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Iamwhomiam wrote:It saddens me to see two well meaning posters talking about the "patient" as though he were not present.
I should hope that in the future this back and forth banter, which cannot be helpful to anyone, especially a certain someone, should take place via pm.
Too insensitive and non-supportive, imo.
bks wrote:
Some people find taking them valuable, whatever the class of controversial drug we're speaking of, c2w?. Without question. But, see, that might not be as important a point as you've make it out to be [here and elsewhere]. Let me try to explain why I think that.
The reason "some people" can benefit from Big Pharma products, of course, is because those products are on the market, and they're only on the market because the drug companies were successful at bringing them to market, and they are successful at bringing them to market because the often-quite-negative side effects the drugs have on a portion of those on whom they were tested, have been effectively "managed" [by being elided, diminished, obscured, or downplayed in a variety of ways, often including out-and-out lying on the part of drugs reps to doctors, and lying on the part of companies to their drug reps, and/or those negative aspects of the drug being buried under 'false hype', and the like]. This is a wide-ranging, if not ubiquitous, feature of the system within which these drugs are brought to market. The atypical neuroleptics are not alone in this respect.
All of which means that the benefits some people find in taking them will come at the cost of consigning others [and often many others] to rather horrible outcomes which they have not been properly warned about [it is another matter whether warning them would necessarily make them safer or allow them to avoid the bad outcomes. The evidence is far from clear that it would, but let's leave that for now]. That is a considerable cost for allowing those who will benefit form the drug to benefit from it, wouldn't you say? And let's be clear: within the current system, protecting the benefit those "some people" get often virtually entails the negative outcomes to those improperly-warned others.
I'm not arguing, of course, that the pharmaceutical industry is alone among major institutions w/r/t this feature.
You admit the atypical neuroleptics were "pushed through with shitty trials and released with a whole tsunami of completely false hype," which I'll take your word for. The bigger point - the one I haven't heard you make, or which I may have missed - pertains to the system, and not any one case within it. To paraphrase David Healy, the problem is that the system of industry-based pharmaceutical testing, and not this or that particular set of trials, does not conform to the norms of science. The pharmaceutical companies control the data they generate. They control [or greatly influence] the manner in which the papers interpreting that data are written up, and which purport to provide the scientific basis for the proper prescription and use of the medications in question. They control the major journals in which the data is published. And they understand that the bottom facts about the substances will not come out unless there is a court trial several years after they've made their hundreds of millions if not billions, and perhaps not even then.
slomo wrote:^^^^ C2W, I agree in part with your analysis of the political forces that are fighting against socialized medicine, but there are equally powerful forces (a weird coalition of insurance and pharmaceutical companies the nature of which I do not completely understand) that would like to make access to healthcare a very coercive endeavor that involves mandated treatment for certain maladies and conditions, as well as involvement in a variety of intrusive programs that seem on paper to be about wellness promotion but under the surface are more about building a system that can surveil behaviors and then issue corresponding financial penalties for "unhealthy" lifestyles. In some environments smokers already pay higher premium contributions for supposedly employer-sponsored healthcare - a precedent that as a reasonably fit, non-smoker, healthy gay male I find somewhat chilling, for obvious reasons.
In some environments smokers already pay higher premium contributions for supposedly employer-sponsored healthcare - a precedent that as a reasonably fit, non-smoker, healthy gay male I find somewhat chilling, for obvious reasons.
SZASZ SETTLES SUIT FOR $650,000
compared2what wrote:I just try to keep my eye on the ball, that's all. And I really do strongly object to the thoughtless demonization of medications that are -- like it or not, and I personally do not -- the only thing keeping a large, underrepresented, very vulnerable part of the population alive.
Incidentally, one reason I don't like it is that it's not fucking good enough to just keep people alive (though possibly hampered or even sidelined by unpleasant side effects) and call that medical care. But there are others. Believe it or not.
compared2what? wrote:I'd say that one's actually another iteration of the same thing I described -- ie, blaming/demonizing/partitioning people who require costly, long-term care. It's worth bearing in mind that most psychotropics aren't big money-makers. And none of them are once they go off patent. Prozac was huge, and it opened up a much bigger market for SSRIs. But nobody's getting rich off of any of them at this point. I believe that....Risperdal? Seroquel?...I can't remember. Anyway. One of those drugs is still on patent and therefore still being hyped to the max by whoever still stands to gain by investing in that. Or at least it was, the last time I checked it, which was within the last year. But even in that case, it's not like a bread-and-butter drug for whoever makes it. So. Pharma's not interested in making psychotropic medications mandatory for some subset of the population. It just wouldn't be profitable enough for them to care.
Which is not to say that they and others don't make money off the over-prescription of commonly over-prescribed psychotropic medications. They do. Plus, they and their insurance-industry cronies are slowly eliminating general access to all other (more costly to reimburse) forms of psychiatric treatment by making meds the standard. So they kind of get to kill two birds with one stone.
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