of the public appeals for "A bird in every pot," "No family left without a turkey" and our bank's own version -- "A turkey and a 20 [dollar bill]."
Like pompom girls leading a high school pep rally, we revved up the community's charitable impulse to a fever pitch with radio interviews, newspaper stories and dramatic television footage to extract the last gobbler from the stingiest citizen. After all, our nation's one great day of social equity was upon us. In skid row soup kitchens and the gated communities of hedge-fund billionaires alike, everyone was entitled, indeed expected, to sit down to a meal of turkey with all the fixings.
And here we are, putting on the same play again this year. But come Friday, as most of us stuff more leftovers into our bulging refrigerators, 35 million Americans will take their place in line again at soup kitchens, food banks and food stamp offices nationwide. The good souls who staff America's tens of thousands of emergency food sites will renew their pleas to donors fatigued by their burst of holiday philanthropy. Food stamp workers will return to their desks and try to convince mothers that they can feed their families on the $3 per person per day that the government allots them. The cycle of need -- always present, rarely sated, never resolved -- will continue.
Unless we rethink our devotion to food donation.
the entire article can be found here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/16/AR2007111601213_pf.html
Post a Comment