Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Healthcare is one of the most regulated industries in existence. You are fundamentally incorrect.
How about supplements? Yeah…
The Hollow Men of Hims
71–80 of 277 posts
Re: The Hollow Men of Hims
#72>The real tragedy is not that Hims exists, but that it works so perfectly. Every day, thousands of people choose their compounded weight-loss drugs over FDA-approved alternatives, their combination ED pills over established single-ingredient treatments, their algorithmic consultations over actual medical care. They make these choices not because the products are better, but because the entire experience has been opti…
> If you want safe and really high quality medical care you should absolutely have a personal physician you have a personal relationship with, who understands your lifestyle, your risk factors for side effects, and your medical needs deeply. How many Americans have that? Maybe a few dozen? A bit of a tangent: I have this here in the US, through a model called Direct Primary Care. I pay $50/mo for a single provider, u…
> I pay $50/mo for a single provider, unlimited visits / communication, and highly discounted labs. She makes house calls on occasion. This doctor is working solely in my interest, and has little concern of insurance, except to help me navigate that system should I need a specialist, prior authorization, etc.
Someone's presumably paying her more than $50/hr, which will burn through your monthly fees pretty quickly. Where's the money coming from?
Re: The Hollow Men of Hims
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't agree with you there, because if you're treating with the wrong dose or for the wrong length of time, you run the risk of making that infection resistant. For communicable illnesses, that can be a risk for others. But I appreciate your honesty. I should also add that those pharmacies, if they are based on the United States, invariably have a licensed provider in there signing off (they would be illegal otherw…
I don't know about op but I've heard the veterinarian versions of antibiotics are widely available. Who knows on the quality control I believe many obtained ivermectin through similar channels despite it being a prescription drug
OP here, i only order from human sites :)
Ivermectin is available there as well. Never tried it though. Actually thinking of taking a mild course though. Why not?
Re: The Hollow Men of Hims
#74I 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
That's absolutely not the case. I've had two scripts years apart with hims and had no issue canceling. It's just a wizard on their website, super simple, no human contact. Does it ask if your sure a couple of times? Sure. But the right button is obvious and easy to see
Re: The Hollow Men of Hims
#75Those commercials are inane and stupid (along with BlueChew and FridayPlans). "The shameful doctor visits." The what? Seriously, doctors in urology and related fields have seen guys whose dicks haven't just malfunctioned, they were BLOWN OFF, so shame really isn't a factor here!
The perspective of the doctors is not what a patient is embarrassed about
Re: The Hollow Men of Hims
#76This buried lede is really the core of the article: > They make these choices not because the products are better, but because the entire experience has been optimized to feel more like shopping and less like confronting the mortality and vulnerability that define the human condition. This is what disruption looks like when applied to the oldest human needs: not improvement, but the illusion of improvement And contra…
Take the case of a antibiotics. A large percentage of people want their doctor to prescribe them antibiotics when they have a virus. It’s been shown that doctors who over-prescribe antibiotics get better patient reviews for example. Now you have a “better UX” that pops up that gives people exactly what they want. They answer a few questions on a website and they get an antibiotic prescription. There is no way for the…
> It’s been shown that doctors who over-prescribe antibiotics get better patient reviews for example.
Are they over-prescribing, or are the others under-prescribing? Comparing how hard it is to get antibiotics as a human with how easy it is to get them for animals (even if there's no evidence of disease) certainly makes one think.
Re: The Hollow Men of Hims
#77> 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…
It's a little of column A, little of column B, but in a mixed way. A lot of doctor visits for basic health issues are ones that can be dealt with over a phone or video call. Routine stuff like updating your medicines, changing dosages, showing a bruise or dealing with a mild fever don't require you to be physically present at the doctor's office. Having to deal with insurance, scheduling, waiting times, driving to the doctor's office in the middle of the workday are unnecessary for a large proportion of the sorts of day-to-day issues people deal with.
Telemedicine isn't a panacea, but in a system with major constraints on doctor bandwidth and where in-person visits are very expensive, it's extremely helpful. And yeah, a lot of that is because so often the solution is as you said -- get more sleep, eat better, maybe work out a little, reduce your stress. I'd much rather have a quick 15 minute call to be told that, instead of having to take several hours off work to go visit the doctor in person.
Re: The Hollow Men of Hims
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Up until the part where people couldn’t cancel their subscriptions or got charged out of the blue
I hate subscriptions and dark patterns and the like as much as anyone, but I am not sure putting a six-month pause on your subscription and getting billed in month 7 is “out of the blue.”
And it’s not the best customer service if you can’t cancel something that’s already shipping to you. But it’s also not outrageous. You could always chargeback if you don’t mind them backlisting you.
Re: The Hollow Men of Hims
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
An oligopoly colluding to push the price of easily produced products into the stratosphere isn't a product of deregulation . In a deregulated or under-regulated market, thousands of cottage-industry insulin producers would be competing to shave pennies off the prices of their insulin. You might have a hard time finding safely produced insulin, but you wouldn't have a hard time finding cheap insulin. Oligopolies collu…
This is a complex picture, so there's much more going on here than Big Pharma trying to squeeze out white-knight compounding pharmacies and supplement makers. What we have in the US is an industry that is constantly at the brink of system collapse, because that's the point of maximum efficiency/optimization. Pharma charges whatever payers (insurance companies) will support, and payers pass on whatever consumers can b…
Your comment seems very far from relevant; possibly you posted it in the wrong thread? Either that, or you're stringing words together with no regard for what they mean.
Those complexities may be relevant to other drugs, but not specifically to insulin, which is the case we're discussing here. Nobody needs to recoup their research investment for figuring out how to make insulin cheaply, and insulin prices are extremely far from "the point of maximum efficiency/optimization", which would be where drug companies were charging barely enough to cover the cost of production. Insulin is not regulated as a supplement, it cannot be administered as a pill, it is not sold in gas stations, and no cases of sawdust or raccoon repellent contamination have been reported in insulin.
All that's happening with insulin is that there's an oligopoly that's colluding to extract monopoly profits, which they can do precisely because regulation prevents biology students from hacking together insulin-producing yeasts over the weekend and selling the insulin to whoever is willing to risk it. That same regulation is what prevents Harbor Freight from importing insulin by the case from any of the dozens of other countries where it costs a tenth of what it costs in the US.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskChina/comments/1j9zf2u/chinese_i... says of China, "I checked and found that rapid-acting insulin is $4 per bottle, long-acting insulin is $10 per bottle, and other brands of insulin cost between $5 and $8." So why does it cost US$100 per bottle in the US? You'd think you could make a big profit importing Chinese insulin, no? But regulations make it difficult to import that insulin from China, so difficult that incumbents can extract US$100 per bottle in monopoly rents.
Re: The Hollow Men of Hims
#80The 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…
[flagged]
Huh? Healthcare is probably the most regulated industry in America, and the world. Many of the problems healthcare currently faces could be dampened considerably with greater market competition; while creating problems of its own, of course, but it is absolutely the case that drugs get cheaper when generics become available; that's marketplace competition.