Holy ****, a "what about black on black crime" sighting and even after being corrected about Chicago and repeatedly clowned on about Chicago Lestat literally cannot imagine that his right wing media diet is misleading him.

So snake oil salesmen don't bilk desperate people out of their money. I find it hard to believe a functioning adult would need to be told this.

Why not compromise and allow drugs that have a small chance of being effective labelled as such?

Even that must be demonstrated.

I would think you of all people who know how bad most of the populace is at making estimates based on probabilities. I have no doubt the end results would be the same: hucksters get fat off money thrown at them by desperate and ill people.

That has to be weighed against disallowing a drug that sometime works. Each situation would be different.

Meanwhile while I agree that the government should look after various categories of people, I don't think one of those categories should be people who have chosen not to learn a little probability. Especially if that assistance harms those who are willing to study a bit.

Yes. I was speaking of drugs that had no alternative for serious conditions that showed evidence of efficacy short of statistical significance. This is already going on for extreme cases but it could be expanded.

I mean, you realize this has a vanishingly small chance of applying to real things, right?

For the vast majority of drugs, it's not a stochastic process whether they work. Even for drugs that we know don't always work, that is best described as a function of biological mechanism rather than random chance. That is why researchers are doing things like sequencing CYP2D6 and HLA and **** for precision medicine. There is still work to be done, but it is not necessarily random.

Are there any drugs with a small chance of being effective that are harmless?Generally all such drugs are harmful (or at least potentially harmful) so sufficient efficacy has to be demonstrated.

Ethically even testing such drugs for harmful (side) effects requires sufficient expectation of efficacy

really, you guys are gonna turn this into a prescription drug derail itt? gtfo here with that bull****

This is way off topic for this thread but might be interesting to move to its own thread or something. I'm generally with Lestat/Sklansky here. The government's role should be 1) ban drugs which are harmful and 2) provide unbiased information about efficacy. Of course it can also choose to withhold subsidies from medications which are judged not effective enough, but it shouldn't be in the business of forbidding people from using things because it judges them ineffective. Aside from anything else, those judgements are completely impossible to make because some treatments only work for a subset of patients. For example, my ex is chronically ill and has had diagnoses like "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome". Trying to test efficacy of treatments for CFS is hopeless, because nobody understands what it is and it's likely to have many different etiologies, so people in studies who have "CFS" probably in reality have like 5 distinct conditions.

I'm not sure if things are hugely different in the US, but in Australia I see much of the medical industry as being sort of like the music recording industry, a behemoth scrabbling to hold onto its power in the face of technology that ought to justify reducing their influence. I tend to see most of what the industry does as trying to make sure that everything that happens with people's health has to get run through doctors before they can do anything, that way there's plenty of work around for them.

He also lives in Chicago so, like, wat am I even reading.

A white person in Chicago knows the 'but Chicago' stories are bull**** even if they're racist as ****. They drive on the expressway. They know they're not dodging bullets. It's not Fallujah despite the catchy name 'Chiraq'.

But you're okay with bilking desperate people out of their life savings and homes. Ever hear of Epipen? Know what some cancer treatments cost now?

The point is, if nothing else is working and you've got a death sentence disease and a drug has ALREADY been proven to be not harmful, WTF is the government to tell someone they can't at least try it to save their own or a loved one's life? Why does it have to also be be proven effective?

I'll tell you why. Because big pharma doesn't want some smaller drug company researching and coming up cures before they do! And they certainly don't want them to control pricing! So they lobby for more and more regulations/restrictions to make it harder and too expensive for new competition.

The only good thing about this AIDS-fest is that this thread is being bumped for reasons other than cops killing someone.

How about you quote him nodding approvingly at PharmaBro jacking up prices, or asserting that the government should not negotiate drug prices, before calling him a hypocrite?

The US already has a much faster drug approval process compared to the rest of the developed world. Why not just give your loved one sugar pills to try to save his or her life if you don't demand efficacy? It is far cheaper.

First of all, I didn't just bring up black on black crime. That's just Fly inserting a straw man narrative again so he doesn't have to address actual points.

Second, I don't just drive the expressways. Back in the day, I worked in delivery. I've been in just about EVERY single neighborhood in the city. Not sure what that has to do with anything, but I spend more time responding to your people's lies and wildly erroneous assumptions that you invent out of thin air because you'll say anything to try and discredit someone you disagree with.

He claimed that regulations against allowing companies to market drugs that have been proven to be safe, but not proven effective, would lead to snake oil salesmen bilking people out of their money.

I just addressed that it's not a proper comparison and people are STILL being bilked. How about you address the 2nd and 3rd paragraphs of my response and tell me why it's wrong?

LOL. When did I bring up black on black crime just now? Where do you even pull this stuff from?

But you're right about one thing. CNN and and MSNBC (particularly Rachel Maddow) has mislead me in the past. Never knew they were part of right wing media though. Where should I get my news from? Legit question, because I really don't know who to trust anymore.

I did address your second paragraph with my question. If you don't demand efficacy in your drugs, only safety, why not just treat your loved one with sugar pills? Those are proven safe, and they are cheap, and you aren't inhibited by the government from buying them. Why do you need some other thing that is safe and not effective?

You've jumped from 'not proven to be effective to 'proven not to be effective'.

That removes the point completely.

How do you see these safe but ineffectual drugs marketed? Like supplements are now with tiny print saying these claims are not proven try at your own risk? What is being suggested is pure anti intellectual wish fulfillment preying on the sick.

I don't want to speak for Wookie, but my argument would be an analogy to Gresham's Law, or some varient of Akerlof's lemons problem. Suppose you have the FDA concerned *only* with whether a drug is harmful, and not whether it's effective. So now you're introducing two new groups of approved drugs (in addition to the current group that has been shown to likely be both safe and effective):
- Drugs that are not harmful and may provide real benefits.
- Drugs that are not harmful and will absolutely not provide any benefits (Wookie's sugar pills).

Assuming that the first group (the ones that might bring real benefits) costs more to develop (which they almost certainly would), then I would expect you're just going to see a race to the bottom where drugmakers simply manufacture sugar pills; if consumers can't distinguish between the two groups because there's no evidence on their efficacy, then they're not going to be willing to pay more for one group. Therefore, drugmakers end up only making the sugar pills. Bad drugs have crowded out good drugs; Akerlof's market has resulted in nothing but lemons.

So even though Wookie may have seemed to skip a couple of steps to get to his example, I actually think it's a natural endpoint to the system that you're suggesting.

I am pretty sure that the chances of a sugar pill spontaneously causing/coinciding with a cure are actually much larger than the chances of an arbitrary untested substance being more efficacious than a sugar pill.

Marketing of safe but ineffectual drugs shouldn't be allowed. Sadly it is which is why we have such a huge market for nonsense drugs and treatments.

Then again the placebo effect doesn't usually come cheap and it's very real.

Well yeah if you're just going to assume you're right and that not proven to be effect -> effectively proven to be not effective.

What about early stage drug developed by proper boffins that hasn't been proven to be effective yet? I'd suggest government is far more willing to test (with consent) their effectiveness far earlier in the process on real live dying patients then with other drugs. If they weren't the government would be wrong and lestat/DS would be correct.

This is a big problem in the real world (sorry bit of politics slipping in) where those paying (insurance or socialised) have to decide how much to pay for very expensive unproven drugs that have massively more chance of working than sugar pills.