005 Ask Dr. Wise: Blue Jeans, Arsenic and Corn Flakes

Ask Dr. Wise: Blue Jeans, Arsenic and Corn Flakes

Walk down the isle of any major drug store and just take a look at the volume of ‘over-the-counter’ medications.

What’s in these products? Do they work? Are they safe to use, or could they potentially cause serious and irreversible harm? But there’s no way they could cause cancer....could they?

During this segment of the Ask Dr. Wise show, Dr. Samuel Wise M.D., extemporaneously takes us on a fascinating journey that begins in India with the ancient process that created the highly prized blue indigo dye, to the dawn of the chemical industry in the mid 1800’s, to the formation of the Pure Food and Drug Act.

At the turn of the 20th century, a common accepted treatment for tuberculosis was to collapse one lung and then send the patient to a spa to breathe fresh country air and eat ‘healthy’ foods. So what were these foods that were considered healthy and fed to these patients? Dr. Wise provides a history lesson of the first ‘fast food’ inventors whose products were consumed by these patients. A hundred years later these early inventor’s products are still with us today. Names we all know, names like Kellogg, Post and Graham.

And if you think that we’re narcissistic today, and will try almost anything to make us more attractive, wait to you hear the story of the face cream women used to give them a nice milky complexion in the early 1900’s.

Most importantly you’ll learn the names of ingredients and compounds currently actively marketed to the public today, names like acetaminophen, understand what they are, how they work, and gain and acquire information that might just save your life.

Or perhaps don’t listen in and just go ahead and take that pill. What could go wrong?

We hope you’ll listen in, we know you’ll be glad you did, and then visit the Ask Dr. Wise website, www.askdrwise.com, to listen to all of the doctor’s educational and entertaining shows.