drug mythbusters

so, i'm a science geek. i love mythbusters. i think it's awesome, and if i were only smart enough, i would love to be on that show. it would be so fun to make things blow up. oh, and to have the budget to blow them up more than once.

in one of my classes, we had the opportunity to do some 'drug mythbusting'. our prof handed everyone out two questions, and we had to search the literature to find the answers to these totally wacky questions. today, we shared them in class.

now, this whole schpiel leads me to one of my classmates responses. she had a totally obscure question, for which she could only find one trial from like 1977. now, for you non-science people, evidence applied in practice is mostly considered current within the past few years. back in the day, trials were not run like they are today (and were much less eithical). anyways, because there was only one trial, she presented the evidence, and gave a brief summary of her answer.

now, the funny part of this story lies in the trial that she found. it turns out that the study was looking at how effective a particular anti-nauseant (ie: gravol) was at making people not want to barf after they took a dose of morphine. so, the dudes running the study gave people the anti-nauseant thirty minutes before the morphine, gave the morphine, then spun them around in a chair for twenty seconds. ha! spun them around in a chair! i love that part. it gives me the funniest mental image. i guess if you can handle being spun around in a chair and a dose of morphine and not spew, your gravol is working.