Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for June 04, 2023

Hey, Russia produces the strongest, healthiest rats.

With all that’s going on has Trudeau gone off on holiday leaving this behind?

Even if isn’t pregnant Russian Rat Vladimir would be nice with two big boobs.

Tell me more about slowing cirrhosis, Mark.

The new Prevagen.

i don’t understand.

Trudeau is getting gloriously weird in his old age.

Did they test that stuff on Putin?? If so, that just might explain his arrogance!!

I haven’t heard a radio station DJ hawking his/her junk in years

Pregnant vermin? We finally know what former guy’s “type” is.

LoL

Rat-tit-tat.

I have heard that there is no way of controlling or eradicating them anywhere . Is that true or isn’t there enough effort put behind do it ?

Is potato.

Twenty years ago I had a “doctor” strongly encourage me to take a similar product for health and weight control. I thought this doctor knew what she was talking about, so I ordered a first month’s supply through her. I will admit that I dropped a lot of weight in that month – my wallet was thinner and I unloaded that doctor.

That facial expression in panel six says it all.

Now, tell them about the ivermectin studies!

Is that “BOOBSIE” in the kitchen?

Supplements, the biggest scam since “Fat Free”.

Okay. That there’s funny. I don’t care who you are. On a bit darker side, does anyone else find those ladies sort of hot? Just asking for a friend.

The Consumer Products Safety Commission has decided to ban kids’ scooters as they’ve found that even a small pothole can cause a rat to loose his balance.

Probably overly subtle for the targets of its sarcasm. Snake oil and worthless supplements are the source of funds for all the right wing misinformation spreaders.

Reminds me of the research published in a major medical journal that concludes a parachute is no more effective than an empty backpack at protecting you from harm if you have to jump from an aircraft.

Good, someone said it out loud. Now I can stop yelling at my TV.

Pretty sure a pill can’t replace real vegetables.

I thought those rats looked like that because of the Chernobyl fallout

Was listening to a podcast about this. There are companies you can hire to do these clinical studies. You tell them the product you want tested and the results you want and they provide the study to show it.

Those of you who listen to PBS radio have noticed the commercials have been appearing on our shows.

Well, I suppose it was only a matter of time.

You can thank Senator Orrin Hatch for getting the Dietary Supplements Health and Organization Act passed in 1994, making it nearly impossible for the FDA to regulate the dietary supplement industry. Coincidentally, a lot of the big supplement companies are based in Hatch’s state of Utah.

Go back to being funny, you have become just another cranky political cartoon

That’s sick. Keep ‘em comin’.

Well, THAT took a turn for the weird.

Rats notwithstanding, this strip makes a good point. The ads on Talk Radio are the worst! Invest in gold, invest in timeshares, get out of timeshares, beat the IRS, testosterone supplements, diet pills…every kind of scam. I listen to the host try to make some point for ten minutes, and then with the next breath he opens his mouth to tell me that society is collapsing and I need to invest in gold and survival cookies, and I remind myself why I stopped listening to talk radio.

Many people today find things to criticize about various religions. But religion per se isn’t a problem. Left to itself, it’d just be a hobby, like collecting stamps, going bowling, or reading Harry Potter novels.

No, religion is just a symptom of the real, underlying problem, namely faith — the mindset that deludes people into thinking that they can somehow or other “know” things without a shred of supporting evidence, and frequently in the face of considerable evidence to the contrary. Faith gives us not only religion but also “natural” dietary supplements like these, homeopathy, astrology, objectivism, ufology, conspiracy theories, climate-change denial, false accusations of ritual satanic child abuse, numerology, anti-vax movements, a host of superstitions, personality cults, dowsing, jingoism, imperialism, racism, psi phenomena, quackery, Chinese traditional “medicine”, feng shui, and the insidious brain parasite that leads people to endlessly obsess over anyone named Kardashian.

Faith is humanity’s all-time, blue-ribbon, gold-medal, undisputed, undefeated, heavyweight world-champion worst method EVER of making decisions! Nobody ever uses faith for anything that can be tested or measured or that really matters in real life.

The priest class, needless to say, praises faith to the skies, because their paychecks depend on suckers continuing to fall for it. Religious believers are the victims in a huge, accurately named confidence game.

Don’t believe me? Test it for yourself. The difference between education and indoctrination is whether the person at the front of the room welcomes questions from the audience. Try it the next time your minister is in the middle of a sermon.

should have had cameo of the singing mice from Gasoline Alley

There’s an air purifier that was popular on kickstarter, which has made some BIG claims on the effectiveness of its design. When you ask for the scientific evidence, they direct you to a research firm they own, which produces two-page documents (one of which is a page of signatures) detailing that they did a study and it totally checks out.

Methodology? Datasets? Sorry that’s proprietary information.

The trumpies love the stuff.

This reminds me of the studies of Thalidomide when it was in the testing stage. It was given to patients in an insane asylum, where the inmates not only were not pregnant, but they could hardly be relied on to give an objective account of how it affected them.

If the stuff doesn’t work then why are all the democrat run cities hiring “Rat czars”?

Excellent strip. Not so much for its less than subtle take down of over blown marketing of vitamin supplements but more for its basic lesson in how to interpret what is and is not statistically significant and why. Single scientific studies, studies with small sample sizes, and studies that are not reproducible or the product of shady laboratories with their own agendas are not to be taken as anything more than anecdotal examples. They are not to be taken as evidence that proves a claim, marketing or otherwise.

Is Mark taking Duke’s drugs now?

Cheese spread. For the rats. Lol.

Mark does his homework on any product he endorses.

I want more lactate production! .. wait, I’m a biological man.

One of my chief aggravations—-ads for medicines that have so many side effects the cure is worse than the disease.

And try suing a giant pharmaceutical company if something DOES go wrong

Does it also induce hallucinations?