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Comment by TheSpiceIsLife | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I understand what harm was done here?

In that moment, representing the barriers to safe and effective medicine as something that one can throw from their pockets.

In the long term, bring drugs to people without thorough testing and regulations. It's one thing for e.g. stage 4 cancer. It's another to let a Vioxx get through.

Strict regulations around the development and testing of drugs exist because no human is capable of evaluating efficacy for themselves, absent stringently controlled testing processes.

We laugh about "snake oil salesmen", but given the amount of money in nutriceuticals, GNC, and the like... I'd say the only damn holding back the torrent on the unsuspecting is the FDA.

They also exist because it's INSANELY profitable to be able to hold someone hostage for their literal life. As long as the IP is tightly controlled and the ever-stricter regulations build your moat for you, you'll make insane money.

Look, I agree this isn't likely to be the scalable and safe solution that solves the cost crisis. But maybe we DO need someone to throw pills out for free just to show the absurdity of our current system. Because if it's something you need to live and the system is built to make something fundamentally cheap ultra-expensive, it's REALLY hard to see what this man could be doing wrong...

What if he is wildly successful and brings down the profitability of future drug development by an order of 10x? And because future profits aren't as certain, investors decide to put their money elsewhere and those drugs aren't ever explored?

I am not suggesting this is the truth, or even a prediction. But I reject the emotionally charged language that people use to say there are no downsides.

There are always potential downsides; it is a dangerous way of thinking to be unable to see possible negativities and use that as certainty of a position. Otherwise, there's just no downside to Pascal's Wager, and we all must believe in God.

The cost of testing a drug for "human compatibility", e.g. the whole clinical trials series, is too high due to how many quality-adjusted life years are saved due to this. Actually, even if you just compare the money the medical system itself wastes on overtesting, instead of using it to help people with existing technology, you see that a lot of this clinical testing money is spend wrong. If we can fix this fearmongering with "bad" medicine, we can reduce the regulation for this and thus allow many more novel drugs to be developed or to spend much less on their development.

Throwing home made medicine in to a crowd is a bit cavalier.

Perhaps they could get their point across while acting a bit more professional?

He`s literary throwing homemade pharmaceuticals like they are candy. These drugs have side effects. They probabally haven't been tested for impurities. If someone took them they could have gotten seriously hurt. I like their ideas though(especially the DIY epi pen).

You have to keep in mind that just because there are some impurities, it is automatically dangerous. Compare the risk of not having an epi pen available when needed to the cost of keeping one stocked if you are not particularily high-risk, and you see that it doesn't make sense for the unnecessarily expensive ones. If they were cheap enough I'd keep some stocked to have handy when handlign potentially allergenic substances, just in case I happen to actually be allergic. But this <5% chance of having an allergic reaction of significance, and then figuring that only a small part is life-threatening, as well as the cost of one's live, and setting this agains the cost of keeping stock (it goes bad), it doesn't work out....

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