Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by logicchains 978 days ago
People absolutely question the results of big pharma. Americans nowadays are less healthier and have lower life expectancies than their parents' generation, and while some of that may be due to lifestyle choices, some is due to pharma pushing drugs that are a net negative, like the unnecessary opioids that caused an addiction epidemic.
1 comments
bart_spoon 978 days ago
The opioid epidemic isn’t making a dent in the lower life expectancy. Lower life expectancy is almost entirely due to heart diseases, diabetes, and cancer, and those are being driven primarily by bad diets, poor sleep, and sedentary lifestyles. Ironically, FAANG and many tech companies are probably more to blame in this respect than Pharma.
link
logicchains 978 days ago
>The opioid epidemic isn’t making a dent in the lower life expectancy

That's absolutely false. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6034969/ for instance found that in British Columbia from 2014 to 2016, life expectancy declined 0.38 years of which 0.12 years of the decline was due to "mainly opioid-involved" overdoses, i.e. opioids were responsible for around a third of the reduction in life expectancy.

link