[warent]

"The far bigger problem than drugs with side effects is a lack of drugs."

I'm not so sure about that. Arguably the market is actually oversaturated with drugs, and too many people rely on them to an absurd extent rather than changing behaviors and habits to improve overall health.

[jamescostian]

> too many people rely on [drugs] to an absurd extent rather than changing behaviors and habits

It's not that simple. If I go to school and someone gets me sick, you wouldn't "this is your fault, you shouldn't have such bad habits like going to school." Furthermore, what are these good behaviors and habits? I can find a million articles on the internet telling me that cold showers are a good habit and another million saying hot showers are a good habit - which one is objectively right?

Yes, there are people who decide to use drugs instead of making simple changes (e.g. my friend who drank a large bottle of Jack in a day and needed to get his stomach pumped - he should have just vented to a friend about his girl issues). But there are so many other people out there who don't fit that description, and there isn't any true scottsman with objectively perfect behaviors and habits. So I don't think it's unreasonable to help people out with more options for drugs that may be better for some people than what we already have.

[Mikushi]

> can find a million articles on the internet telling me that cold showers are a good habit and another million saying hot showers are a good habit - which one is objectively right?

The one that works for you? We are all different, depending on ethnicity, medical history, and a million other factor your diet, life style and life choices will affect your health differently.

[jamescostian]

How do you define "works for you"? For example, say I take cold showers and decide "this makes me cold; I don't like it" and then start taking hot showers everyday. But then imagine that one day, we find a link between hot showers and cancer.

How was I supposed to know that cold showers would have been better for me? Should my "bad habit" really be blamed?

[Broken_Hippo]

I'll fully agree with the other replies. To add to the other things posted:

The other thing with drugs is that there are quite a few diseases and afflictions, quite a few of which need special drugs. Some drugs don't work so well for some folks as others. Migraines and seizures are like this. Sometimes, we have new drugs because they generally come with fewer side effects than the old drug it theoretically replaced, yet the old drug is still in production because it still works better than the new on in them.

[GuB-42]

More like saturated with endless variations of the same drug.

The pharmaceutical industry likes to release a new variants of popular drugs in order to keep them patented. They then advertise to doctors and other involved parties in an attempt to convince them that the "new" drug is better than the old one.

It is possible to have too many and not enough drugs at the same time.

[appleflaxen]

trust me: you think so until someone you care about develops a disease with no treatment.

[saiya-jin]

While I understand what you want to say, wording is a bit poor. Quite a few extremely useful new drugs without any good equivalent are/were released too - for example in last 2 years we can actually cure Hepatitis C and get it out of the body for good! Till now it was almost a death sentence with high probability of liver cancer down the road.

(I know it since my fiancee is a doctor and she accidentally stabbed herself with needle from a patient who is extremely contagious with Hep C, so we did our research. luckily she didn't get it, the stab was quite shallow).

Or new drugs that enable HIV patients to lead +- normal life - they were not here 10 years ago. There are some overused and overprescribed medicines (painkillers, antibiotics in 3rd world countries being handed out like skittles).

[tvural]

There's definitely more that can be done behaviorally - the solution to obesity today probably looks more like eating better than taking diet pills. But this is the anti-technological solution that can only be pushed so far, like trying to solve the energy crisis by telling everyone to drive smart cars.

Also, there's often nothing you can do behaviorally. Even people with near perfect behavior will eventually get Cancer or Alzheimer's or Heart Disease. Most of the drugs approved to treat these diseases are something like band-aids that decrease your risk 10% or allow you to live a couple months longer. Maybe too many people are making drugs that work barely well enough for the side effects to be worth it. But almost anything that can get past the FDA will work economically, since there are usually very few alternatives from the buyer's perspective.