This article is quite bad: haughty in tone and confused in content.
If you are interested in learning something about a key part subject matter (compounding loopholes and their impact on drug prices), this article is much better:
The Hollow Men of Hims
131–140 of 277 posts
Re: The Hollow Men of Hims
#132The attitude in this article is suffocating. I’m 40, healthy, and picked up cheap generic Cialis for the hell of it with no shame, no crisis. It flipped my sex life on its head, instantly. The real scandal is how cheap, safe, and transformative this stuff is, and yet the medical world acts like you’re doing something dangerous by just wanting better sex. It’s not a problem. It’s the most fun I’ve had in years.
Re: The Hollow Men of Hims
#133Interesting how a few rare commenters strongly agree with this article and yet most comments here don't. Perhaps HN is full of people with high digital literacy, relatively high reasoning ability etc. People like this can benefit from the service. The article's core point is that Hims uses unethical marketing. Maybe the HN crowd is privileged: people here may be able to resist marketing. The article's unstated point…
>these unfortunate people spend pretty much their whole lives bouncing around from scam to scam.
Should these people be eligible to vote?
Re: The Hollow Men of Hims
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had the opposite take, actually. I had to think about it for a sec and suddenly, “oh, right. Novo nordisk == Danish == Scandinavian design” cute. This style of writing is a welcome change from all the AI slop or self promoting blogs out there. It’s a personal touch without making it all about the author. Long form articles with some humor used to be all I wanted to read on the web.
> This style of writing is a welcome change from all the AI slop or self promoting blogs out there. Dude. This is AI slop. And quite obviously so! You think all those EM DASHes are there naturally? Or the constant use of reversal? No one writes like that. (Even the people who love em-dashes and make a point of using the Unicode point will change it up more than that, rather than using it like a metronome.) Even if th…
The constant use of metaphor and simile drove me crazy. I had suspected this might be AI due to the frequency as well as absurdity of some of the comparisons (Talmudic scholars? Renaissance cardinals??) but humans also write dumb things like this that make them feel smart more than they serve rhetorical purpose. Or so I think.
I mean just look at this. I didn't even need to look through more than a few paragraphs to find:
> But the subscription traps are where the real extraction occurs—and here we encounter the kind of business model innovation that would make a mobster tip his hat in professional admiration. Customers complain of being locked into year-long commitments they can't escape, like hotel California but with erectile dysfunction pills. Better Business Bureau complaints reveal the pattern with the reliability of a Swiss timepiece: ... Picture ordering a 3-month hair loss kit only to find Hims has shipped and charged for a fourth without consent, like a pharmaceutical version of that friend who keeps ordering shots when you've already said you're driving.
BTW, where's the referral URL you speak of? I didn't realize there was a smoking gun.
Re: The Hollow Men of Hims
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had the opposite take, actually. I had to think about it for a sec and suddenly, “oh, right. Novo nordisk == Danish == Scandinavian design” cute. This style of writing is a welcome change from all the AI slop or self promoting blogs out there. It’s a personal touch without making it all about the author. Long form articles with some humor used to be all I wanted to read on the web.
> This style of writing is a welcome change from all the AI slop or self promoting blogs out there. Dude. This is AI slop. And quite obviously so! You think all those EM DASHes are there naturally? Or the constant use of reversal? No one writes like that. (Even the people who love em-dashes and make a point of using the Unicode point will change it up more than that, rather than using it like a metronome.) Even if th…
The link on "adrafinil" has a utm_source=chatgpt.com
Re: The Hollow Men of Hims
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
It works the same way that health insurance works -- most people don't need all that much care, and when time-consuming care is needed, it is often pushed to the specialists rather than the generalist. Your $50/mo payment might not seem like much, but if all you're doing is a bi-monthly checkin with them over the phone, you're really paying more like $100/visit for a 15-30 minute visit. A lot of these 'concierge medi…
Doctors make $20k a month or more. That's 420+ patients at $50/m. Doesn't seem feasible to know them all personally and deeply. Other revenue would be needed.
420 young, healthy patients probably see the doctor 2x a year at most. That's less than 20 visits a week for the doctor. And as soon as you become unhealthy you are passed along to a specialist or dropped.
You're paying for the bedside manner, not the medicine.
Re: The Hollow Men of Hims
#137> The genius of Hims lies in understanding that consumers will pay almost any premium to avoid the humiliation of discussing erectile dysfunction or hair loss with an actual human being.
Maybe.
> Finasteride for hair loss runs about $10-15 per month as a generic,
I wish. Generic finasteride costs ~$70+t¹/3mo but only from a PBM, and $80/mo from a pharmacy, and is utterly uncovered by insurance.
Or maybe, it is that this is what American Rx healthcare looks like: https://imgur.com/a/awRSOsA ²
> and can cost as little as $2 per month with a GoodRx coupon.
And how does GoodRx somehow magically make drugs cheaper?
> On February 25, 2020, Consumer Reports published an article stating that GoodRx shared user data—specifically, pseudonymized advertising ID numbers that companies use to track the behavior of web users across websites, the names of the drugs that users browsed, and the pharmacies where user sought to fill prescriptions—with Google, Facebook, and around twenty other internet-based companies.
> On February 1, 2023, the Federal Trade Commission fined GoodRx US$1.5 million for violations of the Breach Notification Rule and the Federal Trade Commission Act for allegedly failing to obtain specific, informed, and unambiguous consent from users before disclosing health-related information to Facebook and Google.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoodRx#Controversy)
Last time I was offered a GoodRx coupon (well past those dates) it came with no informed consent of any kind, being merely presented as "magic coupon make drug cheaper" which triggered my "that's too good to be true" alarm. AFAICT, selling your information is the company's business plan.
¹Cigna is utterly incompetent, and while the discount of playing their game is sizable, it costs a great deal of time. It took, I think, 4? 5? calls to customer support to set up a prescription?
²No, proceeding to checkout does not get you the price. You don't get to know the price until after you've placed the order. I have to go on past experience, and prayers.
Re: The Hollow Men of Hims
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not a charitable take of the critics. If you go on a fad diet, lose weight, then gain it back when you stop, well, you haven't really lost anything other than time. If you go on semaglutide, lose weight, then gain it all back when you stop, you're out thousands of dollars, I'm out money when my insurance premium goes up to support the new expensive drugs, and you might have permanent health complications (rar…
> and you might have permanent health complications (rare though they might be). Does obesity have permanent health complications and cost you extra in premiums?
There are other options for addressing obesity than "semaglutide or nothing".
Re: The Hollow Men of Hims
#139> The genius of Hims lies in understanding that consumers will pay almost any premium to avoid the humiliation of discussing erectile dysfunction or hair loss with an actual human being. Does the telemedicine appeal to people because they want to avoid embarrassment, or because they know that traditional doctors will schedule you for an appointment three months out just to say “have you tried getting better sleep, lo…
When it comes to Men's health, doctor's really don't give much of a fuck. Their primary concern is are you actually sick , they don't care about how you feel, or your self-image, or your sense of masculinity. Hair loss is sucky, sure, but in the grand scheme of medicine it's nothing. Erectile dysfunction sucks, but are you old? That's just the name of the game. I lost my testicles to cancer (yippee) and you would be…
> Hair loss is sucky, sure, but in the grand scheme of medicine it's nothing.
It's also pretty trivial to prevent or recover at onset. Finasteride and minoxadil are FDA approved on-label prescriptions for it (well, the later is OTC).
Dermatologists will happily write the prescription and check in with you as often as you want to schedule.
Re: The Hollow Men of Hims
#140This is a frustrating article. To pick one example:
"The most damning aspect is not their exploitation of loopholes or their willingness to combine dangerous drug cocktails or even their reliance on unvetted Chinese suppliers..."
"unvetted" is doing a lot of work here. There's no evidence provided for this claim of working with shady sources and doing no diligence on the products they are selling. I know that to be false from first-hand connections in the telehealth space.
Hims works with 503B pharmacies. They are FDA inspected. They run batch testing on their source material and require strict compliance. All safe, legal, vetted pathways.
It's bizarre to me that the author is linking Novo Nordisk newswire press releases as sources of truth but is unwilling to to do basic research on how Hims operates. NN is hardly a faultless player here. They're selling this medicine for $1k+ per month!
Separately -- Algorithmic care is fine because most decisions are algorithmic. It's no different than what you receive from the 5-minute dr visit in person.
In a perfect world we'd have primary care doctors to coordinate care, direct you to the perfect pharmacy for each medicine you need, etc. In our real world, convenience and access are a good things. The shift from "patient" to DTC "client" is a net win for the public.