THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2013
PAGE 4
We need to schedule the first ever pond hockey tournament on Potter lake. Who's got their skates?
Facebook just showed me about 30 pictures of the same girl in separate posts on my news feed. Thanks for making me look like a stalker.
Finally the part of the semester when you can get away with not texting people back — thank you, finals!
I was going to start my 8 page paper today, but my horoscope said "rest." I guess I had to start it tomorrow.
I need basketball in Allen Fieldhouse back in my life.
TEXT FREE FOR ALL
"Group Study" areas mean you can talk. What they don't mean is me being able to hear you halfway across 'Shutz, Shhhhhh!'
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I wish you could download food.
Shouldn't there be some sort of rule against using library workstations for Team Fortress 2 and League of Legends?
MEDICINE
I love having a roommate who bakes delicious treats all the time. That should be a requirement on all future roommate applications.
I bet Peyton Manning's pizza sucks.
Probably puts anchovies on them.
The sun sets so early in winter because God wants us to take naps instead of studying.
Important question: what's your favorite cheap whiskey? Looking to expand.
Yeah, so I'm gonna need to find wherever those stress-relieving puppies are ASAP. No guarantee that you will get them back.
Hoping tonight's game goes like when we beat #1 ranked Florida all those years ago.
Really not looking forward to paying my mom when she wins our fantasy league.
So just to be clear, we all want a snow Super Bowt, right?
We need Tyler Self back from injury immediately.
Ditka. Bears.
Is it sad that, after two years, I just now realized I probably only get my hair cut at SportClips because of the really cute girl working there?
Florida University or FU.
'Dallas Buyer's Club' misrepresents HIV medications
I recently saw "Dallas Buyer's Club," and I am certain this movie will get a few Oscar nominations at the least. The movie is about Ron Woodroof, portrayed by Matthew McCo-naughey, a Dallas man who contracts HIV in 1985. He smuggles unapproved medication from Mexico and Japan and forms a "buyer's club" to distribute to others suffering with HIV. This movie focused on issues of access to healthcare and LGBT issues, as HIV was once thought to be an exclusively homosexual disease. This film also did a fantastic job of keeping Woodroof's life and character accurate by basing the script off of personal interviews and Woodroof's journal entries. But while the depiction of Woodroof's life was correct, the science behind his medication was not. This film leaves a false impression that alternative treatments are more effective than the antiretroviral prescribed by physicians during the start of the HIV epidemic.
In 1987, the FDA approved azidothymidine, AZT, an antiretroviral. While it cannot halt the
virus, it can slow its replication. It was the first government-accepted treatment against HIV and AIDS. The drug was undergoing clinical trials when Woodroof was given 30 days to live.
Back in the 1980s, HIV was a death sentence. The film portrays the FDA as the "bad guy" when Woodroof was denied the drug that was already created to treat HIV. However, after the FDA's accelerated approval of thalidomide — a drug that was meant to treat morning sickness in pregnant women — caused birth defects, the FDA became more conservative and cautious about the public using drugs that were not fully tested. The FDA would have been doomed had they let patients use potentially harmful AZT without finishing clinical trials.
Woodroof unethically obtained the drug from a hospital employee, but reacted very poorly to it. This led him to denounce the drug as toxic and advocate for other HIV positive patients to stop taking it immediately. Physicians were not sure what the proper dose of this drug was on
humans, so they delivered AZT at a higher dose with fear that a lower dose wouldn't do anything. Thus, the side effects of higher dose therapy included anemia, myopathy and neutropenia. However, these side effects were reversible with reduction of the drug.
AZT is a very effective therapy against HIV/AIDS. "People who were consistently using AZT prolonged life for one year," said Jonathan Engel, author of "The Epidemic: A History of AIDS." Even a mere year was valuable for someone facing a disease with a 100 percent fatality rate.
Along with dosing issues, Woodroof continued his dangerous lifestyle while on this drug, which also led to the toxicity he
suffered. He took AZT with hard liquor and continued to do cocaine multiple times a day. These are substances one should not take when one's immune system is compromised. Alcohol can reduce the bioavailability, or potency, of a drug and have adverse reactions when taken accordance to other drugs like AZT. These are likely reasons why Woodroof had a negative reaction to the drug and sought other treatment outside of the FDA and United States.
Woodroof obtained alternative medications after his failure with AZT. He went to Mexico and Japan and brought back supplements, vitamins and antibiotics proteins. He was a strong proponent of an experimental drug he acquired in Mexico called Peptide T. According to test tube data, Peptide T is an HIV entry inhibitor. It went through clinical trials in the US in the early '90s, but was deemed as a useless therapy. It did not show direct antiviral affect and did not raise T cell count. At this point of his life, Woodroof encouraged his buyers to quit drinking and abusing
illegal drugs, as well as improving their nutrition by taking vitamins and drinking fluids. These words of encouragement can go a long way for people dealing with weak immune systems. The supplements that Woodroof dispensed were not dangerous, but directly ineffective.
It is easy to be persuaded on our opinions of medicine and science when portrayed in a Hollywood film. But film is meant to entertain and evoke emotions. The underlying story of "Dallas Buyer's Club" was not about a man who went overseas to find medications, because AZT did not work. It is a about a man who did everything he could to prolong his life after being told he would die in 30 days. He not only helped himself, but many others in Dallas suffering with HIV/AIDS, by living 2,555 days after his initial diagnosis.
ART
monica Saha is a first year pharmacy student from Overland Park.
Show restraint and stop supporting bad movies
We are suckers, every single one of us. That's what Hollywood thinks at least. All they have to do is loudly flash a movie trailer with explosions and good-looking people in front of us a few times and then, VOILÀ, they have us hooked like an unsuspecting fish. The way I see it, movies nowadays are split up into two categories: movies that are made for the sole purpose of making money and movies that are made to be good. The sad thing is that the cash-driven movies greatly outnumber the actual good movies.
Hollywood isn't ever going to stop shoving their high budget, low-quality cash cow films down our throats, so it's up to us as the viewers/consumers to stop watching them. Just like how the cigarette companies will never stop selling their product that legitimately kills people, movie studios will never stop producing these horrible films that rob us of 2.5 hours of our lives. Unfortunately, there is no patch or chewing gum that can aid in the ridding of these horrible movies from our lives. No, I'm afraid we're just going to have to exercise good old-fashioned
By Eddie Simon esimon@kansan.com
self-control.
A perfect example is a movie like "The Avengers." The only excuse, in my opinion, of actually considering "The Avengers" a good piece of cinema is if you are a diehard comic book nerd. "The Avengers" is the third-highest grossing box office movie of all time and for that fact I am disappointed in humanity. People flooded into the theatres absent-mindedly with their wallets open to see a movie about a guy with a hammer, an angry green giant, a good looking super hero with a Frisbee, an even better looking woman doing karate in tights and a man flying around in an iron suit. When you think about it this way, it looks as if a team of nine-year old movie executives sat down in a room, shared a pipe of peyote and came up with a movie idea. And the idea that these nine-year old peyote-smoking executives came up with profited over $623 million in the U.S. alone.
I know that there are arguments out there to defend "The Avengers" being considered good cinema and I truly envy those
that somehow found legitimacy in that movie. One man's trash is another's treasure. What truly disappoints me is the fact that there are great movies out there that are getting lost under the stampede of blind viewers rushing toward whatever is flashiest. We need to do a better job sifting through the filth that is thrown at us and finding the legitimate movies that are made with the hopes of being a piece of art rather than a big payday.
rattle that makes a squirm. Lucky for us, Oscar season is coming up. It's the time of year that the ratio of bad-to-goo movies is finally in our favor. So enjoy it while it lasts, because a couple of months from now we'll be back sitting through the excrement. And when we are, just try and exercise some self-control and stay away from the movies that are aimed at our wallets and not our hearts.
Eddie Simon is a senior majoring in English from Minneapolis, Minn.
FFA OF THE DAY
CAMPUS CHIRPS BACK
Always a bitter sweet moment finishing a semester. On one hand, I'm done with finals. On the other, it's considered 'inappropriate' to be drunk at 2 p.m. on a Wednesday back home.
HEALTH
@Timmy_Hewitt
@KansanOpinion Wherever the business majors aren't working on a group project.
@Timmy_Hewitt
Don't let college stop you from exercising
Lack of exercise is harmful to our health. If you are not exercising and keeping healthy, your body is susceptible to many diseases due to lack of inactivity. According to healthland.time.com, there have been millions of deaths due to inactivity because it can cause diseases like heart disease, type 2 diabetes, breast cancer and colon cancer. Why put yourself at greater risk when they can be prevented?
As college students, we are at that point where we begin to exercise a lot less. After high school, we grow busier with more studying and other time consuming activities. Most of us give up our high school sports that we used to do a on a regular basis. After our primary source of exercise is taken from us, we have to motivate ourselves to do it on our own, which is much harder.
It's getting cold out there, folks. For a lot of us, that means that exercise is coming to an end, or at least put on hold for warmer weather. I know it's hard to get out there and exercise when it's much more tempting to snuggle up by the fire in your favorite pair of fuzzy socks, but there is no excuse for not exercising.
I'm assuming that none of you believe exercise is harmful. Hopefully you would agree that exercise is beneficial. Despite this being common knowledge, many of you won't put these words into action and actually do it. I'd like to tell you, then, not how to exercise, but to persuade you to actually go out and get some exercise.
People don't need to run marathons every day to keep healthy. All it takes is a half hour of exercise per day, or 150 minutes per
By Molly Smith
msmith@kansan.com
Find a physical activity you enjoy, and just do it. If you get bored, try something new. There are so many fun things you can do to exercise; you should be surprised how fun it is to be healthy.
Molly Smith is a sophomore majoring in speech pathology from Lenexa
week. Practically everyone can spare 30 minutes a day, so many of those awful outcomes can be prevented as long as you are willing to put in a little bit of effort.
One of the things I love most about exercising is how rewarding it can be. Once you've exercised for a while, you begin to build endurance and start to feel in shape. This is exciting to me and it can help motivate me to keep going. I constantly challenge myself and ask "What I can do next?"
Exercise can even be fun! Maybe not at first, but once you get into the habit, it can be something to look forward to at the end of the day and serve as an outlet for frustrations. It gives you a chance to unwind, enjoy the outdoors or simply engage in activities that help your mood. Physical activity helps you connect with family and friends in a fun social setting. So take a dance class, hit the hiking trails or join an intramural soccer team with some friends.
Pushing yourself past your limits is the beautiful thing about exercise. It makes you realize that you are capable of more than you ever thought. This lesson is true with anything in life. If you want to be successful, you have to challenge yourself and put no limit on success.
@nicolettucce
@KansanOpinion Allen Fieldhouse #COE
@Thinmints420
@KansanOpinion My couch, but it normally becomes a go-to-sleep spot.
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Members of the Kansan Editorial Board are Trevor Graff, Allison Kohn, Dylan Lyons, Will Webber, Mollie Pointer and Sean Powers.
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