Stop Vomiting

It's the middle of the night and your child has been up all night, vomiting. What does the modern parent do? How about type stop vomiting into Google?

Here's an interesting ethical dilemma for our age. It turns out that the top match for this search [at least until this post replaces it] is a page at pharmcatalyst dot com (no link here for obvious reasons) that promises to tell you which medicine to take if you pay them $5 via PayPal. They point out that there's a common over the counter drug that will help, but that drug manufacturers can't tell you what it is because the government won't let them. (I'll save you the money, it's doxylamine, the ingredient in Unisom. They encourage you to mix a tablet with Pepsi).

But wait! In most cases, most of the time, common vomiting is a body's natural and positive reaction to something in the environment. Check here: Nausea and Vomiting. And when it's not that, when it is something that should be stopped, you probably should be at the doctor anyway.

Other than trying to leave a legacy for future midnight surfers, the purpose of this post is to help us think about whether charging $5 for information like this is ethical--and if you think it is, whether it is possible to do it successfully for long...

We now take you back to our regularly scheduled programming.