it's so surreal to me how this is happening under our eyes and nobody's stopping it. the impact this will have on our health is so staggering. and what's worse, even if these cuts were reversed tomorrow, it would still take quite some time to reverse the negative effects
There will be follow-on effects, too. Like "wellness" ending up on the same tier as "medicine". Without the research, who's to say? This will also compound the Qanon fascination with "medical freedom", where the patient gets to dictate to the doctor what to do (i.e. use ivermectin against COVID, or whatever other superstition rises to the top of the Qanon imagination cauldron).
yep. I don't wanna be in the shoes of the doctors who'll have to deal with this. although I suspect a part of them will resign, leading to even more "fun" downstream effects
> This will also compound the Qanon fascination with "medical freedom", where the patient gets to dictate to the doctor what to do (i.e. use ivermectin against COVID, or whatever other superstition rises to the top of the Qanon imagination cauldron).
That's very double-edged.
The open question is should humans have the right to take substances individually?
Sure, you get Ivermectin/covid deniers. But you also get homemade Solvaldi (cure for Hepatitis C). I can make it for $300 for the 12 week course, and it retail costs $84000
Of course, even making and taking this drug you manufacture is illegal, even aside patent bullshit.
But why shouldn't I be able to treat myself? Why do we accept really shitty gatekeepers (medical establishment, doctors) gatekeep treatments and cures from us?
And more currently, now that der fuhrer quit the emergency use allocation for Covid shots, now you need a doctors scrip for 'allowing to get a vaccine'. I should be able to get this if I pay for it. But nope, now need to pay for needless doctor payment and more barriers.
So at least in that side, I'm on Qanon's view that I should be able to personally treat myself with whatever substance I deem. Of course, I'll definitely heed a doctor's suggestion as an expert. But fuck.. My body, my choice.
>I can make it for $300 for the 12 week course, and it retail costs $84000
A problem that only exist in USA, you could follow literally any other country and you wouldn't get the same problem, and no other country avoided that issue but letting dumb people take dumb things that they heard in the internet
> Of course, even making and taking this drug you manufacture is illegal
This is not true.
In the United States GENERALLY SPEAKING you can manufacture any substance that is not on the list of controlled substances on the CSA Schedule.
You cannot sell it or administer it to others.
Also IN GENERAL you can consume any substance that is not illegal to possess or manufacture.
In the non-pharmaceutical realm there are a few additional restrictions, like ethanol (which you can manufacture for industrial use but not human consumption) and various nuclear, biological, and chemical munition components. (Don't know how many people are ingesting those)
If you have the ability, you can manufacture your own sofosbuvir and ingest it.
Consider this analogy: you should be allowed to put a gun to your own head and pull the trigger. You should not be allowed to put on a suicide vest and blow yourself up in a group of people.
To the first, yes, I do believe that we humans SHOULD have a right to commit suicide. It should be a right to end your own life.
We have a 'right' drink a handle of whiskey a day, up to the point we get liver disease. Same with smoking 3 packs a day of cigarettes. Same with horrendous diet. But those ways of killing yourself are "acceptable" and also legal. But they're slower.
The second, you're harming other people. That example is blatantly ridiculous, and appears just to gain an emotional response by invoking terrorism.
> "you're harming other people", yes as in the case where you are contagious.
Have you watched a movie lately? Talk about contagious violence. I can tell you this, your fate is just a blip on the back side of other people's large screen TV where the movies are shown.
I go further and say that you should be able to buy any drug from the pharmacy without a prescription*. As well as testing kits. Having to have an ongoing relationship with a doctor just to refill your medication or get antibiotics when you get strep is a huge waste of everyone's time and money. And there are countries where you can already do this and they haven't collapsed. It makes the job of pharmacist actually matter as someone other than a pill counter.
It ends so many stupid discussions we have in the US. Can this medication be prescribed for an off-label use? Who cares because you can just buy it. Do you meet some arbitrary federal weight guideline for Ozempic? Who cares you can just buy it.
* every rule has exceptions, don't get bogged down with them.
Two words that explain why it hurts everyone else when you can go buy antibiotics whenever you want (you think you have strep):
Antibiotic Resistance.
Longer explanation: how do you know exactly which bacteria you’re infected with, and which antibiotics will work well against them, and which ones they’ll throw a middle finger at? Even if you have the exact same symptoms as the last time, how do you know that taking the same antibiotic will work just as well, and won’t just further select for bacteria it has no effect on?
My apologies, I'm using strep in the layman's terms meaning any bacterial sinusitis.
This is great and all but it ignores that getting an antibiotic prescription is not difficult at all. I literally just get in a video call, describe the symptoms of strep, and they write me a prescription. It's less expensive to treat than to test. In 15 years I've never had a doctor actually test me for what bacteria I actually have. They sometimes do the bare minimum of looking at it to be pretty confident it's bacterial but that's about it.
However stupid you think the general populace is, doctors count themselves among their numbers. Your average urgent care or primary care doc is just going to give the same broad spectrum antibiotics without any real thought. Except for the one bona-fide MD who looked at my very obvious case of strep, knowing from my chart that I have chronic bacterial sinusitis, and me telling them as much, looking at my puss filled tonsils and concluding that it's allergies and that I should take Claritin. Never go to urgent care man.
I believe all recreational drugs should either be legal or else available by prescription with the explicit statement in the law that addiction management is a valid reason for a prescription. None of the controlled substances hoops. And I think *renewing* maintenance meds should be within the realm of the pharmacist.
But I think all agents for which resistance is a factor should be doctor only.
If use of a drug had no, or very little externalities, id agree. Overuse of antibiotics creates resistant bacteria, endangering everyone. I am forced to disagree civilly, sir.
A large portion of antibiotic resistance comes from patients taking a partial prescription, feeling better, and discontinuing the rest of the pills.
In that situation (the only one at this time), is the majority of resistances are made.
Controlling the supply, especially if you know you have a bacterial disease, can be solved readily.
In fact, on a camping trip, I was bit by 15 ticks. Was bad. When I got back to civilization, I started getting spots all over my body. Surprise, it was rocky mountain spotted fever. But if I could determine the 2 drugs for curing spotted fever and Lyme, I absolutely would have did both. But the shitty gatekeeper (doctor) wouldn't do Lyme course. Again, logically made a lot of sense, especially that Lyme tests are 60% accurate. And, 15 ticks.
You're not really saying that the populous would finish more courses of over-the-counter antibiotics, are you? Prescriptionless antibiotics would almost axiomatically make that worse.
So then what's the fear? If they take antibiotics for a bacterial infection and don't finish it's same as the current state of the world. If they take antibiotics for a viral infection and don't finish them then no harm no foul if you believe the theory that this is how resistance occurs.
Hard to create a strain of antibiotic resistant bacteria when you didn't have any in your system to begin with. Turns out you can't #gatekeep #girlboss your way out of this and have to educate your way out regardless if antibiotics are behind-the-counter non-prescription or not.
What happens when your benign dictator (FDA), turns not so benign?
Like, covid shots. Now you need to beg a doctor to get them. Hope you pass their gatekeeping test.
Or now women are being arrested and charged with murder for miscarriages and missing periods.
And there's another round of "get rid of ACA, which includes banning non-coverage of preexisting conditions. Treating yourself is a strong protection of not being covered.
RFK is going through medical records across the country for anybody with autism, ADD, and ADHD. What and how are these lists being used for? (I know how the German nazies used them...)
We as a society spent the last 3-4 years kneecapping public health laws and authorities. There have been numerous state level rollbacks of authority, did that public health officials don't have the authority to impose mask mandates, or advise social distancing.
The Project 2025 document makes a lot of accusations about this or that department being politicized and left-aligned. But that's not exactly a good standard to go by.
Science in the US became political in like the 50s, when Vannevar Bush decided we should spend federal funds on advancing research since it was so fruitful during WW2, and things like peer review, which did not exist as a formal process in most research, could improve dissemination and the scientific process.
It also became political when we were trying to introduce evolution, a well understood and supported scientific discovery, into science curriculums, and that made religious people extremely angry
It also became political in like 2000 when Bush jr. banned stem cell research because it made religious people mad.
It also became political in like 1980 when Exxon understood unequivocally that they were directly causing the destruction of the Earth's climate and that they could probably just spend money on PR campaigns to make it a culture war issue so they wouldn't have to fix it.
It also became political when geology proved the earth was more than 6000 years old.
It also became political when Eugenics. This also made religious people angry when scientific racism was demonstrably wrong.
It also became political when scientists knew there was a clear connection between cigarettes and lung cancer but it took like thirty years to produce the kind of scientific studies that were required to convince the general public because of immense counter-narrative campaigns by cigarette companies that insisted that cigarettes were healthy.
They also became political when the Christian Scientists parlayed their insane cult beliefs into laws to allow them to send their unvaccinated kids to school at everyone else's expense.
It also became political in the 90s when the sugar industry funded an immense anti-narrative campaign to trick the majority of the US into believing that fat was more harmful than other forms of the same amount of calories.
It is currently political to understand even basic highschool biology like "mRNA won't change your DNA"
It was political when a Utah politician and two chemists tried to turn the result of a single extremely poorly run fusion experiment that no physicist was able to replicate and had clear methodological problems (and math problems) that any physicist would have wanted to fix into federal funding to the tune of $25 million after claiming in the Press Release that the intial experiment was funded with $100k of their own money and they wanted maybe a couple million to scale up and confirm their results.
It was political when Nazis burned an institute setup to research gender and sexuality.
Knowledge has always been political to people who confuse their ignorant beliefs for reality, and rely on public ignorance for their support. You should notice that these events were not politicized by scientists.
If I talked to the board of directors of my employer this way do you think I would remain employed? Why do you think public research institutions would or even should be able to attack the majority population of the country and not suffer the same fate?
I don't think you'll be able to manage the combination of self reflection and empathy required to understand this. Most people on your side are behaving in a similar way. It's why this stuff is going away and very unlikely to come back.
