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A cat and a dog go into a bar.

The dog says "Two pints of bitter and a packet of pork scratchings, please".

The cat says "Fuck me, a talking dog!"

I agree that there is a problem with drug prices - though I accept fully that the companies who have researched and developed those drugs with all that that costs should be able to reap the benefits of that effort and make a fair profit. Perhaps some kind of time limit on that exclusivity should be globally imposed - say 15 years or so, after which time the formulas must be made public domain - call it a fair price for having public money buy those drugs in the first 15 years.

This already exists - generic drugs are ones that have gone off-patent and can be made by anyone. Big Pharma pushes drugs as strongly as possible (eg Pfizer's suggestion that women can benefit from Viagra too) while they are still protected by patent as this is when they make the bulk of their money, recoup their development costs and make a profit on top. Bear in mind that this is a relatively short space of time - they need to patent the drug before seeking FDA approval, which takes a long time - and the costs they need to recoup are unbelievably huge. That's why they market them so aggressively, particularly in the US.

The reason Big Pharma is struggling at the moment is because the "conceptual space" for small molecules is limited. Drugs need to treat a condition, be orally bioavailable (so you can take them in a pill) and have side effects that are less harmful than the condition they're treating. [If you're interested in this, Google "Lipinski's rule of five".] Most of the possible candidates have now been investigated. Barring major breakthroughs on the peptide front, Big Pharma will continue to suffer and will churn out fewer and fewer "blockbusters" each year.

But this misses the point. The real problem with privatised drug development isn't the cost for consumers in developed countries, it's the fact that these consumers are the only market. Drug companies got badly burned developing HIV treatments that they had to give away for peanuts in the developing world, after consumer / international pressure. All the money they spent developing and producing them was wasted. That's why you don't see any money going into HIV or Malaria treatments any more - it's recognised in the industry as a quick way to make a giant loss. Hence the focus on "lifestyle drugs" for conditions like insomnia, pain, erectile dysfunction, dementia, etc, and also the proliferation of "me too" drugs that are just there to compete and don't provide anything useful to clinicians when they're prescribing.

Instead, we need an international, socialised drug development program to treat these conditions. Hopefully as Big Pharma disintegrates we'll see this happen.

That was the best-informed post I've ever read on here, if not the internet. Fascinating.

And totally agree with you re: QoF.

Dunno, I didn't watch either of them.

Acupuncture seems a little pointless to me.

See what you did there!

following on to a more brutal theme

Isn't this a bit too much like the last time you posted someone being killed on a railway and had to remove it...?

Jon Ronsen's "Crazy Rulers of the World" C4 documentaries (which he made into a book called "The Men Who Stare at Goats") had some interesting stuff about the US Army testing out weird new-age ideas during the Waco siege - stuff like subliminal messages in music, which apparently they still use. There's also general detail about how every federal agency went down there and behaved at complete cross-purposes. Recommended viewing / reading.

I hope the guy responsible uses that argument to placate his boss.

Details here

I can think of any number of native herbal remedies which have been dismissed by 'western' scientists as folklore and mysticism until they actually bothered to look into them and, voila, another new 'drug'. Acupuncture sometimes suffers in a similar way.

Think you have badly misunderstood the scientific method here.

Record attempt fail (only 2 off though!)

YouTube - Most toilet seats broken by the head in one minute

Zen you won't be coming...?

Currently this is the plan

I hope the prayer of us wheel be there together

But it's his turn to "French toast" tonight.

Starting to feel victimised... :)

[drum roll] Buddha Boom ! [cymbal crash]

Seeds will be selling autographed 10" x 8" photos in the lobby.

Fixed

Oh, that kind of sub.

My thoughts exactly.

Not sure if that's clothes-pegs or french toast on the left of the picture. Perverse either way.

Make me one with everything!!

Sorry, wrong thread.

karma ?
cause and effect
religion or philosophy ?

I'd join. After all, you only live once!

Bit like that Ian McEwan novel, innit:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jun/27/shooting-harry-morgan-st-johns

wanting evidence before does not mean one is close minded.

+1

Relying on intuition and arguments from authority is a lot more close-minded.

You can be open-minded about the possibility that something you would like to be true, isn't.

I'll probably get shot down in flames here but, this is how I see it knowing people with difficult to treat ailments:

Western medecine: Very good with fixing mechancal type problems with the human body - say a knee reconstruction. amazing stuff, glad it's all possible.

Eastern/traditional medecine: very good with painfull/annoying ailments in areas western medicine struggles to treat. Example. My dad kept getting styes on his eyelids. 1 after the other. The doctor kept cutting them off. He's had about 5 or so removed, and on the 6th one his doctor said " you know, I've had one guy in here 35 times for this." My dad thought, there must be a better way. He went to see a naturopath, he said my dad's system was acidic and was causing the styes. My dad changed his diet as per the recommendations, hey presto, no more styes.

My mother has arthritis in her spine. The doctor just says take pain killers. She tried everything and in the end a naturopath recommended lifestyle changes - diet and exercise and various natural remedies. The pain is now managable.

I'd say CAM is now a lot more careful about grand claims to treat cancer etc, but that wasn't always the case - and there are still some practitioners of some treatments that do a lot of damage by making inflated claims about their efficacy, but let's not get into that.

CAM is very good at treating cyclic conditions, like chronic pain (stuff that gets worse for a while, then gets better for a while). Humans are very good at seeing patterns in random data. Just saying, like. Also, and perhaps more importantly, people seem to frequently misunderstand the words "no better than placebo". That doesn't mean "no clinically significant effect" - it just means "probably not doing what you think it is". The placebo effect is very powerful and useful. If it wasn't for ethical considerations about misleading patients, then it would be used a lot more in "Western" medicine (? Science is not a western enterprise btw, and it's only westerners who believe in "Eastern" medicine that use that term. I'd prefer to use EBM, instead).

Finally - and this is getting a bit tl;dr - but someone mentioned that Chinese remedies are 2000 years' old. Well, willowbark has been used to treat pain for much longer than that. By the 1800's doctors had realised that willowbark extract was the really interesting thing, and by 1850 or so somebody had isolated the active ingredient by reaction with acetyl chloride to form an orally-bioavailable solid, acetylsalicylic acid, or Aspirin. 150 years later and this has given rise to the class of NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) that includes ibuprofen. As well as pain management, NSAIDs are useful for lowering fever (Aspirin was used to treat the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918) and, at least while I was still in science (eyebrows might correct me) they were being investigated for the treatment of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimers. They don't have to be injected and they don't make you sleepy.

We could also talk about digitalis, which has a very similar history, or the excitingly-named, excitingly-structured and excitingly-discovered Vancomycin, which is about the most powerful antibiotic we still have, and was isolated from a soil sample taken by a missionary from a jungle path in Borneo.

I just think it's easy and lazy to dismiss scientific advances, or take them for granted, without knowing much about what life is like without them (ask someone with arthritis about painkillers, since we're big on personal anecdotes in this thread). And it's easy to romanticise treatments from other parts of the world that may (or may not) have long and mysterious histories, without realising how open-minded science is. All that is required is that a treatment works. There is no "bias" there before the evidence has been sought.

Curiously aroused though

Speechless.