It's amazing to me that people are willing to experiment with an unapproved chemical that provides no proven benefit in humans, yet aren't willing to use human-proven therapies with known benefits such as statins.
Well, it's not for a sore knee. Is there anything more unapproved than an irreversible disease that destroys your mind in the space of a few years? It's not like cancer, from which you might be cured, or at least with which you can have a meaningful life until your eventual death. It is a slow motion process of erasure that is well on its way at the moment of the first diagnosis. Taking the wrong medicine could shorten your brain's life of how much, a year perhaps? Still worth trying.
Some people go to Switzerland for specific chemicals to render them dead as fast as possible, since they see it as preferable to living with Alzheimer's.
Admittedly it seems like a bit of a gamble to just start popping drugs whether they've been studied or not, but people spend lots of money on "natural" supplements which are at least usually reasonably safe but are even less likely to work.
Yes, obviously. But what about new chemicals where testing has been done, without significant observed damage? Is that considered safe after enough observations, or would a single fatality skew your risk-minimizing behavior?
I know there's very good reason to be wary of mouse models, but in cases (as this appears to be) where the physiological mechanism of disease is both (a) understood and (b) the same from mouse to human, a little less skepticism may be warranted.
Not really. Side-effects aren't to be observed in a vacuum.
We should be far more concerned about side-effects of a drug intended to treat acne or erectile dysfunction than for drugs targeting life destroyers such as cancer and Alzheimer's.
At some threshold of disease viciousness, society (and the FDA) should relax substantially on the risk-aversion, because the patient is already facing the worst-case scenario.
>At some threshold of disease viciousness, society (and the FDA) should relax substantially on the risk-aversion, because the patient is already facing the worst-case scenario.
This is a fair point, but the rest... well ... still manages to miss the above argument. Side-effects aren't observed in a vacuum, but efficacy is still observed in laboratory conditions, so we really can't comment on whether (or how) this molecule affects other systems.
Mouse models are rapidly becoming obsolete as it's becoming easier than ever to model entire, differentiated tissues grown from red blood cell-derived adult stem cells.
It's also now possible to do clinically-useful testing of targeted treatments using genetically-edited control tissue cultures against unedited tissue cultures.
The point is that it's better to test something that is as close to the patient as possible, not guess with other species or even other people whom express genes differently.
FYI: making a new mouse models requires lots of chopping off heads of mice whom don't possess the desired gene. While transgenic, highly-edited living models might be nice, there's probably a more humane/simpler/reproducible way to do the exact same thing.
>>Mouse models are rapidly becoming obsolete as it's becoming easier than ever to model entire, differentiated tissues grown from red blood cell-derived adult stem cells.
No they aren't. Transgenic mouse models are a $billion industry. We do not understand biological mechanisms nearly enough to not use live animal models. We are not even able to recreate single cell organisms with our level of knowledge and engineering.
>>FYI: making a new mouse models requires lots of chopping off heads of mice whom don't possess the desired gene. While transgenic, highly-edited living models might be nice, there's probably a more humane and simpler way to do the exact same thing.
Ah, the real root of your argument. Do you even know what the word humane means? I work in a labroatory and the animals are treated better than the people. Yes, a lot of mice are killed.. but for a reason. You say there's probably a simpler way to do the exact same thing, but there simply isn't. I wish more people were actually educated in this matter, but emotional responses tend to get more results.
Not only that .... chopping off heads isn't how mice are terminated, from what I've been told by someone who worked in fetal development research on mice.
I always assumed that the sacrifice method depended on the research. You might liquefy them in a centrifuge, or pith them with a probe, or asphyxiate them in pure gaseous nitrogen, or flash freeze them in liquid nitrogen. Whatever makes sense for the study.
But if the animals in question are not part of the study at all, I don't see how it matters much. Maybe there's a little mouse guillotine. Maybe one person on the team owns a reptile pet that is very well fed. The reason why rodent models are used in the first place is that they're mammals, easy to care for, breed, and handle, and no one really cares if they die by the millions.
If they were outside the lab, they would likely get poisoned or crushed by snap traps. (That's better than what a cat would do.) Cuteness won't save you from my wrath if you eat my food and then poop in whatever you left behind. At least the ones that died in the labs had real jobs, instead of living hedonistic freeloader lifestyles inside someone else's couch.
I work for the Stanford Med School, so where do you work?
But regardless, you're rationalizing your own biases and agendas on outdated techniques and racing to the bottom with a disrespectful, ad hominem approach. How pleasant and humane of you. Maybe you should look to the future instead of attacking what isn't in your narrow focus, because you come across as a troll.
I think what you're responding to is NOT about willingness to experiment with unproven drugs, but rather a feeling of horror about dementia and Alzheimer's disease. These are awful afflictions that impact not just the victims but also their families.
That said, regardless of whether or not they're proven/approved/tested, drugs are never magic bullets. The ones used to treat the most serious chronic diseases always come with serious risks and profound side-effects. I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
Hippies often did the same thing. It's pretty dumb to just throw compounds in your body without having a guestimate about their effects.
In the future, medical clinicians won't have to guess as much because adult stem cells can now be created from red blood cells, allowing personalized medication with a petri model of actual patient tissue, to screen problems like interactions and allergies before administration.
There's a lot of subtlety when it comes to statins:
"Statins are beneficial, but some have questioned whether their benefits are due to their ability to lower cholesterol or to their anti-inflammatory effects, or both. There are two competing hypotheses, the LDL hypothesis and the statin hypothesis. A new study in The New England Journal of Medicine sheds some light on that controversy and tips the balance in favor of the LDL hypothesis."
I expect there is a Venn diagram that would cover this small subset of people that fulfill your 2 requirements but most people probably fall into one or the other.
I would definitely prefer not to have chemical compounds that haven't been demonstrated effective marketed as consumer medical products. I'm not sure how that connects to the thread, though.
While there are some drugs that are clearly effective, there are big problems in Big Pharma's approach to clinical trials, including burying half the trials' results and poor experiment design. And once a drug makes it to market, expanding that market without testing becomes a priority. Do you think Risperdal was a one-off, or is it a representative case study of how drugs are marketed by at least a major part of Big Pharma?
Being cynical about 'Big Pharma' does not mean that you support <insert pseudoscience/buzzword category here> placebos, and does not mean that you do not support honest scientific efforts.
For example, Ben Goldacre. He is cynical about 'Big Pharma', and has written about it in one of his books[0]. At the same time he appears to support efforts to open up private medical research -- he recently cofounded AllTrials[2] along with the BMJ, Cochrane, PLOS, and a few other high-profile reputable sources[3].