Finished mowing the lawn or washing the car? The kids are busy? No one’s asked you to do an errand? Then relax with these….

Will Glaxo’s Alli diet pill be a smash? Depends who you ask. Caroline Apovian, a Boston doc who wrote The Alli Diet Plan, a book designed to promote the drug, doesn’t understand the shame people might feel over losing bowel control while taking Alli. “It’s also embarrassing to be obese,” Apovian, a paid Glaxo consultant, tells The Philadelphia Inquirer. “It’s embarrassing to be dead.”

But Maria Taylor, a pharmacist at Narbeth Pharmacy near Philadelphia, says Alli isn’t a hot item. “We do have it in stock. No one has inquired about it. Maybe it should come with a coupon for Depends,” the adult diaper.

Can continuing medical education exist without industry influence? A doc who moderated a panel on antipsychotics says that’s unlikely. The panel was sponsored by Lilly, which sells Zyprexa, and the moderator and two other panel docs had ties to Lilly as paid consultants, advisers or speakers. One panel slide said no study “has proven that antipsychotics directly cause diabetes,” but didn’t mention Lilly has paid more than $1 billion to settle lawsuits charging Zyprexa caused diabetes-related symptoms.

“Anybody who writes or teaches or does research, they are likely to have funding at one time or another,” William Glazer, the panel moderator, tells The Indianapolis Star, adding Lilly had no control over content. “The pharmaceutical industry is incredibly important for underwriting education, and so if you were to leave out anybody that had connections of any sort, I’m not sure I’d attend the meeting. What I’d be hearing would be a lot of people with their own personal biases in their own particular areas (of interest).”