4 ms·

I have been worried for some time the only solution is the democratization of healthcare due to advances in biology and chemistry. People are 3d printing their

by R0b0t1 6y ago

I have been worried for some time the only solution is the democratization of healthcare due to advances in biology and chemistry. People are 3d printing their own prosthetic mounts and getting better results than trained and heavily credentialed professionals. Maybe some day people will be able to design their own medication and targeted supplements. What worries me is this may be decades away.

youngNed 6y ago
> Maybe some day people will be able to design their own medication and targeted supplements. > What worries me is this may be decades away. First the good news: That day is here!! Now the bad news: that medication isn't working out great for them. Apparently some wingnut told people that drinking bleach was a potential cure for some ills. Didn't go great. And thats the problem with what you wish for - a popular facebooker, youtuber, instagrammer, president tells people that they can design their own medication, people are going to do it.
- baryphonic 6y ago
  Who was telling people to drink bleach? Can you cite a specific instance?
  - youngNed 6y ago
    While stopping short of suggesting injestion of bleach trump certainly posited whether bleach used internally (on the lungs) could be an effective medication - so yeah, maybe he didn't mean drinking it, maybe he meant injecting it?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - me_me_me 6y ago
    https://quackwatch.org/cases/board/med/buttar/complaint_20091/ https://quackwatch.org/cases/board/med/buttar/complaint_2009... There one example
  - frederikb 6y ago
    US President Trump seriously suggested research into injecting bleach to the horror of doctors and medical professionals everywhere: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52407177 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52407177 It lead to actual problems of US American citizens ingesting/consuming bleach which forced government agencies to put out warnings: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2020/08/24/some-americans-are-tragically-still-drinking-bleach-as-a-coronavirus-cure/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2020/08/24/some...
    - hiram112 6y ago
      You can read his exact quote here: https://www.statesman.com/news/20200713/fact-check-did-trump-tell-people-to-drink-bleach-to-kill-coronavirus https://www.statesman.com/news/20200713/fact-check-did-trump... Never once does he mention the word 'bleach'. He uses the terms UV light and disinfectant. But I guess using disinfectant, to the average American reader, is synonymous with literally injecting bleach into your body or guzzling it down your throat... Remember when NPR came out with this article entitled: "No, You Don't Need To Disinfect Your Groceries", and the media was outraged because millions of Americans were dumb enough to start soaking their food in bleach? Yeah, me neither. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/12/832269202/no-you-dont-need-to-disinfect-your-groceries-but-here-s-to-shop-safely https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/12/8322692... Interestingly, looks like he was right about it anyway: https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/using-uv-light-to-fight-covid-19-what-to-know-about-its-effectiveness-91729989602 https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/using-uv-light-to...
api 6y ago
The problem is that without strict regulation any health care market will be flooded instantly with quacks. Quackery is much easier than actual medicine. Quacks don't have to spend anything on R&D and quack medicines are a lot easier to manufacture (look up the synthesis pathways for popular pharmaceuticals!), and this means quacks can spend more on marketing and operate with much higher margins. This translates into a huge market advantage. Pretty soon you'll have nothing but quacks. Medicine has a unique and extreme case of the "uninformed consumer problem." In medicine it's incredibly difficult even for professionals to tell whether something actually works, let alone individuals. "Do your own research" doesn't work at all in medicine unless you have a billion dollars burning a hole in your pocket and can assemble your own research lab. Excluding emergency medicine and the most instantly and dramatically effective drugs, it's really hard as an individual consumer of health care to tell whether a treatment is working over the short term. Check out gwern.net and how much work he's put into trying to tell if various nootropics work and how much uncertainty remains. The fact that individual discernment is so hard in medicine means defrauding people is incredibly easy. It's a market that is inherently vulnerable to massive fraud, and there is no easy way (that we know of) to fix this. Even with the FDA there is still a tremendous amount of quackery. Without the FDA and strict licensing and supervision there would be only quackery. BTW news seems to suffer from a similar problem. Actual investigative journalism is expensive, hard, and sometimes dangerous. (Old PI joke: How do you know if a conspiracy theorist might be right? They are missing and presumed dead.) Fake news is cheap and easy, and since it's fake you can craft your stories for maximum click bait appeal without having to be limited by pesky "reality" and "honesty" constraints. The reader meanwhile has neither the time nor the ability nor the expertise to really fact check anything. In general markets where the consumer is unable or unwilling to discern tend to be flooded with and overcome by fraud.
- chopin 6y ago
  > Medicine has a unique and extreme case of the "uninformed consumer problem." In medicine it's incredibly difficult even for professionals to tell whether something actually works, let alone individuals. It's extreme but not unique. Do you know what's running in any of your devices? Almost not, I believe. Yesterday I had the pleasure of needing to copy some medical reports of mine on a multipurpose printer I own. I shortly gave it a pause being not sure whether the contents would be sent immediately to the mothership. I then realized that when the printer was set up initially that I set up the router to prevent calls to the outside for this machine. But: although I configured the router, I would need to go to great lengths to actually verify that the printer can't phone home. And don't get me started about quality (as in endurance and serviceability). It's a nightmare as price is not a deciding factor in my experience. Neither is brand.

by R0b0t1 6y ago

youngNed 6y ago

> Maybe some day people will be able to design their own medication and targeted supplements. > What worries me is this may be decades away. First the good news: That day is here!! Now the bad news: that medication isn't working out great for them. Apparently some wingnut told people that drinking bleach was a potential cure for some ills. Didn't go great. And thats the problem with what you wish for - a popular facebooker, youtuber, instagrammer, president tells people that they can design their own medication, people are going to do it.

baryphonic 6y ago
Who was telling people to drink bleach? Can you cite a specific instance?
- youngNed 6y ago
  While stopping short of suggesting injestion of bleach trump certainly posited whether bleach used internally (on the lungs) could be an effective medication - so yeah, maybe he didn't mean drinking it, maybe he meant injecting it?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- me_me_me 6y ago
  https://quackwatch.org/cases/board/med/buttar/complaint_20091/ https://quackwatch.org/cases/board/med/buttar/complaint_2009... There one example
- frederikb 6y ago
  US President Trump seriously suggested research into injecting bleach to the horror of doctors and medical professionals everywhere: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52407177 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52407177 It lead to actual problems of US American citizens ingesting/consuming bleach which forced government agencies to put out warnings: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2020/08/24/some-americans-are-tragically-still-drinking-bleach-as-a-coronavirus-cure/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2020/08/24/some...
  - hiram112 6y ago
    You can read his exact quote here: https://www.statesman.com/news/20200713/fact-check-did-trump-tell-people-to-drink-bleach-to-kill-coronavirus https://www.statesman.com/news/20200713/fact-check-did-trump... Never once does he mention the word 'bleach'. He uses the terms UV light and disinfectant. But I guess using disinfectant, to the average American reader, is synonymous with literally injecting bleach into your body or guzzling it down your throat... Remember when NPR came out with this article entitled: "No, You Don't Need To Disinfect Your Groceries", and the media was outraged because millions of Americans were dumb enough to start soaking their food in bleach? Yeah, me neither. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/12/832269202/no-you-dont-need-to-disinfect-your-groceries-but-here-s-to-shop-safely https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/12/8322692... Interestingly, looks like he was right about it anyway: https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/using-uv-light-to-fight-covid-19-what-to-know-about-its-effectiveness-91729989602 https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/using-uv-light-to...

api 6y ago

The problem is that without strict regulation any health care market will be flooded instantly with quacks. Quackery is much easier than actual medicine. Quacks don't have to spend anything on R&D and quack medicines are a lot easier to manufacture (look up the synthesis pathways for popular pharmaceuticals!), and this means quacks can spend more on marketing and operate with much higher margins. This translates into a huge market advantage. Pretty soon you'll have nothing but quacks. Medicine has a unique and extreme case of the "uninformed consumer problem." In medicine it's incredibly difficult even for professionals to tell whether something actually works, let alone individuals. "Do your own research" doesn't work at all in medicine unless you have a billion dollars burning a hole in your pocket and can assemble your own research lab. Excluding emergency medicine and the most instantly and dramatically effective drugs, it's really hard as an individual consumer of health care to tell whether a treatment is working over the short term. Check out gwern.net and how much work he's put into trying to tell if various nootropics work and how much uncertainty remains. The fact that individual discernment is so hard in medicine means defrauding people is incredibly easy. It's a market that is inherently vulnerable to massive fraud, and there is no easy way (that we know of) to fix this. Even with the FDA there is still a tremendous amount of quackery. Without the FDA and strict licensing and supervision there would be only quackery. BTW news seems to suffer from a similar problem. Actual investigative journalism is expensive, hard, and sometimes dangerous. (Old PI joke: How do you know if a conspiracy theorist might be right? They are missing and presumed dead.) Fake news is cheap and easy, and since it's fake you can craft your stories for maximum click bait appeal without having to be limited by pesky "reality" and "honesty" constraints. The reader meanwhile has neither the time nor the ability nor the expertise to really fact check anything. In general markets where the consumer is unable or unwilling to discern tend to be flooded with and overcome by fraud.

chopin 6y ago
> Medicine has a unique and extreme case of the "uninformed consumer problem." In medicine it's incredibly difficult even for professionals to tell whether something actually works, let alone individuals. It's extreme but not unique. Do you know what's running in any of your devices? Almost not, I believe. Yesterday I had the pleasure of needing to copy some medical reports of mine on a multipurpose printer I own. I shortly gave it a pause being not sure whether the contents would be sent immediately to the mothership. I then realized that when the printer was set up initially that I set up the router to prevent calls to the outside for this machine. But: although I configured the router, I would need to go to great lengths to actually verify that the printer can't phone home. And don't get me started about quality (as in endurance and serviceability). It's a nightmare as price is not a deciding factor in my experience. Neither is brand.