91–100 of 118 posts
So long as we administer drugs based only on their effect on symptoms but without understanding root causes, there will be all kinds of abuse and fads.
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There must be some ambiguity in the article, because GP's reading looks plausible to me. For example, "You can’t have one set of elements in Russia and another in the US, everyone would work together and compare notes. At the very least one side would have the common decency to at least steal from the other. No way anything like this could possibly go on. But as far as I can tell this is exactly the state of modern p…
It's things like this that point out that the author a) can't write effectively and b) doesn't know anything about pharmacology/medicinal chemistry. Why are people going nuts about an article written about a very advanced subject that's written by a non-expert?
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> But the only thing the author bases this on is the summary of a study in russian that the author can't even read. Not true. He said that "they seem to have pretty good evidential support", and that russian study was used only as an example . Also while comparison tu room temperature superconductivity might be a hyperbole, apparently drug having "both stimulant and anti-anxiety properties" that "millions of Russians…
The possible evidence is in those other journal articles, but they are in russian as well, which the author admittedly can't read. So I'm wondering how he arrived at his conclusion when all the possibly hard evidence is in a language he doesn't understand?
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Why can't you see a doctor about your anxiety?
Why should he have to?
However, if I was suffering anxiety, or any other disorder, to the point where I wanted to take medication, I would see a doctor. I would not trust myself to diagnose myself, let alone prescribe a course of treatment.
> It is considered novel having both stimulant and anti-anxiety properties. That would be handy. I did take an American anti-anxiety drug for a short while during a painful divorce, but I went from someone who gets hours of work done on the bus to work every day to someone who just stares out the window. Sure, I was happy and not worried and not desperate, but I wasn't getting half the amount of work done either.
But a medication that disrupts the anxious cycles of thought while at the same time stimulating the motivation/energy to complete tasks... well, that sounds almost like magic to me, especially if it doesn't involve the retrograde amnesia associated with benzos like alprazolam, lorazepam, etc.
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I sometimes wonder why people make these egregious reading comprehension mistakes. It sometimes seem to come from reading stuff too literally. Are the people who do this really smart but simply too analytically inclined to comprehend normal prose?
I don't know. My natural reaction when reading something that clearly makes no sense is to assume that maybe I misread something, go back a bit and read more carefully. Maybe it's because some people have the default assumption of "they must be wrong", and others "I might be wrong", and this determines how their knee-jerk reactions look like?
From that I then try and get a grip on how wrong everybody is and then react according to what seems to make the most sense at the time.
Then later I reflect on my actions and curse myself for being wrong.
If I'm desperate for medicine and am willing to take a risk by taking a non government-tested drug, then shouldn't that be my right? Also, it's not even entirely clear whether on the whole, the FDA saves more lives than it harms. Sure, it's prevented many bad drugs from going to market, but the astronomical costs (both time/money/energy) associated with getting drugs approved by the FDA 1) slows down good pharma companies and 2) discourages many people from starting good pharma businesses at all.
A free market solution to this would be to have FDA and/or commercial enterprises vet the drugs with open, transparent standards, and the pharma companies can choose at will whether or not they want to be certified by these companies (and list whatever certifications they received on their products). The consumers can then choose at will whether they want to buy products with only these certification(s), or they can take a gamble and buy completely uncertified products.
Entrusting a government agency to retain totalitarian, opaque control over what drugs can make it to the market is just a bad idea.
This is most likely an extremely unpopular opinion here, but mandatory FDA approval is another one of those government regulations that I think the world would probably be better without. If I'm desperate for medicine and am willing to take a risk by taking a non government-tested drug, then shouldn't that be my right? Also, it's not even entirely clear whether on the whole, the FDA saves more lives than it harms. Su…
This is most likely an extremely unpopular opinion here, but mandatory FDA approval is another one of those government regulations that I think the world would probably be better without. If I'm desperate for medicine and am willing to take a risk by taking a non government-tested drug, then shouldn't that be my right? Also, it's not even entirely clear whether on the whole, the FDA saves more lives than it harms. Su…
Not long ago, the free market solution was snake oil. Literally.
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Hyperbole. Marketing is how the rest of us sell things. Giant drug company would have many advantages there. They are likely to sell boatloads of product regardless of patents. The patent is a greedy attempt to dominate the market legally in addition to commercially by creating a monopoly.
The drug industry is very different from other industries because of generics. The FDA has an approval pathway that allows you to say "my drug is identical to that other drug". Also, many states have legislation that requires pharmacists to fill Rx with generics. Marketing won't do a whole lot to help that. If the same thing happened to the tech industry, it would work like this... you create an awesome new gadget an…