| Just a short note on the "we do not understand the brain and thus are not able to design more sophisticated methods to treat this terrible decease" Allow me to disagree. We do not need to understand how the brain works in order to be able to find treatments for all the different mental deceases. Its all trials and errors, hypothesis -> testing -> result, again and again and again until a final conclusion! I have spend a lot of years researching the brain, the black box which everyone wants to understand but no-one has any clue about it and more specifically Alzheimer's disease (not in a pharmaceutical company but in academia). From my experience, we don't need to understand how something works if we know what is the most likely outcome for a given input. I was lucky enough to test different types of drugs, their long term and short term effects, how useful they are and of course what effects have in behaviour etc. From every single study I could put a piece of puzzle right there and be able to see a clearer picture of what's going on, make hypothesis, tests hypotheses, have controls, tests controls etc. I obviously have no clue how the brain works but for those things I checked I know: Given an input -> Brain -> I get an particular output most likely* From that (and of course many control studies), I could trust that this drugs will most likely give me the predicted output. And that's how research is done..Is not always correct but based on that, we managed to be where we are, to have drugs for diseases which in the past killed us and step by step we can move forward and it would be wrong to doubt how much improvement has been done so far by the research community. I am not suggesting you to trust anti-psychotic, just suggesting you that in my personal opinion, is wrong not trusting a drug (which you of course are well aware for advantages/ disadvantages) just because you don't know how brain works...Many other drugs which are for simple diseases actually affect your brain in many similar ways as anti-psychotics. |
of course you are right: we do possess very advanced tools, starting from the actual design of drugs that target certain receptors selectively, medical trials, production and quality control. What I meant by "we do not understand the brain and thus are not able to design more sophisticated methods to treat this terrible decease" was the fact that most of the time, we are treating symptoms, for we are not sure what the actual causes are.
It is great what we can do, but (IMHO) pharmaconeurology still has a long way to go.
The actual process of choosing a drug for a patient is somewhat black voodoo magic: If A does not work/has bad side effects, B is prescibed, etc.
And of course, due to the nature of our organism, it is impossible (?) that a pharaceulogically active compound has just one system effect/side effect e.g "Aspirin".
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On a side note: could you PM me in which field you are active as an entrepreneur? My email is in my account description.
Cheers!