Couldn’t See This Coming
By Mitch Berg
Gregg Allman gets a liver transplant:
In a statement, Allman said he’d turned his life around, but liver damage led to doctors recommending a transplant.
“I changed my ways years ago, but we can’t turn back time,” he said. “Every day is a gift, and I can’t wait to get back on the road making music with my friends.”
I had a college professor who’d worked concert security during grad school in the seventies who remembered having to carry Allman onstage and prop him up on the stool behind his Hammond B3.
June 24th, 2010 at 7:38 am
Considering he was married to Cher for about six hours, I’m thinking Allman needed a new spleen.
June 24th, 2010 at 8:30 am
Well the liver transplant thing worked for David Crosby, because he seems to have taken sobriety seriously. John Phillips got one but died anyway (He was seen drinking in a bar afterward), and it didn’t seem to help Micky Mantle.
Good luck to Gregg. He’s lasted a lot longer than Duane did.
June 24th, 2010 at 10:05 am
Wow. One soundbite from Gregg and he excerpts both Cher and Willie Nelson. Don’t do drugs, kids.
June 24th, 2010 at 11:07 am
Post-transplant behavior is important.
My college choir director may be the longest-lived person in the world with a liver transplant; he got one in the summer of 1981. He was the first person to be given Cyclosporin as an anti-rejection drug, and it made the difference; every transplant before him had died within months if not days, IIRC.
Unlike Allman, Phillips and Crosby, my director didn’t drink his factory liver to death; it was a congenital condition that led to his liver spontaneously shutting down. His aftermarket liver came from a 19 year old accident victim. When we were on tour in Cologne Germany two years later, the director gave the liver a 21st birthday party (not excessive; a beer was plenty). The occasional beer wasn’t an issue – but then, chemical abuse had never been his thing, either.
I wonder if miracle drugs like Cyclosporin will be developed anymore, now that we have Obamacare?
June 24th, 2010 at 11:24 am
Only for the very elite.
June 24th, 2010 at 2:15 pm
Oh, there will be drug development for the little people, alright. Mostly in the area of euthanasia.
June 24th, 2010 at 2:47 pm
Mitch wrote “I wonder if miracle drugs like Cyclosporin will be developed anymore, now that we have Obamacare?”
ROFL – checked out the number of huge pharmaceutical companies in the UK lately, including doing their research there? If R&D is continuing there, and in other industrialized countries with more modern medical delivery systems than ours, it will continue here. (got any other supernatural boogeymen to pull out of your imagination, LOL?)
http://www.allaboutmedicalsales.com/dir/top20_pharma_companies.html
top 20 pharma companies in the UK
1. GlaxoSmithKline
2. Pfizer
3. Astra Zeneca
4. Merk & Co
5. Wyeth
6. Novartis
7. Aventis Pharma
8. Pharmacia Ltd
9. Roche
10. Lilly
11. Sanofi-Synthelabo
12. Bristol-Myers Squibb
13. Johnson & Johnson
14. Boehringer Ingelheim
15. Novo Nordisk
16. Abbott
17. Bayer
18. Schering Plough
19. Schering Ag
20. Lundbeck
June 24th, 2010 at 3:45 pm
Dog Gone said:
“more modern medical delivery systems than ours”
More bureaucracy is “more modern”? Well, isn’t that NICE.
June 24th, 2010 at 4:01 pm
“If R&D is continuing there”
How much? What are the numbers?
Domestic sales to R&D? Sales to R&D outsourced?
And how does the big FDA variable affect all of this?
June 24th, 2010 at 4:04 pm
Dog Gone said:
“checked out the number of huge pharmaceutical companies in the UK lately, including doing their research there? If R&D is continuing there, and in other industrialized countries with more modern medical delivery systems than ours, it will continue here”
You’re missing the point, though perhaps intentionally.
Who has to be persuaded to buy pharmaceuticals? The customer.
Who is the customer in the UK? The government.
So things will be exactly the same before and after Obamacare? Possibly, but a list of pharmaceutical companies doing R&D in the UK doesn’t cut it in the “proof” department.
June 25th, 2010 at 12:19 am
Well, Troy, many of the medical device companies in the US have already said ObamaNationCare will severely cut into R&D.
Fact.
Heck, why haven’t we heard much form deegee about how congress almost hauled some CEO’s for a Congress beat down in front of cameras… until they realized those companies were just following the rules congress set out…
Hmmmmm….
DG, moderate you claim, really? Seriously?
Me thinks the VG/KA has clouded your perception. I suggest a wagon.