Insist On Brand Name Poly-Vi-Flor Or Your Baby Will Be Crazy, Mentally Challenged, Eaten By Their Own White Blood Cells, Then Finished Off By Cancer.

I just saved you the effort of reading the latest fax from Zytera Pharmaceuticals with that headline. Those of you wise enough to already have a copy of my latest book know that Zytera is the company that bought the rights to the Poly-Vi-Flor and Tri-Vi-Flor brand names, and that both products were boring old baby vitamins on the market as long as anyone can remember, only requiring a prescription to make sure your kid wasn't getting too much fluoride, the tooth hardener that turns your teeth to mush when taken in excess.

Anyway, boring old product most doctors still prescribe by name, even though 99.9% of those prescriptions have been filled with a generic for decades, then a new company buys the name. Most of you know where this is going. The old "minor change" trick. The company buys the name, makes a minor change in the formula, and now, all the sudden all those Poly-Vi-Flor prescriptions can no longer be filled with the cheap generic. I'm looking at you Auralgan.

In the case of Poly and Tri-Vi-Flor......Zytera uses a slightly different form of folic acid, one of the B vitamins. The folic acid we eat or take in vitamin supplements, like a gazillion other drugs and food parts, is metabolized into the form your body eventually uses. That is the full time job of your liver. Changing the stuff you eat into the stuff you use. Zytera uses the form of folate that comes out of your liver for the new Poly and Tri-Vi-Flor.

Ho hum.

Not to hear the folks at Zylera tell it though, after the usual blah blah blah about how the new formulations are NOT pharmaceutically equivalent to previous (inexpensive) formulations, this is what today's fax said, word for word:

Recent studies have indicated that 40-75% of the population has a genetic variant called methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase also known as MTHFR that impairs the ability to process folate. This defective gene leads to elevated levels of homocysteine and defective methylation. Defective methylation is associated with psychiatric illnesses, such as schizophrenia, depression and bipolar, as well as autoimmunity disorders, ADD, autism, spina bifida, Down's syndrome, miscarriages, and cancer.

I'm not making this up. Basically a pharmaceutical manufacturer this day sent out a fax to pharmacies around the country that essentially said... HOLY MOTHER OF GOD IF YOU DON'T USE BRAND NAME POLY-VI-FLOR THE BABIES WILL BE CRAZY AND RETARDED AND DEAD!!! THEIR OWN WHITE BLOOD CELLS WILL JOIN UP WITH RAMPAGING CANCER TO EAT THE CHILDREN FROM THE INSIDE!!!!! BE AFRAID BE AFRAID BE AFRAID!!!!!!

I will step back here and remind you we are talking about baby vitamins. Hopefully you won't need me to tell you that 40 to 75% of babies born in the last 40 years have not turned out to be spina bifida wrecked schizophrenics, despite how badly the people at Zylera would like you to believe that. My guess is there's a reason these incredibly irresponsible bullshit claims were made in a fax, and not in the more permanent and traceable form of a postal letter or advertisement.

So thank you Zylera. Before I got this fax the temptation was very strong not to use my limited amount of time behind the counter calling doctors to explain why Poly-Vi-Flor is now bullshit. You can bet your left testicle that whenever I see a prescription for your crap in a bottle from now on though, time will be made.

Fuckers.