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.
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.
There's not much worse than having your mind die while your body is still alive.
Just to pick another unrelated chemical example that is well known, 30ml of methanol will kill you but 10ml will make you permanently blind.
How is this relevant?
People tend to vary wildly in choices and opinions. Who knew!?
But some people think their choice or opinion is somehow the "correct" one and should be imposed on everyone ;-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Watch this, and learn something: https://youtu.be/ilVjSnE5t44
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.
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.
"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."
https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/update-on-cholesterol-a...
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?
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].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Pharma [1]: http://www.cochrane.org/ [2]: http://www.alltrials.net/ [3]: http://www.phc.ox.ac.uk/news/ben-goldacre-joins-oxford-unive...