41–50 of 277 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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I am unsure why you have been down voted because fundamentally your point is correct. Health is a fully regulated space, and no entity should be supplying medical products without adherence to requirements appropriate to their role. Compounding GLP-1 seems to me to be in the higher bar space.
Semaglutide / GLP-1 compounding is not limited to just Hims. Lot's of pharmacies do it. The manufacturer (Novo Nordisk) charges 5x-10x for the exact same thing. The author calls the GLP-1s used in compounding "Chinese Knockoffs", but offers no evidence of quality control problems, and is instead relying on the reader's prejudices. GLP-1 drugs may be a game-changer for obesity and diabetes, the same way that cholester…
Hims is actually very expensive. I get the same Semaglutide for far cheaper either via my hormone dr. (provides a small, reliable dose of testosterone (trt) every month and legit access to hard to get compounds via a compounding pharmacy. No hoop jumping, they have a menu, I order from it. In real life I take 2 - 3x the testosterone dose when I am on but when I am coasting its easy no stress way to get what I want de…
They don’t care that it helps people stick to their healthy diets and get better. They need these people to bear the stigma of the gluttony.
I might be crazy, but I am more sympathetic to Hims after reading this than I was before.
Up until the part where people couldn’t cancel their subscriptions or got charged out of the blue
Hims is actually very expensive. I get the same Semaglutide for far cheaper either via my hormone dr. (provides a small, reliable dose of testosterone (trt) every month and legit access to hard to get compounds via a compounding pharmacy. No hoop jumping, they have a menu, I order from it. In real life I take 2 - 3x the testosterone dose when I am on but when I am coasting its easy no stress way to get what I want de…
There’s a very vocal, puritanical anti-semaglutide crowd that thinks using the drug is a way of subverting the moral order. “You have poor willpower, you’re SUPPOSED to be fat as a punishment!” They don’t care that it helps people stick to their healthy diets and get better. They need these people to bear the stigma of the gluttony.
Hims is actually very expensive. I get the same Semaglutide for far cheaper either via my hormone dr. (provides a small, reliable dose of testosterone (trt) every month and legit access to hard to get compounds via a compounding pharmacy. No hoop jumping, they have a menu, I order from it. In real life I take 2 - 3x the testosterone dose when I am on but when I am coasting its easy no stress way to get what I want de…
The explosive growth of Hims and other side-channel healthcare businesses (using this model -- telehealth combined with compounded meds) is entirely due to the "legitimate" healthcare system's complete and total failure to serve patients' needs. You can maybe talk about the hollow men of Novo and Lilly, who colluded with PBMs and insurers for most of a decade to push the cost of insulin analogues into the stratospher…
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Oligopolies colluding to elevate prices of necessities to fatal levels is a product of regulation. In cases like these, incumbent businesses support regulation because it raises barriers to entry for new entrants; this results in oligopoly or monopoly, permitting the extraction of monopoly rents, even when people are literally dying in the streets because they can't afford products like insulin which are extremely cheap to produce.
(Insulin wasn't always cheap to produce, but for 43 years now it's produced by genetically engineered microorganisms, which makes it very cheap. It's a tiny protein, only 51 amino acids, produced from a 110-amino-acid precursor protein.)
Hims is actually very expensive. I get the same Semaglutide for far cheaper either via my hormone dr. (provides a small, reliable dose of testosterone (trt) every month and legit access to hard to get compounds via a compounding pharmacy. No hoop jumping, they have a menu, I order from it. In real life I take 2 - 3x the testosterone dose when I am on but when I am coasting its easy no stress way to get what I want de…
Counterexample: what about antibiotics? There are negative externalities to their inappropriate use (yes, there are plenty of stories about the infections that were missed, but that has a lot of selection bias). There are countries that allow their use over the counter. Is that a good thing?