Naked Medicine

When Telegraph UK published the article, “Scientists find drug to banish bad memories” the piece was dugg over 1200 times. The article title effectively hypes up the idea that is currently backed up only by the most preliminary experiments. The truth in application remains years away – if indeed application of this idea is possible. That’s because many early scientific experiments of interesting chemicals working in mice and rats are hyped up by the press or by scientists themselves who can benefit from the publicity (translation: potential for future research funding).

What is not emphasized enough for the public is that what may look interesting in petri dishes or lab mice / lab rats remain just that – interesting. Does this interesting result translates to something actually happening in humans? Not always. Still it makes for good sci-fi movies or even a sequel to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

So what exactly is U0126? According to the Promega (a chemical supply company) website: U0126 is a synthetic chemical MEK Inhibitor that blocks the activity of the MAP (mitogen activated protein) kinase kinase (not a duplicate typo), MEK. U0126 is more potent and less toxic than PD098059, another MEK inhibitor that has been under investigation for potential therapeutic use for decades, but hasn’t resulted in a human application.

I don’t know what your finances looked like when you were when you were 18 or in your early twenties, but I was a starving graduate student barely able to afford rent. If now I have to pay at least $100 each month on top of my expenses, I’d sink deeper into debt unless I move out of that state. Now, MA is requiring all taxpayers to prove that they have health insurance, which would include young adults who are still either in school or starting to chip away at student loans with their first jobs.

Of course, the politicians are going to espouse the wonders of early prevention and encouraging young people to take better care of their health so that they could lead long, healthy lives. One of the reason why HMOs love healthy adults and young people is because the number crunchers have found that they are less likely to use health care simply because statistics show that this population is healthier than an older age group. This means the HMOs will come out ahead in their business of covering for treatment and cost of care. The truth is, the Massachusetts bureaucrats want the young to pay and subsidize health care utilization by the aging population. We’ve seen how well this concept of “taxing one generation to pay for the other generation” has worked for social security; health care is a hegemonic burden that is finding its expenses to all segments of the population (except for illegal immigrants, but that’s another unwieldy topic).

I’m glad I’m not a young person living in Massachusetts.

Gardiner Harris of New York Times wrote about Vermont’s disclosure of the amount of funds that the states doctors received from drug companies. While the focus was on psychiatrists, because they received top total dollars, I was particularly intrigued that endocrinologists as a specialty followed a close second. Those of you familiar with the field (I briefly worked in the field when I was a pharma employee) know that compared to psychiatrists, endocrinologists are a much smaller group as a specialty.

Still, I was concerned that psychiatrists earn so much money from drug companies because in general, doctors can earn money from drug companies mainly through consulting fees (including speaking fees) or from participating in clinical trials. In neuroscience, clinical trials tend to be very large and time-consuming to have any meaning behind the results. This means psychiatrists wouldn’t make much money per year from clinical trial participation alone, and the bulk of their revenues would come from “consulting” agreements. Consulting agreements usually comprise of speaking engagements and other “advisory board” activities. While we have many more drugs within the psychiatric therapeutic area than endocrinology, why wasn’t cardiovascular specialists a close second or even topping the list? The number of psych drugs could rival the number of cardiovascular drugs on the market.

Could it be that there is much more off-label (unapproved) use of psychiatric drugs than there is for cardiovascular drugs? This was implied by the NYT article, when it noted that psychiatrists who earned a lot of money tend to prescribe psych meds to children the most often. Read the rest of this entry »

I was wondering about the rash of recent television ads for a product called “Alli”. It was obviously a diet product, but I wasn’t sure if it was an herbal supplement or prescription drug. The tone of the ad sounded more like an herbal supplement, and the multi-colored lettering on the bottle looked gimmicky.

Turns out that Alli is the over the counter (OTC) version of an old drug called Xenical.

Some side effects associated with Xenical: Oily Spotting, Flatus with Discharge, Fecal Urgency, Fatty/Oily Stool, Oily Evacuation, Increased Defecation, Fecal Incontinence. In layman’s terms: your butt “leaks” oil, you may expect to have sh*tty farts, you may expect to have the sh*ts (and when you do you’d better pray you’re near a bathroom because you may not have much time or control), you may expect to have oily sh*t, and you may expect to have trouble sh*tting all other times.

The ads could have just said that and saved us a lot of trouble figuring out what this product really is. But that would be too obvious, and the marketers are counting on consumers not knowing any better to buy into the hype so the drug company (GlaxoSmithKline) can make some money before people figure it out for themselves.

A friend sent me an article called, “Drugged out of our minds“, written by Larry M. Jones, a retired Navy Commander and aviator in Texas. Mr. Jones thought the reasons given by drug companies for high drug costs smelled fishy and didn’t appreciate having to fight for a parking space or waiting room seat with pharmaceutical “reps waiting to peddle their wares to the physicians.” Mr. Jones said it was a shame that some American citizens had to skip or split pills because they could not afford their treatment.

I can’t argue with how this “stinks” and how nice it would be if we could get free or affordable medications. I have a chronic condition for which I need to take daily course of prescription strength medication and I have to consider the cost in my budget. I may also have some sympathy toward the pharmaceutical industry because I have worked in pharma companies for most of my professional life and I have some insight into how much research, development, and marketing costs.

Healthcare and medicine strike highly emotional cords in all of us. We – not just the seniors – are becoming victims of “poorly managed healthcare”. Working professionals are fighting a different battle in healthcare – employer healthcare coverage – than elderly or retired citizens, but we all eventually progress to the same question of affordability and healthcare cost. Read the rest of this entry »