OFF HIS MEDS

RUSH LIMBAUGH


Alright, we all know that Rush Limbaugh is a true cretin; a dispicable human being in any and every sense of the word who ought to be rotting in prison given his past transgressions and not spewing his bile over the taxpayer-owned airwaves.
Today's target of his offensive ramblings is Michael J. Fox, the actor who suffers from Parkinson's disease. Fox recently shot a campaign ad for Missouri Democratic Senate candidate Claire McCaskill urging that a vote for McCaskill would be a step towards getting federally funded stem cell research approved and a possible cure for dibilitating diseases like Parkinson's might be found.



It's a pretty powerful and effective ad and given that a standard election season has thousands of ads of dubious quality and veracity, this one resonates.

Limbaugh, being the kind and caring soul he is, had this to say about the ad:

"I stated when I saw the ad, I was commenting to you about it, that he was either off the medication or he was acting. He is an actor, after all."

He then goes on to claim he has received a "plethora of emails" stating that Fox has admitted in interviews that he goes off his meds and that he had done so for this ad in an effort to make himself look more sympathetic. Of course these emails' claim are bogus (if they even exist at all other than in Rush's drug-addled brain), as the interviews don't exist since Fox has never said such a thing. In fact, quite the opposite, in regards to meds/movement link appears to be the case - as in, the medicine is the cause of the movements and not the Parkinson's itself.
From a doctor emailer to Crooks and Liars:

The chorea that Michael J Fox has in that ad comes from chronic use of dopamine agonists in the context of Parkinson's. They're movements from the medicine, not the disease itself. Although he might have odd movements OFF of his meds, they wouldn't look like the ones in the ad.

Of course, guys like Limbaugh (and when I say that, I mean Republicans in general) don't cotton to things like science. They say whatever the hell they want in an effort to smear people who disagree with them and their point of view. That he would target Fox is just more evidence of this fact.

UPDATE: Another doctor backs up the above claim and shows Limbaugh to be the arrogant and ignorant fool we all knew him to be. Here's some quick research from Jonathan Cohn at The Plank over at the New Republic, who spoke to Dr. William J. Weiner, a professor and chairman of the department of neurology at the University of Maryland Medical Center:

What you are seeing on the video is side effects of the medication. He has to take that medication to sit there and talk to you like that. ... He's not over-dramatizing. ... [Limbaugh] is revealing his ignorance of Parkinson's disease, because people with Parkinson's don't look like that at all when they're not taking their medication. They look stiff, and frozen, and don't move at all. ... People with Parkinson's, when they've had the disease for awhile, are in this bind, where if they don't take any medication, they can be stiff and hardly able to talk. And if they do take their medication, so they can talk, they get all of this movement, like what you see in the ad.

When I want commentary on the side-effects of oxycontin I'll ask Rush. Otherwise, he should exercise some restraint and stop talking out of the side of his ass. Of course, if he did that, he wouldn't be able to make a living, but would that be such a bad thing for humanity?