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Now they're saying Advil's bad. What's next? Santa Claus?

December 21, 2004 By pia

Happy Winter!

Enough happiness; I should be writing about all the people who died needlessly in Iraq yesterday, but I’m not going to.

When Pfizer began having its Celebrex problems, I was going to use it as an example of a seemingly flawless stock that people might put into their private Social Security accounts as a stock that would only go up.

But I thought that everybody realized or should realize by now (since everybody but me seemed to be experts on stocks in the 1990’s) that pharmaceutical stocks go down drastically whenever a drug that is found out to have some bad or many or tragic effects.

“Oh but I’m in it for the long term” you say confidently, “I’m not planning to touch my account for at least 25 years.”

Do you have a strong stomach for loss? Or are you one of the many people who sell everything when one single stock goes bad really quickly? If you are please contact me as I’ve never understood why people actually do that.

Now you say “look at the newest news stories that say Celebrex is effective.” Fine, but it caused the stock market to tumble just when it was starting to go places.

I do understand that companies go bankrupt. More companies than you would expect to, and when they go bankrupt it’s never a good thing for stockholders.

Kmart is doing well this year.

But when it went bankrupt several years the common as opposed to preferred stockholders were left with nothing, zilch, zero.

If you didn’t sell before the bankruptcy because you thought that it wouldn’t go bankrupt, that something magical would happen, because Kmart is a smart idea, with good leadership and the Martha Stewart line, and more ideologically appealing than WalMart, you would have been left with the above.

For the record, not that anybody cares, I think that Martha deserved her sentence plus more, and it had nothing to do with her being a woman. Before becoming Martha Stewart she wasn’t just a stockbroker but owned a seat on the exchange. Besides costing much money, an owner is vetted, and has to be highly knowledgeable about the market(s). Let me amend that; an owner should be highly knowledgeable.

Martha Stewart’s a great example of somebody who had insider knowledge of a stock that was going to fall far because the product (something in pharmaceuticals, how about that?) because trial studies showed it to be ineffective if not dangerous (I really can’t remember as I was so caught up in the drama.)

Insider knowledge is something that most of us will never have but the most sophisticated individual investor such as Martha, and many institutions (such as some pension funds) will always be just a couple of degrees of separation from their stocks. You and I will be at least five degrees away. There is the possibility, distinct as it is, that I will invent the next Google; then….

Okay enough sermonizing. Today I looked at the headlines and saw that Aleve and Advil might cause heart attacks.

I love Advil. After I gave up Excedrin because it so obviously cause ulcers, I found Advil. I would take it if I felt that I might possibly have a headache sometime later that week.

Ever since I decided to adopt a healthy life style I’ve taken fewer and fewer. But I always keep a bottle at home, because if I don’t have one, I will positively develop a headache. Or somebody who is visiting will have one and since I don’t want to think that it’s my company that’s causing the headache I will offer one. I realize that’s circular reasoning but that’s the way I think

Now it’s like learning that there isn’t a Santa Claus. I want to scream; isn’t it an anti-inflammatory medicine? Doesn’t that by definition protect against heart attacks rather than cause them?

Are there any safe medications? Do we know anything about medications, really, or are they all going to be found out to be incredibly dangerous?

Have to go look at my bottle of Tylenol with Codeine. Just knowing that it’s there makes my sinus headaches go away. Really. Sinus headaches are much worse than my other headaches as they make me want to vomit, hate all noise, light and people. I get them from mold, and try to live a mold free life–but I can tell where mold is before I smell it. I’m a true mold meter.

Tylenol with codeine knocks me out and makes my sleeping dreamless. I hate that; it’s the perfect medication for me as when I look at it I know that if I take it, I’m going to fall into a semi-coma and I like being awake or dreaming while sleeping too much.

Someday soon somebody is going to do a study and find out that just having a bottle of Tylenol with Codeine is going to give a person brain tumors. I just know that.

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About Me

I live in the South, not South Florida, a few blocks from the ocean, and two blocks from the main street. It's called Main Street. Amazes me too.

I'm from New York. I mostly lived in the Mid-Upper East Side, and the heart of the Upper West Side. It amazes me when people talk about how scared they were of Times Square in the 1970's and 1980's.

As my mother said: "know the streets, look out and you'll be fine."

What was scary was the invasion of the crack dens into "good buildings in good 'hoods." And the greedy landlords who did everything they could to get good tenants out of buildings.

I'm a Long Island girl, and proud of it now.
Then I hated everything about the suburbs. Yet somehow I lived in a few great Long Island Sound towns after high school.

Go to archives "August 2004" if you want to begin with the first posts.

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