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Threat in Your Medicine Cabinet: The FDA's Gamble on America's Drugs
11–20 of 82 posts
Re: Threat in Your Medicine Cabinet: The FDA's Gamble on America's Drugs
#12I'm so angry right now. I did a deep dive into this at one point after being prescribed some generic Vyvanse through Sun via Dillons/Kroger. The pills smell like fish and seem like they didn't work at all. I checked some records from the FDA and Sun wasn't listed. I brought it up to my doctor and they just brushed it off. I really hope another class action lawsuit is brought against Sun.
I have nothing but respect for physicians but my experience is that each acts as a more narrow filter than the last and, beyond their direct expertise they have very little expertise in billing, pharmacy or anything outside of their direct domain, nor do they have the bandwidth for it. Add to that the advertising phenomenon of 'ask your doctor about X' and I suspect that anything beyond the immediate care you're rece…
I respect doctors (and people in general), but I don’t give the medical profession a passing grade. To speak in generalities (there are exceptions), their training is somewhat insane: long hours, sleep deprivation, knowledge cramming, and more. Their daily practice leaves little time or incentive for keeping up with studies. Most were not adequately taught statistics in the first place. To vent a bit more, I don’t think it is unfair to say the system is crap. If we could redesign it from scratch, understanding human nature, how people learn, and the need for ongoing learning, and evidence-based medicine, it would not be this. None of this is meant to assign blame to individuals.
Re: Threat in Your Medicine Cabinet: The FDA's Gamble on America's Drugs
#13I'm so angry right now. I did a deep dive into this at one point after being prescribed some generic Vyvanse through Sun via Dillons/Kroger. The pills smell like fish and seem like they didn't work at all. I checked some records from the FDA and Sun wasn't listed. I brought it up to my doctor and they just brushed it off. I really hope another class action lawsuit is brought against Sun.
Oh boy. I've had quite the experience with my own ADHD medication (dextroamphetamine in my case, which is essentially the stuff Vyvanse metabolizes into), and when they substituted for a different brand, that brand was completely different and so totally not compatible with this body. So now I have a Brand Medically Necessary because when they tried to switch it on me I went into hypertensive crisis :)
The drug you mentioned had a reputation for these sorts of problems.
Re: Threat in Your Medicine Cabinet: The FDA's Gamble on America's Drugs
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have nothing but respect for physicians but my experience is that each acts as a more narrow filter than the last and, beyond their direct expertise they have very little expertise in billing, pharmacy or anything outside of their direct domain, nor do they have the bandwidth for it. Add to that the advertising phenomenon of 'ask your doctor about X' and I suspect that anything beyond the immediate care you're rece…
I respect doctors (and people in general), but I don’t give the medical profession a passing grade. To speak in generalities (there are exceptions), their training is somewhat insane: long hours, sleep deprivation, knowledge cramming, and more. Their daily practice leaves little time or incentive for keeping up with studies. Most were not adequately taught statistics in the first place. To vent a bit more, I don’t th…
>Their daily practice leaves little time or incentive for keeping up with studies.
Their certification requires it, at least to some extent.
Re: Threat in Your Medicine Cabinet: The FDA's Gamble on America's Drugs
#15The report is horrifying, but in the current US political climate it is very hard to see how a government agency could undergo any positive cultural change.
A quick search finds recent firings [1] and [2]... who would lead a change?
[1]: https://floridianpress.com/2025/06/rep-wasserman-schultz-sla... [2]: https://fortune.com/2025/02/16/trump-cuts-fda-layoffs-food-s...
Re: Threat in Your Medicine Cabinet: The FDA's Gamble on America's Drugs
#16Manufacturing drugs in India is like manufacturing them in Haiti. Why would anyone think that would be a good idea?
Re: Threat in Your Medicine Cabinet: The FDA's Gamble on America's Drugs
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't the new direction of capitalism in America Freedom from Regulation?
Yes. This is a clear example of why that's bad and why these agencies need funding and competent staffing.
these agencies had funding and competent staffing. they correctly identified that the factories were producing dangerous products.
Re: Threat in Your Medicine Cabinet: The FDA's Gamble on America's Drugs
#18The report is horrifying, but in the current US political climate it is very hard to see how a government agency could undergo any positive cultural change. A quick search finds recent firings [1] and [2]... who would lead a change? [1]: https://floridianpress.com/2025/06/rep-wasserman-schultz-sla... [2]: https://fortune.com/2025/02/16/trump-cuts-fda-layoffs-food-s...
The issue I described existed before the administration change.
Neither's parties people wants to be poisoned.
Re: Threat in Your Medicine Cabinet: The FDA's Gamble on America's Drugs
#19I'm so angry right now. I did a deep dive into this at one point after being prescribed some generic Vyvanse through Sun via Dillons/Kroger. The pills smell like fish and seem like they didn't work at all. I checked some records from the FDA and Sun wasn't listed. I brought it up to my doctor and they just brushed it off. I really hope another class action lawsuit is brought against Sun.
Isn't the new direction of capitalism in America Freedom from Regulation?
How did you arrive at that conclusion? All of the evidence provided in the article is prior to the “freedom of regulation” as you call it.
To me, it’s indicative of a rotting regulatory institution that lost its way. FDA is about safety, not low cost drugs. I don’t know how that mandate became mission critical for them but it happened before the current administration.
Re: Threat in Your Medicine Cabinet: The FDA's Gamble on America's Drugs
#20I have a pet theory about the medical industry in the USA.
The US is the most pure-capitalist nation on the planet, and medical services are as bad a fit as it gets for a market economy:
* interactions with the market are ideally as few as possible
* there is massive information asymmetry
* people can't "shop around" during medical emergencies
* the externalities are orders of magnitude more potent than the forces directly acting on a transaction
* most importantly, individuals in many cases *literally cannot exit the marketplace* (unless you consider death a viable consumer choice).
That second property creates a market incentive to squeeze every consumer dry. What can they do about it, really?
But it's insanely unethical, and extremely against the common good (externalities abound).
Those forces push the middlemen, the insurance providers, to do horrible shit. And since they are the middlemen with all of the power, and interact with literally every market actor, the culture of pure evil seeps into everything. Clinicians either becomes numb to the fact that insurance companies will literally just not pay things they agreed to pay, or live a life of endless frustration.
This is just "how it is", and so everyone, including regulators, shift their overton window to be able to function in a decrepit, toxic system.