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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
there does need to be increased basic research (not immediate commercial production) but the other kind, the immediate commercial research, is still necessary. some sort of patent would be needed to facilitate the latter kind of research, otherwise you'd have a pretty bad product market in all likelihood.
making information property is problematic within a sovereignty based property system that flows straight from monkeys claiming hilltops. this is not to say the monkeys should not be able to claim some sort of value out of 'their' hilltop, but the process for determining that value is going to involve more than justifying an original 'claim.' the extent of hte claim itself has to be modified. a protection of discovery is more or less unproblematic in academic citation system, where you only credit the idea's discovery and not pay soem royalty for use. but when money comes into the picture there will not be accurate citations.
it is a problem
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Example of immediate commercial research please?
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The problem is that R&D is laughably expensive, especially for medicine. I'll be the first one to agree that healthcare is laughably expensive, but there is a reason. A single drug represents a massive investment for a company, and the patent allows it exclusivity to make it back (and cover losses from failed drugs).
A single drug takes somewhere on the order of 5-10 years and a billion dollars to bring to production. That completely ignores the costs of all the drugs that fail somewhere in the test process, meaning the average cost for developing a successful drug is even higher.
Now, it might be possible to reduce costs in some ways during the drug testing phase, but it is difficult to see where. If you take a drug, you want to know that it is safe and works, which means undergoing large-scale human trials which cost lots of money. There are some ways of testing, such as checking out some pharmokinetics by using sub-effective doses, but we honestly have no substitute for using actual humans to test drugs.
Now if we just took like 50% of the US military budget and funneled it straight into the NIH, maybe there's a chance but we're more interested in protecting ourselves from a threat that is more visible but generally more remote for the average American.
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On May 22 2014 11:26 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2014 09:32 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On May 22 2014 09:20 IgnE wrote:
Abolish the patent system. It's just another asset that the growing rentier class is collecting and which encourages further rent-seeking behavior. Information wants to be free, and if you got rid of it that would be one less avenue through which the rentier class could extract resources from producers, and hence, from employees of producers. Wouldn't that eradicate a lot of R&D? Seems overly extreme... Fund more R&D by increasing federal grant money.
I don't think that's viable. Public and private R&D aren't perfect substitutes.
We're a global leader in R&D. If you want to get rid of patents you need to be very convincing that you have a better system to take over.
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You are exaggerating the costs of drug research in relation to military spending and have swallowed big pharma's narrative hook, line, and sinker. If drug research is your only objection to scrapping the patent system, then I think we can safely say the patent system should be scrapped.
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Tuesday primaries marked the first state-wide election in Arkansas since the state's new voter ID law went into effect earlier this year. And there were problems.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas has received numerous complaints from voters who say poll workers "quizzed" them about the information on their IDs, one of the organization's officials told TPM on Wednesday.
"It's not one or two specific locations, we're hearing about it in various locations around the state," Holly Dickson, legal director at ACLU of Arkansas, said in an interview. "There may have been a coordinated effort to have poll workers enforce the law this way -- that remains to be seen, of course."
The complaints received by the ACLU were similar in nature to those reported on by Max Brantley of the Arkansas Times, an alt weekly in Little Rock. He first noted reports of it on Tuesday while the election was still taking place. Then on Wednesday, Brantley posted several first-person accounts from voters on the newspaper's website.
"I was quizzed about my name, address and birthdate while the election volunteer held my license where I couldn't see it," one reader wrote to Brantley. "Is that also part of the photo ID law? I mean, my drivers license does have my photo right there on the front... Are we testing for fake IDs now, too?"
"I voted in the Democratic primary at Temple Baptist Church, Springdale, Arkansas. I was asked many questions," another reader told Brantley. "The little old lady was pleasant and I was nice to her but I was asked to specifically mention that the word 'Place' was in my street address in addition to the street name, etc."
Quizzes are not part of the new law. Here's how it's supposed to work: poll workers are instructed to ask each voter for their name, their address, and their date of birth. After that, the poll workers ask for ID, which they are supposed to use to verify names and compare faces to photographs. But that's not the procedure encountered by the voters voicing complaints.
Source
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Pity that trolling scum decided to pass pointless voter id laws instead of dealing with actual issues.
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Drug research is expensive because Phase III trials suck but we can't live without them. Yes, pharmaceutical companies charge lots but they also spend a lot. If you can find a real way to really reduce the cost of clinical trials across the board, please let us and the Nobel Prize committees for Medicine AND Economics know.
You need money to develop drugs. People with money will only develop drugs if they think they can make money. Patents enable them to make money. See how that logic goes? Abolishing the patent system doesn't solve the problem at all.
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I would contest the notion that we need a whole lot of drugs that go into extensive phase III testing. Most of the drugs that cost hundreds of millions or billions of dollars are anti-obesity, anti-diabetes, and anti-heart disease drugs that are designed to treat symptoms of a very preventable problem. Oncology drugs, for example, don't require nearly as extensive testing. Same goes for AIDS drugs and other drugs that are designed for acute diseases. If you care about making money from drugs then I see your point. But if you care about improving health outcomes then I don't think you have one.
Look at the big money makers from drug companies, the kinds of drugs that they are spending all this R&D on. Prozac is overprescribed and only debatably "works" at all. Viagra and Cialis are sex drugs that are more likely related to obesity and heart disease in the first place. Lipitor and other statins are drugs that are keeping people with very preventable problems from dying of a clogged artery at the cost of developing diabetes. Nexium and other heartburn drugs are designed to treat problems stemming from diet and lifestyle habits and often result in a serious dependency, upregulating the proton pumps in your stomach and fucking you over if you ever decide to go off them. Besides allergy medications and maybe some immune system drugs, it's hard for me to think of a blockbuster drug that we wouldn't have been fine without.
Keeping the patent system around to prop up the corrupt drug industry, pushing its ritalin on kids, statins on overweight middle-aged men, and cornucopia of mood regulators on depressed people doesn't seem worth it.
Contrary to popular belief, the drug companies haven't really made a whole lot of great new advances in the last decade or two, and their pipelines are surprisingly empty. You could improve health outcomes by 80% at 20% of the cost by focusing on preventative care and education.
Even if it's impossible to reduce the costs involved with proper safety and testing (which is not conceded), and that testing must be done, there's no reason, in principle, that promising drugs can't be submitted for testing to a public organization with public money funding to conduct the testing. I would argue that the profit motive behind drug testing distorts incentives more than the politics involved in choosing promising new drug candidates. Do we need a new phosphodiesterase inhibitor or should we spend the money looking for novel antibiotics, anti-malarials, anti-cancer drugs etc.?
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On May 22 2014 13:18 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:Show nested quote +Tuesday primaries marked the first state-wide election in Arkansas since the state's new voter ID law went into effect earlier this year. And there were problems.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas has received numerous complaints from voters who say poll workers "quizzed" them about the information on their IDs, one of the organization's officials told TPM on Wednesday.
"It's not one or two specific locations, we're hearing about it in various locations around the state," Holly Dickson, legal director at ACLU of Arkansas, said in an interview. "There may have been a coordinated effort to have poll workers enforce the law this way -- that remains to be seen, of course."
The complaints received by the ACLU were similar in nature to those reported on by Max Brantley of the Arkansas Times, an alt weekly in Little Rock. He first noted reports of it on Tuesday while the election was still taking place. Then on Wednesday, Brantley posted several first-person accounts from voters on the newspaper's website.
"I was quizzed about my name, address and birthdate while the election volunteer held my license where I couldn't see it," one reader wrote to Brantley. "Is that also part of the photo ID law? I mean, my drivers license does have my photo right there on the front... Are we testing for fake IDs now, too?"
"I voted in the Democratic primary at Temple Baptist Church, Springdale, Arkansas. I was asked many questions," another reader told Brantley. "The little old lady was pleasant and I was nice to her but I was asked to specifically mention that the word 'Place' was in my street address in addition to the street name, etc."
Quizzes are not part of the new law. Here's how it's supposed to work: poll workers are instructed to ask each voter for their name, their address, and their date of birth. After that, the poll workers ask for ID, which they are supposed to use to verify names and compare faces to photographs. But that's not the procedure encountered by the voters voicing complaints. Source "There were problems" leads off talk on reports on how poll workers behaved. Problems with poll worker training, not with laws at the poll box. These sorts of accusations surface all the time whether laws have changed for the polling place or everything's fine and dandy. This is a very weak attack on Voter ID laws, but to their credit they do point out that the purported quizzes weren't part of the new law.
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Of of the "problem" you have is that other countries managed to force pharm companies not to sell you the better poison. So now you're left with bad stuff.
Just abolish, it's not that hard.
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On May 22 2014 16:09 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2014 13:18 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:Tuesday primaries marked the first state-wide election in Arkansas since the state's new voter ID law went into effect earlier this year. And there were problems.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas has received numerous complaints from voters who say poll workers "quizzed" them about the information on their IDs, one of the organization's officials told TPM on Wednesday.
"It's not one or two specific locations, we're hearing about it in various locations around the state," Holly Dickson, legal director at ACLU of Arkansas, said in an interview. "There may have been a coordinated effort to have poll workers enforce the law this way -- that remains to be seen, of course."
The complaints received by the ACLU were similar in nature to those reported on by Max Brantley of the Arkansas Times, an alt weekly in Little Rock. He first noted reports of it on Tuesday while the election was still taking place. Then on Wednesday, Brantley posted several first-person accounts from voters on the newspaper's website.
"I was quizzed about my name, address and birthdate while the election volunteer held my license where I couldn't see it," one reader wrote to Brantley. "Is that also part of the photo ID law? I mean, my drivers license does have my photo right there on the front... Are we testing for fake IDs now, too?"
"I voted in the Democratic primary at Temple Baptist Church, Springdale, Arkansas. I was asked many questions," another reader told Brantley. "The little old lady was pleasant and I was nice to her but I was asked to specifically mention that the word 'Place' was in my street address in addition to the street name, etc."
Quizzes are not part of the new law. Here's how it's supposed to work: poll workers are instructed to ask each voter for their name, their address, and their date of birth. After that, the poll workers ask for ID, which they are supposed to use to verify names and compare faces to photographs. But that's not the procedure encountered by the voters voicing complaints. Source "There were problems" leads off talk on reports on how poll workers behaved. Problems with poll worker training, not with laws at the poll box. These sorts of accusations surface all the time whether laws have changed for the polling place or everything's fine and dandy. This is a very weak attack on Voter ID laws, but to their credit they do point out that the purported quizzes weren't part of the new law.
I can't wait to hear about all the voter ID fraud they stopped... Oh wait... they made that problem up in the first place, then made Voter Suppression laws and slapped a euphemistic name on em' to suppress Democratic voters...
But you just keep propagating the propaganda.....
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
On May 22 2014 11:53 IgnE wrote:
Example of immediate commercial research please? market product research.
pharma etc patents can be reevaluated by cost benefit analysis which should be the standard for good patents. point is under this standard at least some patents will still survive
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Northern Ireland27206 Posts
IgNE is on to something regarding America's prescription drug culture.
It's an instinctual thing, just from reading around and seeing people frequently bring up SSRis, mood alterers, Diazapam et al very casually. They seem frequently mis-prescribed.
It's nothing I can substantively back up, just a cultural observation on how normal and non-noteworthy it seems to be in the States to be on one or more of these kind of drugs, even compared to Western Europe. That's a comparison I'd love to see some data on actually
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United States44190 Posts
Selective publishing of trials also completely discredits the entire research process. When you publish the results along with the statistician's claim that the chance of getting these results without the drug being effective is, say, 1 in 50 and neglect to mention that you actually ran 50 trials and only got this result in the one then what the fuck is the point of any of it.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa065779
According to the published literature, it appeared that 94% of the trials conducted were positive. By contrast, the FDA analysis showed that 51% were positive.
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On May 22 2014 21:43 Wombat_NI wrote:
IgNE is on to something regarding America's prescription drug culture.
It's an instinctual thing, just from reading around and seeing people frequently bring up SSRis, mood alterers, Diazapam et al very casually. They seem frequently mis-prescribed.
It's nothing I can substantively back up, just a cultural observation on how normal and non-noteworthy it seems to be in the States to be on one or more of these kind of drugs, even compared to Western Europe. That's a comparison I'd love to see some data on actually
Fuck me, but I actually have to agree with Igne on the prescription drug culture problem. There's so much shit that's way over-prescribed. People are trying to fix problems that don't really need to be fixed, such as prescribing Ritalin to every little boy who acts just like a typical little boy. The one that's really going to fuck us, though, is the over-prescription of antibiotics.
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On May 22 2014 22:16 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2014 21:43 Wombat_NI wrote:
IgNE is on to something regarding America's prescription drug culture.
It's an instinctual thing, just from reading around and seeing people frequently bring up SSRis, mood alterers, Diazapam et al very casually. They seem frequently mis-prescribed.
It's nothing I can substantively back up, just a cultural observation on how normal and non-noteworthy it seems to be in the States to be on one or more of these kind of drugs, even compared to Western Europe. That's a comparison I'd love to see some data on actually Fuck me, but I actually have to agree with Igne on the prescription drug culture problem. There's so much shit that's way over-prescribed. People are trying to fix problems that don't really need to be fixed, such as prescribing Ritalin to every little boy who acts just like a typical little boy. The one that's really going to fuck us, though, is the over-prescription of antibiotics.
Same problem here but it's partly being solved because of our insurance companies. Since they're the one who have to pay for the drugs they are forcing doctors to prescribe cheaper drugs.
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On May 22 2014 22:16 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2014 21:43 Wombat_NI wrote:
IgNE is on to something regarding America's prescription drug culture.
It's an instinctual thing, just from reading around and seeing people frequently bring up SSRis, mood alterers, Diazapam et al very casually. They seem frequently mis-prescribed.
It's nothing I can substantively back up, just a cultural observation on how normal and non-noteworthy it seems to be in the States to be on one or more of these kind of drugs, even compared to Western Europe. That's a comparison I'd love to see some data on actually Fuck me, but I actually have to agree with Igne on the prescription drug culture problem. There's so much shit that's way over-prescribed. People are trying to fix problems that don't really need to be fixed, such as prescribing Ritalin to every little boy who acts just like a typical little boy. The one that's really going to fuck us, though, is the over-prescription of antibiotics.
I agree, overprescription of antibiotics is so bad that I'm wondering if homeopathy isn't actually doing us a favour by creating a truly harmless placebo, as much as it galls me to admit that quackery can have any benefit at all.
The other thing is mood-alteration stuff. Here's something that should put the problem in perspective, for the US. As a nation, the US is consuming so much Prozac that the fish are getting affected by the amount that gets pissed into the waterways. And that's just Prozac, not counting the enormous array of other similar pharmaceuticals that are becoming an environmental issue. Maybe there is some underreporting in Europe and I'm not really that much into that field, just antidepressants, but I'll back xDaunt's cultural observation up on that, it doesn't seem to be anywhere near such a problem in Western Europe, at least for SSRIs.
It's actually quite shocking how little we know about SSRIs and similar medications compared to how readily they're prescribed, but while that's a problem in itself, why are people asking for them at such insane rates? There's something to think about. For anyone that is more than just casually interested, there's a book by Sapolsky that I couldn't recommend more called "Why do Zebras not get ulcers?" It's accessible to laypeople and it will probably raise more than a few questions about structure of modern life and the economy in general.
EDIT: Sapolsky's book is non-political, so have no fear  .
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On May 23 2014 00:57 hummingbird23 wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2014 22:16 xDaunt wrote:On May 22 2014 21:43 Wombat_NI wrote:
IgNE is on to something regarding America's prescription drug culture.
It's an instinctual thing, just from reading around and seeing people frequently bring up SSRis, mood alterers, Diazapam et al very casually. They seem frequently mis-prescribed.
It's nothing I can substantively back up, just a cultural observation on how normal and non-noteworthy it seems to be in the States to be on one or more of these kind of drugs, even compared to Western Europe. That's a comparison I'd love to see some data on actually Fuck me, but I actually have to agree with Igne on the prescription drug culture problem. There's so much shit that's way over-prescribed. People are trying to fix problems that don't really need to be fixed, such as prescribing Ritalin to every little boy who acts just like a typical little boy. The one that's really going to fuck us, though, is the over-prescription of antibiotics. I agree, overprescription of antibiotics is so bad that I'm wondering if homeopathy isn't actually doing us a favour by creating a truly harmless placebo, as much as it galls me to admit that quackery can have any benefit at all. The other thing is mood-alteration stuff. Here's something that should put the problem in perspective, for the US. As a nation, the US is consuming so much Prozac that the fish are getting affected by the amount that gets pissed into the waterways. And that's just Prozac, not counting the enormous array of other similar pharmaceuticals that are becoming an environmental issue. Maybe there is some underreporting in Europe and I'm not really that much into that field, just antidepressants, but I'll back xDaunt's cultural observation up on that, it doesn't seem to be anywhere near such a problem in Western Europe, at least for SSRIs. It's actually quite shocking how little we know about SSRIs and similar medications compared to how readily they're prescribed, but while that's a problem in itself, why are people asking for them at such insane rates? There's something to think about. For anyone that is more than just casually interested, there's a book by Sapolsky that I couldn't recommend more called "Why do Zebras not get ulcers?" It's accessible to laypeople and it will probably raise more than a few questions about structure of modern life and the economy in general. EDIT: Sapolsky's book is non-political, so have no fear .
Its a problem of entitlement and the lack of No.
If someone feels they have a problem but dont really have one they want a pill. Feeling a little down? its perfectly normal but people want a pill for it.
A kid is busy, parents get concerned despite it being utterly normal and get them on pills ect ect.
Everything is a problem nowadays, every child has ADHD, every person had a dozen physiological problems and if they don't find one a new one is made up it feels like.
The human body & mind is pretty resilient and capable of solving problems if given a bit of time but no one wants to do that, just put in pills until it stops.
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On May 22 2014 14:20 IgnE wrote:
I would contest the notion that we need a whole lot of drugs that go into extensive phase III testing. Most of the drugs that cost hundreds of millions or billions of dollars are anti-obesity, anti-diabetes, and anti-heart disease drugs that are designed to treat symptoms of a very preventable problem. Oncology drugs, for example, don't require nearly as extensive testing. Same goes for AIDS drugs and other drugs that are designed for acute diseases. If you care about making money from drugs then I see your point. But if you care about improving health outcomes then I don't think you have one.
Look at the big money makers from drug companies, the kinds of drugs that they are spending all this R&D on. Prozac is overprescribed and only debatably "works" at all. Viagra and Cialis are sex drugs that are more likely related to obesity and heart disease in the first place. Lipitor and other statins are drugs that are keeping people with very preventable problems from dying of a clogged artery at the cost of developing diabetes. Nexium and other heartburn drugs are designed to treat problems stemming from diet and lifestyle habits and often result in a serious dependency, upregulating the proton pumps in your stomach and fucking you over if you ever decide to go off them. Besides allergy medications and maybe some immune system drugs, it's hard for me to think of a blockbuster drug that we wouldn't have been fine without.
Keeping the patent system around to prop up the corrupt drug industry, pushing its ritalin on kids, statins on overweight middle-aged men, and cornucopia of mood regulators on depressed people doesn't seem worth it.
Contrary to popular belief, the drug companies haven't really made a whole lot of great new advances in the last decade or two, and their pipelines are surprisingly empty. You could improve health outcomes by 80% at 20% of the cost by focusing on preventative care and education.
Even if it's impossible to reduce the costs involved with proper safety and testing (which is not conceded), and that testing must be done, there's no reason, in principle, that promising drugs can't be submitted for testing to a public organization with public money funding to conduct the testing. I would argue that the profit motive behind drug testing distorts incentives more than the politics involved in choosing promising new drug candidates. Do we need a new phosphodiesterase inhibitor or should we spend the money looking for novel antibiotics, anti-malarials, anti-cancer drugs etc.?
http://jco.ascopubs.org/content/21/22/4145.full.pdf
This paper gives a very low-ball estimate for the cost of Phase III trials for a oncology drug (the researchers admit themselves that their estimate is low). Basically, it's a few thousand dollars per patient enrolled in the trial, plus a ton of overhead costs for time, equipment, etc. that can't be nicely attached to each individual.
Cancer is incredibly complex. You can't just throw some cancer cells in a petri dish with your drug and see if it kills the cancer. You need to test the entire thing in humans-- for example, there's a drug called doxorubicin which is pretty good at killing cancer, but turns out to also cause irreparable heart damage. It is sometimes used, but suppose scientists had said "hey it works", released the drug to a tens of thousands of cancer patients and half of them died from heart failure in a couple years. That is what could happen if we forgo exhaustive clinical testing for side effects.
Or as a historical example, Thalidomide was used to treat morning sickness and it turned out an isomer of it caused birth defects. Even with clinical trials, we've had some bad shit go on like Vioxx, which caused strokes and other heart problems.
I don't deny there are problems with drug companies and the entire culture of overprescribing antibiotics/ other stuff. I know the drug pipeline sucks, because drug companies already hit all the easy cash cows and the patents will expire sooner or later. Half the stuff they do now is recycling old stuff with new delivery systems and silly stuff like that; there was a case where some company had a drug with an expiring patent and they tried to get a new patent for it by selling it with apple juice or something and arguing it was a new delivery method.
However, I'm not talking about those crap drugs half of America has to take because they have lousy lifestyles. I'm talking about drugs that are needed to save lives. Those are not easy to develop, and they are not cheap to develop because they require a much better understanding of how many different systems in the human body fit together, rather than targeting one particular step in a signalling pathway. Now if we nationalized health insurance AND included the cost of federal drug R&D funding it would work, but otherwise we have to try and live with a round of chemotherapy costing a few thousand bucks. Unfortunately, no one is going to buy into that because independence and all that jazz.
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EPT
