sparks wrote: ↑Thu Apr 04, 2024 5:35 pm
Good points there stank.
And perhaps I'm being a bit hard on The Stoopid people. Our system
is fucked. All the more reason users of the system really ought to be paying closer attention to what the system is doing to them and yell Foul! if they see something out of wack.
Said this before: Healthcare should not be a for profit system. Several other things shouldn't be for profit either, but those are different discussions. As is obvious, the profit part represents a conflict of interest and should not be tolerated.
"Profit" hardly describes this massive pot of gold available to the unscrupulous designers. The legal drug trade has always made the black market look wholesome. In fact, during this spell of inflated prices for everything, along with constant chipping away at quality of product, illegal drugs have come down in price and up in quality...a lot! (Friends tell me stuff.)
The U.S. is the druggiest. Most otc use; most scripts; and most use of illegal drugs. We've radically over prescribed various wonder drugs and anti-biotics through the years. Early 60's; diet pills and valium...oops! Then prozac...we're depressed in correlation with its use. Causation? Doesn't prove anything, except, overall, we're not cured. It's a very pushy system. My niece worked as a travelling rep for a large drug company; wining and dining doctors; free samples galore; kick-backs, etc.
I saw it from the inside, though 50 years ago. Hasn't changed much that i can see. new names for drugs that replaced the last round; also crap. So few serve any purpose. Knowing some chemistry makes it more infuriating, watching this shake down. America doesn't do mathy stuff, so they don't realize what a milligram is. 325 in a single aspirin, or 21 times more substance than the entire month's script i recently consumed, one pill a day, for pissy prostate stuff. The single aspirin is also hugely less expensive than the other pill.
meds increasingly lean towards minuscule quantities directed at a specific receptor. micrograms means nothing on the purchase end. it should, but the fabulous savings aren't passed on. must be crazy difficult chemistry? why? fully equipped lab with good starter molecules and pre-tested measurements? No cops? Easy. Fentanyl is one, that some analogs (carfentanyl) are active at 5 mics. that's 200,000 doses in a gram. Clandestine chemists are able to do that one.
the notion of the great worth of these meds is fabricated and renewed, relentlessly. It's the biggest cash cow for the least work, ever.
The dream meds are the ones that you need to take forever, for a chronic condition that is very common. few side effects helps unless one needs a side effect to believe...to engage the placebo process.