The only silver lining of the pandemic is that I haven't had a cold or flu in years and haven't needed to ask for behind the counter pseudoephedrine.
The Uselessness of Phenylephrine
431–440 of 613 posts
Re: The Uselessness of Phenylephrine
#432Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find acetaminophen almost completely useless for pain. Ibuprofen is better but still not very effective. Naproxen sodium is the only OTC pain medicine which is effective for me.
accordind to the American Dental Association, 500mg of acetaminophen in combination with 200mg of ibuprofen is more effective than naproxen for pain relief. https://jada.ada.org/article/S0002-8177(18)30117-X/fulltext (the result are in table 1)
Don't really care what the ADA has to say. I have conducted my own study on myself, my comment was regarding which is most effective for me, and naproxen sodium is by far more effective for my pain relief than other OTC pain relievers including combinations which I have in fact tried.
Re: The Uselessness of Phenylephrine
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
"lack of consensus about how to treat some of the most common conditions in the human population (e.g. back pain)" That one is obvious: question too broad ... does not compute ... out of cheese error. Back pain is a massive, massive thing - it sometimes doesn't actually involve the back. Here's an anecdote: I (50ish y/o male) used to have episodes of quite crippling to very crippling "back pain". To cut a long story…
I wouldn't call the latter a "fix". More like avoiding the problem. Let's pretend for as second the actual problem was some sort of muscular tightness you've developed, wouldn't the preferable fix be to identify the tightness, do some exercises regularly that alleviate it, and conserve the original function of your body? Otherwise seems like you're just slowly abandoning capabilities that your body used to have.
I'm a bloke what is going from 0 to n years old where n is hopefully undefined and roughly "later". I'm currently 51.
When I was a child/teen/young adult I had a habit of basically twisting myself in such a way that I stored energy and then released it to turn over - perhaps a bit like a rubber band being twisted. That's fine in a young body but not in an older one. Bear in mind that the same person (mind) is within both the young and old body and it took quite a lot of time to realise that I'm not as agile as I was.
I'm a lot more cunning these days and for example can actually ski far better than I used to as a child but if I fall, it bloody hurts!
Funnily enough the wallet thing is way more important to my wellbeing.
Re: The Uselessness of Phenylephrine
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my mind it is not a good system, because if the surgeon is looking at a much-more-difficult than average circumstance, than he could reasonably expect a lower-than-average result, but a result that might be much better than average for a case so difficult. As a separate observation, any time data is kept, turned into metrics that then become the basis for goals ("I want to have a better-than-average success rate,…
I think you are right that there is a natural and understandable psychological resistance to a data-based evaluation system. I understand that the doctor may realize something about the patient that will lower his/her chances of success. I'm arguing that a sufficiently comprehensive system would take in to account whatever that doctor realized (and perhaps much more) and compensate for it when determining expected ou…
This assumes a level of knowledge that simply doesn't exist.
A simple illustration: I have medical issues with no meaningful diagnosis, despite seeing many doctors. If the medical community can't figure out what's wrong, how can they have an understanding of all the relevant factors in determining risk?
Re: The Uselessness of Phenylephrine
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
What makes you say the FDA is actively adding poison to other drugs, are there first hand sources from them? "Not everyone thought it was a good idea to make alcohol deadly, when making it illegal hadn’t stopped drinkers, and New Jersey Senator Edward I. Edwards called it “legalized murder.” However, the Anti-Saloon League persisted, arguing that legal alcohol had killed many more in its day than denatured alcohol wo…
This makes me wonder if it would have been possible to, instead of using something that causes significant harms to health, instead something which just causes a rather unpleasant experience. But, I guess one important thing is whether such an additive is compatible with the altered substance still being usable for the purpose for which it is being made available. Now, presumably something as simple as “dissolve larg…
During prohibition, the government tried things along those lines, as well as basically any poisonous or unpleasant chemical they could get their hands on. However, the problem was that anything not sufficiently alcohol-like could be pretty easily distilled out by bootleggers. What was much harder to distill out was large quantities of exceptionally-poisonous methanol.
Nowadays, of course, alcohol is cheap and plentiful enough that there's no incentive to re-nature it, and we can get away with much less extreme measures. In many cases, the alcohol won't contain any methanol at all, and may even be drinkable.
A good article on the government's arms race against bootlegging: https://slate.com/technology/2010/02/the-little-told-story-o... (also, the author's book "The Poisoner's Handbook")
Re: The Uselessness of Phenylephrine
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it's absolutely very difficult to do rigorous statistical analysis. Genetics is oversimplified to non-physicians. It's cool that we can diagnose and predict the likelihood of getting Huntington's disease using our knowledge of genetics, but extremely few diseases are this simple. There are huge swaths of the human genome that we don't understand but are likely playing some important role in the regulation of oth…
Yup. As a patient I've found a bunch of bogus allergies in my records once that I was able to get fixed, but I know there's other stuff I've tried but the doc wasn't interested in listening. He felt he had "proved" I was mistaken/faking when he didn't listen in the first place. How am I supposed to identify the evil item in a challenge when it isn't even present? (I had said "ham". The challenge was with pork. I didn…
I've had doctors make up things as egregious as my height.
I had one doc I had only met remotely who entered a height into my online, shared record that was several inches shorter than I was...back when I was an 11-year-old child. It's been 25 years since I was that short.
I pressed them that they could at least have asked me how tall I am, or even consulted the previous entries by other doctors in their same system.
There wasn't even an attempt at an excuse. It was plain, simple negligence.
That doctor had also been insisting I needed to let him do an exploratory surgery, despite never even having had me come to the office in person, so I noped right out of there and started telling that story to everyone I thought might consider seeing him.
Re: The Uselessness of Phenylephrine
#437Earlier quoted context omitted.
My impression of the medical system (both here in Germany, and through reports from the US) is that it's very much like everything else: much is crap, much is mediocre, some good, and a very small, excellent sliver. This goes for doctors, drugs, surgeries, devices. If you want good results, you really have to take matters into your own hands, search for possible treatments yourself, evaluate several doctors until you…
This is the reason why the US system is better than Canada. In Canada you can't shop around and need referrals for specialists.
Canada is indeed very frustrating. It's great for simple things like a broken arm. But the reality is that it's years behind in treatment of complex illnesses. There are a lot of people in Canada that travel to US to see specialists, when they can afford.
US is also able to attract the best professionals, including MDs. Here in Canada we're left with the "leftovers". Those that did not make it big in life.
Re: The Uselessness of Phenylephrine
#438Earlier quoted context omitted.
You seem to be under the impression that there is some 'advanced technology' out there that will magically solve your problems that the US fails to have. In my experience, many people have a quasi-religious belief in the capability of modern medicine to perform what would otherwise be called a miracle. This belief is typically held without any evidence whatsoever. In reality, there are a plethora of conditions, some…
Ignoring them is unethical. Treating them with an unscientific treatment is unethical.
In practice the rest of my life is probably going to be playing whack-a-mole with symptoms without any understanding of what's causing the underlying issues. I have no meaningful diagnosis so by your standard there can be no treatment.
Re: The Uselessness of Phenylephrine
#439Earlier quoted context omitted.
You seem to be under the impression that there is some 'advanced technology' out there that will magically solve your problems that the US fails to have. In my experience, many people have a quasi-religious belief in the capability of modern medicine to perform what would otherwise be called a miracle. This belief is typically held without any evidence whatsoever. In reality, there are a plethora of conditions, some…
The problem with empowering people medically is that 10% of people will benefit from it but 90% of people will get info from Facebook and infomercials and fall victim to quacks. Hence everything being gated behind credentials and prescriptions (along with some good old regulatory capture). I disagree with the characterization of medicine not being able to treat so many things. Many things are incurable but a lot of m…
> I disagree with the characterization of medicine not being able to treat so many things. Many things are incurable but a lot of medicine/public health is so effective we barely think about it. Of course we are going to notice and pay more attention to the things medicine sucks at treating, because they’re real problems that inflict a lot of pain due to the lack of treatment.
> But medicine is very good at treating plenty of things like infections (of many different kinds), traumatic/acute injuries, and many disabilities.
I agree that medicine is very good at treating infections and traumatic/acute injuries. Which disabilities are you referring to? Outside of these categories, what can we we effectively treat or cure? It seems to be very little.
Re: The Uselessness of Phenylephrine
#440Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ignoring them is unethical. Treating them with an unscientific treatment is unethical.
And the ethical alternative is, for chronic conditions, someone who suffers for their entire life and is not allowed to do anything about it? Look at every wastebasket diagnosis (yes, that's a real term) out there. There is no "ethical", approved treatment. In fact, there's not even an understanding of what the condition is. Instead, doctors work down a list of bad ideas with their patients: all the various medicatio…
And note that such things don't always remain wastebasket diagnosis. Sometimes we figure out what's actually going on.
Personally, I think many of the cases where something works for one patient but not another is actually saying there's more than one possible cause for the situation.