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More drugmakers hike U.S. prices as new year begins:
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Drugmakers including Bristol-Myers Squibb Co (BMY.N), Gilead Sciences Inc (GILD.O), and Biogen Inc (BIIB.O) hiked U.S. list prices on more than 50 drugs on Wednesday, bringing total New Year’s Day drug price increases to more than 250, according to data analyzed by healthcare research firm 3 Axis Advisors.
Reuters reported on Tuesday that drugmakers including Pfizer Inc (PFE.N), GlaxoSmithKline PLC (GSK.L) and Sanofi SA (SASY.PA) were planning to increase prices on more than 200 drugs in the United States on Jan. 1.
Nearly all of the price increases are below 10% and the median price increase is around 5%, according to 3 Axis.
More early year price increases could still be announced.
Soaring U.S. prescription drug prices are expected to again be a central issue in the presidential election. President Donald Trump, who made bringing them down a core pledge of his 2016 campaign, is running for re-election in 2020.
[...] The United States, which leaves drug pricing to market competition, has higher prices than in other countries where governments directly or indirectly control the costs, making it the world’s most lucrative market for manufacturers.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by barbara hudson on Thursday January 02 2020, @01:03PM (54 children)
drug fails trials, company still wants it approved , universities complicit in research fraud [madinamerica.com]
We could start by banning all antidepressants. They don't work any better than a placebo and they cause brain damage by causing grey matter [ahajournals.org] in parts of the brain to be replaced by white matter [mentalhealthdaily.com]
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday January 02 2020, @01:14PM (27 children)
First paragraph I'm happy to agree with. Hell, I'll even show you more ways to fix things if you like.
Second paragraph is both ignorant and idiotic. I won't say that head shrinkers use them properly (we're still barely better informed on the mind than the folks who thought phrenology was legitimate medicine) but they most definitely do have an effect on the emotional state that placebos do not.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Informative) by barbara hudson on Thursday January 02 2020, @02:25PM (26 children)
After 60 years, a study came out that claimed that there was finally proof that antidepressants worked. It was widely hailed as it claimed to meet the standards of a Cochrane review. Norwegian researchers tore the study apart. Outright fraud. Go figure. Antidepressants should not be used. Even the UN is saying that we need to stop medicalizing what are basically socioeconomic problems. There is zero proof that depression is caused by a lack of serotonin, that is just industry marketing Mumbai jumbo.
People on antidepressants don't get better at nearly the same rate as those who don't take them, according to VA records of 2 million soldiers. Look it up. Same as schizophrenia, people treated with drugs have 5x the relapse rate of those who aren't treated.
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by Tokolosh on Thursday January 02 2020, @03:01PM (11 children)
If you don't like antidepressants, don't take them. If you don't like abortion, don't have one. If you don't like gay marriage, don't marry. But don't tell me what I can do.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Thursday January 02 2020, @04:23PM (10 children)
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(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02 2020, @05:02PM (3 children)
You've chatted to Runaway then?
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday January 02 2020, @06:10PM (2 children)
First time I've heard of brain damage being a feature rather than a bug!
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02 2020, @07:41PM (1 child)
Are you familiar with the Democrat presidential candidates?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02 2020, @11:05PM
That would be lack of brain damage as a feature. Have you seen the sitting Republican choice?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02 2020, @10:31PM (5 children)
FALSE.
There are many different types of anti-depressants. They work differently. Your statement is as valid as saying that wheels don't work.
Secondly. Most of what you are talking about are double-blind studies where drugs are tested vs. placebo. What you miss, is that placebo is a valid medical effect.
Anti-depressants work. What they don't work against is being sad or unhappy.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday January 02 2020, @10:44PM (2 children)
That's why there's increasing calls even from psychiatrists and psychologists to abandon chemical treatments, deep brain stimulation, and electroshock. They don't treat the cause, and the side effects make the patient much more likely to relapse.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by NickM on Friday January 03 2020, @03:14AM (1 child)
Those drugs truly helps some peoples, nobody really understand why¹. I suffer from crippling unmanageable anxiety without underlying cause, 10mg of escitalopram² is the difference between me not leaving my house unless forced by my hunger and me having a great job where I am productive to society and appreciated by my colleagues.
1- second paragraph [sciencemag.org]
2- Not the racemix citalopram, that's a drug with a strong anticholinergic component responsible for almost all of the off target side effects. Most newish drugs, not the rarer new new drugs, replacing existing one have a tremendously better UX but the government only pays for the shitty yet almost equally effective version so it is what most Canadian doctors are prescribing by default ! Luckily for me, I have gold plated work insurance to complement the public regime so I get the fanciest drugs for almost nothing.
I a master of typographic, grammatical and miscellaneous errors !
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Friday January 03 2020, @12:19PM
I'm glad that works for you, but you two are talking about orthogonal issues.
Lets say we all agree that vitamin C cures scurvy. Given that scurvy seems to be the disease of not having enough vit C that seems pretty likely.
Now we can argue all day about how vit C is a scam because it doesn't cure broken legs, or how marketing aspirin as a treatment for scurvy is not a scam. But none of that has anything to do with the core issues of what scurvy is or what vit C can actually treat.
Note that aspirin is not the worst idea for scurvy anyway. It won't fix the problem, but it'll sweep it under the rug via pain killing anti-inflamatory effect. There seems to be a common problem among non-scientific non-medical people of not being able to tell the difference between something that fixes the symptoms vs fixing the actual cause of the problem. This is an especially big problem for psych drugs, although not entirely all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 03 2020, @02:18AM (1 child)
> What you miss, is that placebo is a valid medical effect.
And we've found the the guy that believes in homeopathy.
The null effect and placebo response are two ways of saying the same thing. A drug is NOT effective if it is no more effective than a placebo. Only pseudo-scientific magical water promoting quacks and frauds will tell you otherwise (and their friends promoting magical needle pokes).
If all you want is a placebo, use a sugar pill, or hell, a magical medical chocolate chip cookie-- but, not something that causes harm.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 03 2020, @12:50PM
No, you dumbass.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/mental-health/the-power-of-the-placebo-effect [harvard.edu]
When it come to things like mild depression, placebo effect is fucking important and has nothing to do with homeopathy bullshit.
Placebo also causes harm and results in side effects, by the definition of the double blind studies and the required reporting standards
(Score: 3, Insightful) by meustrus on Thursday January 02 2020, @03:28PM (6 children)
Some links would be nice, since every argument you make here relies on someone else's authority. Specifically:
1. Where the study claiming antidepressants finally worked?
2. Where's the Norwegian review tore that study apart?
3. Where/when did "the UN" make a statement about depression, and which countries were part of making that statement?
4. Where's the review of antidepressant effectiveness among depressed VA patients? What's the likelihood that the patients not receiving antidepressants were already less likely to relapse?
5. Where's the review of anti-psychotic effectiveness among schizophrenic VA patients? What's the likelihood that the patients not receiving anti-psychotics were already less likely to relapse?
Not saying you don't have a point. I'd love for you to be correct, because the idea of antidepressants has always rubbed me the wrong way. But I can't expect anybody else to take your ideas seriously without seeing the source of your claims.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by barbara hudson on Thursday January 02 2020, @03:35PM
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(Score: 1, Flamebait) by barbara hudson on Thursday January 02 2020, @04:18PM (2 children)
You're severely depressed because you can no longer do your job because your health went in the shitter, so you're experiencing economic hardship as well as trying to cope with life-destroying health problems.
It's entirely normal to be depressed in such a situation. And pills that alter the brain, not just functioning but also physically, won't fix the underlying cause. Which is why they're no more effective than a placebo . You hope it works, you're desperate for it to work, the doctor says it will work ... but after a while reality manages to intrude on your drugged brain. So, increased doses, same thing. Try another one same same. Try several in combination - your reality hasn't changed, and you are even less able to cope because the side effects include one people rarely talk about in studies - your increasing alienation from yourself. It's not a recognized side effect, so it's ignored or discounted as part of the depression itself.
So you end up in a situation of trying to cope with the real world problems using drugs. Better to drink - at least you can share with friends and get a bit of social support. But neither is a solution to the underlying problems that caused the depression. You're still out of a job, your health problems haven't gone away, and you've bought into the lie that it's all because of a chemical imbalance in the brain - which none of the drugs fix or you wouldn't relapse.
Another problem is that the most effective tool, cognitive behavioural therapy, doesn't work that well in such circumstances because it too doesn't fix the underlying problems. If you're poor and otherwise challenged, changing the way you see the problem still leaves you poor and challenged.
The worst part is that people are afraid to come off the drugs even when the doctor suggests it, out of a fear it might get worse.
Another form of learned helplessness, encouraged by doctors saying it's a chemical imbalance in the brain and that you will have to be on drugs all your life.
Interesting fact - when people living in countries with half-decent old age pensions retire, depression often clears up on its own. There's not the same sense of failure at work if you're retired, and the extra money helps. Amazing how money "fixes" what is supposed to be a permanent chemical imbalance in the brain, which tells me that the whole idea of chemical imbalance is full of shit, same as previous theories that being lgbt was a mental illness, or that peptic ulcers were caused by stress and you need to quit your job/get a divorce and pay for lots of therapy,, or that when a man acts assertive he's being manly, but a woman is mentally ill with hysteria. What can we expect from a field that got its start with Mesmer and went on with crazy theories from crazy guy Freud?
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 03 2020, @12:54PM (1 child)
No, depression is a normal effect of being alive. It clears on its own in most instances. But the pharmaceutical industry has trained doctors that if you are sad for a month because your cat died, then you need pills to make you happy again. Like is not like that. It's normal to be fucking sad and depressed for months and even a year while to deal with shit in your life.
This has nothing to do with anti-depressants working or not. It has to do with wrong treatments of mild depression.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday January 03 2020, @03:56PM
I'm NOT talking about mild depression. I'm talking months of intrusive suicidal thoughts, and everything that goes with it. 5 years of that was enough.
Nobody is supposed to be prescribed antidepressants for mild depression.
But yes, the problem is pills don't deal with the underlying problems of your life going totally into the shitter. Any appearance that they work is temporary, and results in embarking on the roller-coaster of increased doses and different types of antidepressants - and since antidepressants have been shown to double the rate of relapse in "controlled" patients, it's a mook's [merriam-webster.com] game.
Fortunately, within the last decade there's enough evidence against antidepressants that there's been significant pushback. These drugs need to be banned based on the harm they cause, and their not working.
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(Score: 5, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Thursday January 02 2020, @04:51PM
Antidepressants work, just not for everyone:
Depression: How effective are antidepressants? [nih.gov]
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday January 02 2020, @05:32PM
I tend to believe it in a general way, even if some of the specific details in the gp might be suspect. Yes, we all know it's bad. Patients absolutely are not first. Money is. Yet I think most don't understand the severity of the corruption and ubiquity of the warping. For instance, we still mostly believe in magic pills, and there are plenty that do work, so that it's all the easier for a fraudulent drug to slip past. There is not one medical decision that isn't twisted by inappropriate financial considerations.
How about hospitals keeping patients alive, not just for the obvious reason of racking up expenses, but to manipulate the numbers? One place specializing in heart transplants stalled on Do Not Resuscitate directives, in order to get their patients past the arbitrary milestones used to judge their effectiveness. Heart patients can't be allowed to die until they've lasted a month or a year. https://www.propublica.org/article/the-family-wanted-a-do-not-resuscitate-order-the-doctors-didnt [propublica.org]
How about cures for AIDS being delayed? Senior citizens being overmedicated? (That one I heard, and saw, over 30 years ago.) At the other end of the age spectrum is the overdiagnosis of whatever the latest fads are in childhood illnesses. ADHD is still pretty big.
Another thing that makes matters worse is how many are in cahoots. Ambulance chasing lawyers love sky high medical prices. Health insurers were supposed to be helpful in fighting excessive medical care, instead they've embraced it, to boost their own profits. All too often, schools will hoke up medical reasons to ditch students to whom they've taken a dislike, and the medics are entirely too willing to take the teachers at face value. Police lean on drug testing to return positive results.
Most of all, the basic system of "fee for service" has been disastrous. The incentives are all wrong, and even the most well-meaning doctors are swayed inappropriately, perhaps only at subconscious levels.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday January 04 2020, @07:44AM (6 children)
Last I looked, they weren't meant to be taken long term. They're supposed to be taken long enough to break the downward spiraling feedback loop and then tapered off of as you get your shit back together.
You said you've taken almost as many varieties as I have, so you know they absolutely do affect your emotional state. Most obviously exemplified in the inability to feel much of anything at all, even when warranted. That's where your suicide risk comes in by the way. Suicide is a perfectly logical and dispassionate solution to pretty much anything up to and including avoiding washing the dishes. It will absolutely put an end to anything that you'd prefer not to have to put up with and it has a 100% success rate. And not having your emotions telling you that you're scared of it, that you do still have some happiness in your life, or that you don't want to emotionally crush everyone you love can make it seem way less objectionable.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday January 04 2020, @05:39PM (5 children)
There are a couple of problems. Doctors are prescribing them long term, by using the BS excuse that there's something wrong with your brain (the "chemical imbalance" myth) and that you need to take them long term - preferably for life. Now that's insane, knowing what we do about the side effects.
Also, while it takes 3 weeks or more to "take effect", fMRI research at one of the local universities (McGill) last year showed that it starts pruning brain synapses within hours of taking them. The researchers theorized that the brain is trying to recover by generating new connections, but eventually get overwhelmed, and then the drug would seem to take effect.
Of course, the effects are more a dulling of personality, lethargy, and flattening of emotional responses than any real cure for depression. So for a while, the things in real life that were causing you depression don't seem as bad (due to brain damage). But reality seeps back in, and reality bites. With a vengeance. So you end up on the cycle of increased doses, multiple drugs, etc.
Some of the research shows it causes the brain to replace grey matter with white matter in critical areas such as the hypothalmus. No wonder that so many patients report they are no longer themselves - it's mimicking dementia. If I had been told that it would reduce the grey matter in my brain I would NEVER have agreed to try them, no matter how desperate. Better dead than dementia.
It's been more than 6 months I've been off them, and there are visible differences in the greatest collection of nerves that is visible from outside the body without cutting into it. All the nerves in my retinas, that were leaking crap in big white clouds of "cotton wool patches [wikipedia.org]", are no longer doing so. I knew they were affecting the proteins in the capsular sac enclosing the eye lenses, but this is a real bonus. And it's real physical, documented evidence in improvements in nerve tissue after ceasing antidepressant use.
I thought that my growing hatred of writing code was due to the frustration of repeatedly trying by using screen readers, by the increasing lack of innovation in software, etc. But how much of that was from brain pruning? Because it's (the knowledge) still all there. So while I still don't feel like "me", I'm hoping that with time all the damage will be undone. After all, neuroplasticity is a thing, and things like the joy of coding and creating are emotional, not intellectual, feelings - feelings that antidepressants dull.
Problem is, antidepressants are surprisingly addictive. So when people stop, they do the same as with stopping any other addiction - they get depressed. But so what if it takes half a year or a year to work through it? It's better than drug-induced brain damage that causes large changes in personality and emotions. Or in the case of one drug, causing me to lose voluntary muscle control at random times. "It shouldn't be doing that" means nothing, not when it stopped the day after I was off that particular drug (Effexor - a second-level antidepressant for when all the first-level ones don't work, that is really nasty shit).
How do doctors expect people to attack the causes that make their lives so crappy if the drugs leave them barely able to get out of bed?
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(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday January 05 2020, @01:17AM (4 children)
Yeah, I have way more problems with most head shrinkers than I do with the drugs they have in their tool kits, for exactly that reason.
Right, they're not supposed to be a cure. Almost no emotional drugs are viable as a cure or even a permanent treatment for a chronic condition. They're supposed to be emotional pain medication for a temporary condition. Flattening emotional responses somewhere in the neighborhood of the correct amount during the peak of the emotional pain is a reasonable way to do that. Most shrinks don't get that though, which makes me extremely glad I finally found one that did.
Mostly, the only way to deal with life is to deal with it. Yeah, you can numb yourself for a time with one substance or another but that doesn't actually solve anything. At best they give you time to formulate some coping mechanisms at a lower level of pain to serve you when you get off the drugs.
I highly recommend an hour of serious exercise in the mornings for anyone with any sort of depression by the way. I hate the shit out of it but it's got me completely drug free for over a year now, even though I was quite fond of the Adderall as a morning coffee turbo booster.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Sunday January 05 2020, @03:53AM (3 children)
So he took 1/6 the minimum dose - 5 mg. Screwed up all the next day. He now gets it when patients complain about reduced functioning, etc.
They should try their own medicine. Literally give them a taste of their own medicine. The experience of side effects, including personality changes, intensifying and extending depression, lack of motivation , alienation from self, and sleeping all the time would induce PTSD if I didn't already have it.
As antidepressant use has become more widespread, we've created a population with acquired learned helplessness who will be permanently unable to work or be productive members of society. Since the damage was done by the drug companies via falsified drug trials, they should pay for it.
Thought of the day: "After you stop using social media and online videos long enough you no longer have the free time for them."
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(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday January 05 2020, @04:17AM (2 children)
The learned helplessness isn't specific to medication, it's been happening for a very long time. We'd probably be better off as a species if we just replied to anyone saying "You're the victim of..." with a prompt punch to the throat before they could finish the sentence.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Sunday January 05 2020, @04:06PM (1 child)
Can't do that because it doesn't actually solve the problem. Some people ARE victims. Anyone who took oxy was the victim of lies put out by the drug companies that it wasn't addictive, which even made it into articles in Scientific American way back when it was first introduced.
The same with antidepressants, hence the class action judgments against the manufacturers.
Same with the people of Flint drinking crappy water.
It doesn't cost anything except time to listen and sympathize, and sometimes just the chance for dialogue will let the victim get out of the circular thinking rut and explore new possibilities.
For example, it would have been nice if someone had pointed out that I could have retrained my eyes. Nobody did, and it was only when I got desperate a couple of years ago that I mentally reviewed everything I knew about visual processing by the retina and optic nerve (most visual signals never make it to the brain anyway - if they weren't filtered out, the brain would be overwhelmed), and came up with the idea of retraining the retina and optic nerve to interpret the blurs and missing data as proper letters, because the brain sure as hell wasn't doing it.
But now, I can make the same suggestion to others in the same boat, and get them started.
Thought of the day: "After you stop using social media and online videos long enough you no longer have the free time for them."
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday January 05 2020, @08:00PM
Nah, you always have the choice between giving a speedbump the finger and choosing to succeed despite it or by deciding to be a victim so you can not feel bad about your failure.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by khallow on Thursday January 02 2020, @01:29PM (7 children)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Thursday January 02 2020, @01:58PM (6 children)
Why aren't governments doing bulk deals for entire states? Lobbyists. Why are prices so high? No bulk buying, because of lobbyists.
Do you buy toilet paper one roll at a time, or in larger quantities? Do you buy eggs one at a time, or in larger quantities? Most people save money by buying larger quantities. Why can't state governments? Lobbyists.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 03 2020, @02:35AM (1 child)
> Why aren't governments doing bulk deals for entire states?
> Why can't state governments?
Because a bunch of bought and payed for congress critters (in this instance, a little over half of them) and president Baby Bush passed a law that outlawed the government being able to negotiate drug prices, as a huge giveaway to the pharma corps in exchange for bribes ^H^H^H^H^H campaign contributions.
"Lobbyists" is too polite and soft a word to describe this blatant corruption. It is like, "post traumatic stress disorder." Which replaced, "Shell Shock!" PTSD is a mealy-mouthed bullshit phrase to hide the reality of the brutality of war-- but, much more polite, and much less likely to evoke a response in the person hearing the phrase. Just like, "Lobbyists" is less likely to evoke a response than the more honest, "Corrupt mother fuckers accepting bribes!"
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday January 03 2020, @03:10AM
It can have lifelong consequences. Life changing consequences. Including suicide as a way to put an end to the suffering.
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(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday January 03 2020, @04:24AM (2 children)
Hallow is the kind of dumb fuck who equates regulatory capture, i.e., the secular-blasphemous, zombifying, cynical parodoxical overturning of regulatory apparatus to make it do exactly what it was created to prevent, to "regulation bad rarrr." I've pointed this out to him several times and he just sticks his fingers in his ears and blows raspberries.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday January 03 2020, @04:38AM (1 child)
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 08 2020, @03:08PM
Here, the pharmaceutical market has been turned into a wasteland by US regulation. If you want to introduce a generic competitor to a drug that's already there and proven to be safe enough, it's tens of millions of dollars just to continue to show it's safe enough. On the other extreme, if you have something new and radical with many misses as you attempt to fine tune how the drug works? It can go over a billion dollars [nature.com]. That enormous barrier to entry explains on its own why so many drugs are so expensive even when patents run out.
Moving on, the usual ways around such things, say like importing drugs from places where they are vastly cheaper is also illegal.
Azuma can derp on about my obsession with bad regulations, but well, it's not that hard to find them and they go away so slowly.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 08 2020, @03:19PM
Enforcing existing regulations would help, but what's causing that? A common symptom of overregulation is failing to enforce existing regulations due to some combination of inability, cost, need to keep the industry functioning, and sheer complexity (corruption hides well in that). How in the world are regulators going to police pharm/doctor interactions? Who pays for all these trials? And who will do the bulk buying (and who gets these theoretically cheaper drugs) economically when the usual parties already aren't doing their job?
To elaborate on my previous point, it'd also be lobbyists involved if those entire states happens to pay more rather than less for those deals.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Tokolosh on Thursday January 02 2020, @02:56PM (2 children)
"The United States, which leaves drug pricing to market competition..." This is the fakest news I have read in a long time.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday January 02 2020, @04:26PM
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(Score: 2) by kazzie on Thursday January 02 2020, @06:12PM
The "competition" is along the lines of "think of a number..."
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Thursday January 02 2020, @03:17PM (1 child)
Your last link redirected somewhere weird. I think you were trying to go here: https://mentalhealthdaily.com/2014/09/19/one-dose-of-ssri-antidepressant-changes-brain-connectivity-in-3-hours/ [mentalhealthdaily.com]
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday January 02 2020, @03:43PM
Sometime in the future, if and why my crap vision allows it, I'll do a journal entry on the evidence that antidepressants are a huge fraud by drug companies along with complicit researchers and universities. This scam has been going on for more than 60 years, and there's finally pushback by psychiatrists and psychologists.
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by RS3 on Thursday January 02 2020, @03:39PM (6 children)
I generally agree with you, but please be careful - I think sweeping generalizations are the bane of the "information age".
Many new drugs are truly modern miracle cures. But many (most?) are becoming more chemically and bio-actively complex and work differently in different people, and in different diseases and condition combinations and comorbidities.
For many people, peanut butter is awesome, but for a few, it's deadly. Please don't ban my peanut butter.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday January 02 2020, @04:34PM (5 children)
Part of the problem is researchers for hire, who bury negative outcomes, in the hope that if you repeat the study often enough , random chance will give at least one study with some "statistically significant " results, even though that falls far short of clinical significance.
The Hamilton scale rates depression from 0 to 50. Neither the patients nor their doctors can notice a change of 1 or 2 on the scale. 7 is clinical significance, where they actually see a change. A drug that still leaves you with the same symptoms and comes with side effects that are no joke needs to be withdrawn.
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(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday January 02 2020, @06:05PM (2 children)
Thanks and agreed. Everyone was pushing them 10-20 years ago, probably still do. Now we see TV commercials for law firms saying "did you take Zoloft (or whatever)? contact us if you did"
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday January 02 2020, @08:12PM (1 child)
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(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday January 02 2020, @09:38PM
I really hate commenting in minefield discussions like this... but I certainly agree with you. I think the public's attitude is like so many things, they just want things dealt with and to just go away and disappear. The prisons are full of great people who for whatever reason ended up in some kind of compromising situation. It's been proven that given certain situations, people will do things they wouldn't normally do. (Dr. Philip Zimbardo and others showed this.) And I can argue that many of those "offenses" are not bad enough to warrant prison. And we have drug company executives who walk free...
Ultimately it's all part of survival of the fittest, which is not my philosophy.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by epitaxial on Thursday January 02 2020, @07:16PM (1 child)
What is it with you and antidepressants? They work for some people but not everyone. You act as is if they makes up 90% of the drug market. How about insulin prices that have skyrocketed for no reason?
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday January 02 2020, @07:50PM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mcgrew on Thursday January 02 2020, @06:13PM (3 children)
"Considering the total failure of the market..."
That's exactly what's wrong with health care in the money-worshiping US. Capitalism isn't the be-all and end-all hard core, money-worshiping capitalists think it is. Health care is something that can't have a free market. You can't choose to get your broken arm fixed, or to pay for a prescription, it's forced on you. Without freedom it's not a free market.
We Americans are idiots for letting the medical insurance industry to even exist. Out costs are double socialist systems and the outcomes are far poorer. But then, religious fanatics like the money worshipers seldom listen to reason or logic.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02 2020, @09:48PM
When someone says "I have a plan to save $100 billion on healthcare" what the healthcare industry hears is "I have a plan to pay the healthcare industry $100 billion less". That is why they fight it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 03 2020, @01:31AM (1 child)
Everybody has to eat, but the market does a fine job supplying food to everyone, and at reasonable prices. Just because you have to have something doesn't mean that the market doesn't work.
(Score: 2) by dry on Friday January 03 2020, @05:08AM
Yes and no for the market working. Grocery stores exist in a competitive market, resulting in competition and low profit margins. Farmers are heavily subsidized by the government, which results in the grocery stores being able to purchase cheap food to sell you.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday January 03 2020, @01:48AM
Oh, but they actually do work as intended. You see, by contrast, there's no "placebo industry"; the barrier of entry is so low that there's not gonna be a huge profit in selling M&Ms clones
Idiots with income? Yes, please, and gimme a double serve of them.
Yes, we know the proper way of consuming them
(large grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday January 03 2020, @12:26PM
In a greater sense I agree with you in general, although this specific linked article is not providing much proof.
A non-alarmist article could point out that shockingly pharm prices are now only increasing around the inflation rate as opposed to endless historical stories about 1000% increases. This specific article has to be alarmist because all journalism about the medical field has to be alarmist, but its actually pretty good news.
With the usual political fun stuff you see in legacy media propaganda such as all good news (or more commonly, all bad news) is entirely and solely due to the election of President Trump.