Next Time, Just Shave Your Head...at Least You'll Live Through It..

I have said for years that the Food and Drug Administration is, for the most part, worthless, a wind-sock in a land devoid of breeze. For every report of tainted Chinese crap hitting the mainstream media last year, I swear I could count three or four commercials touting some cockamamie (no pun intended) erectile dysfunction treatment or pseudo-trendy diet pill, carrying that world-famous disclaimer. You know the one, about how none of the statements in the ads have been "verified" by the Food and Drug Administration." Never have received an answer as to what it is the FDA is doing where they don't have any time left to raid the late-night medicine cabinet.

To be fair, when the FDA more or less, sort of kind of gets one right, they deserve a little notice, more or less. Sort of kind of. In a letter the FDA issued in December, concerns were stated over the information Morton Grove Pharmaceuticals was using in web and print advertising of its head lice treatments containing lindane, an agricultural insecticide banned for use as such by the EPA in 2006. Morton Grove is the only manufacturer of lindane in the United States. I'm far beyond the point in my digestion of 21st century life where I question how a banned insecticide is useful as a scalp treatment, but there for the grace of blind consumerism, go I.

Despite the fact that hospitalization, seizures, and even death have been reported from the use of Lindane Shampoo and Lindane Lotion, nearly ten percent of the prescriptions for head lice treatments written in 2007were for lindane-based treatment, over 166,000. To clarify, the hospitalization, seizures, and death are listed on the warning label, by the FDA's own requirements. Ask your family doctor, just out of sheer morbid curiosity, what he or she would prescribe, and see what they answer. Be cure you have a Yellow Pages handy, just in case.