4 ms·
The point of this blog post was totally lost on me. I can’t even say it is a critique of the practice of medicine - or maybe therapeutic development (?) - beca
by pfisherman 3y ago
The point of this blog post was totally lost on me. I can’t even say it is a critique of the practice of medicine - or maybe therapeutic development (?) - because literally every example given by the author is a solution rather than a problem.
Also the author clearly does not know what they are talking about. For example, them calling for the use of surrogate endpoints - they clearly did not know the term of the art - when a whole regulatory framework around this concept has already been developed, formalized, and implemented!
To me the piece has a mix of smugness, hubris, and gross ignorance that would make for truly masterful work trolling if I did not believe the author were sincere.
- renewiltord 3y agoIt’s just an observation that “if violence didn’t solve the problem, you weren’t using enough” is sometimes true with other things substituted for “violence”. I think that’s a useful thought.
- pfisherman 3y agoSure. Unfortunately people already thought of this long ago. Drugs often have more than one active pharmaceutical ingredient in them. For example, rybelsis vs mounjaro. The average senior citizen is taking four medications. Pase 1 trials test doses of therapeutics far above what ends up on the market. In general there is a trade off between safety and effectiveness. Note that safety is evaluated in the context of the underlying condition. So worse side effects are tolerable for treating something cancer or HIV, than for treating something like a common cold, The drug in the example given by the author, Alopurinol, is very hepatotoxic so cranking up the dosage is not something you can do without risk of killing someone. Or you could just use rasburicase - recombinant urate-oxidase - instead.
- kuhewa 3y ago[flagged]