Re:Drug 'reverses' ageing in animal tests
by akiselev on Thursday March 23, 2017 @09:09PM
(#13945752)
Safe injection sites don't create a moral hazard: they are a response to a public health and safety crisis that exists whether or not you have them. Your neighborhood drug dealer won't convince anyone to start abusing drugs just because there's a safe injection site nearby.
Charging for any FDA regulated drug or therapeutic (or anything) before marketing approval, however, is a cardinal sin in the pharmaceutical industry because it incentivizes the exact kind of snake oil salesman behavior that the FDA was created to curtail. Gathering any kind of useful data (let alone keeping patients safe) for a few self-experimenters will be extremely expensive so unless this infrastructure is publicly funded, you're just recreating the conditions of the 1800s, except now with entire businesses built on finding gullible people who will try literally anything because... "science". Even if it's publicly funded, it will almost certainly end in disaster.
All it takes is a few desperate parents, a dead autistic kid, and some clickbait for an entire generation to lose trust in our pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. That loss of trust will lead to orders of magnitude more death and suffering than would be prevented by letting desperate people play Russian Roulette with what is essentially a fully loaded gun (that they think is empty).
The first phase of human clinical trials is literally giving a small group of healthy patients under constant supervision a steadily increasing dosage until more than half of them can no longer safely handle it. That's only after a safe dose has been established in animal trials so we're talking about serious complications or death in the single digits percent of cases after tens of millions of dollars have already been spent. Individuals hoping for a positive outcome have a better chance of winning the lottery.
Charging for any FDA regulated drug or therapeutic (or anything) before marketing approval, however, is a cardinal sin in the pharmaceutical industry because it incentivizes the exact kind of snake oil salesman behavior that the FDA was created to curtail. Gathering any kind of useful data (let alone keeping patients safe) for a few self-experimenters will be extremely expensive so unless this infrastructure is publicly funded, you're just recreating the conditions of the 1800s, except now with entire businesses built on finding gullible people who will try literally anything because... "science". Even if it's publicly funded, it will almost certainly end in disaster.
All it takes is a few desperate parents, a dead autistic kid, and some clickbait for an entire generation to lose trust in our pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. That loss of trust will lead to orders of magnitude more death and suffering than would be prevented by letting desperate people play Russian Roulette with what is essentially a fully loaded gun (that they think is empty).
The first phase of human clinical trials is literally giving a small group of healthy patients under constant supervision a steadily increasing dosage until more than half of them can no longer safely handle it. That's only after a safe dose has been established in animal trials so we're talking about serious complications or death in the single digits percent of cases after tens of millions of dollars have already been spent. Individuals hoping for a positive outcome have a better chance of winning the lottery.