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Comment by kranner | Hacker News Reader

> I doubt these are a real problem for people who have a modicum of conscientiousness.

What does conscientiousness have to do with it?

You might need to travel or transit through a country which prohibits carrying them. Now you have to cancel the trip or go without the medicine.

> by all means come up with a one-time cure on your own

This is not helpful. People have the right to ask questions without being asked to devote a lifetime to develop some arbitrary authority (which would then in any case bias them to look for positive results).

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Are there any examples of medication other than ADHD medication that are have such restrictions in certain countries?

Opioid-based painkillers for sure, sleeping pills, apparently even decongestants like Sudafed because they contain pseudoephedrine.

Yes. You need to get permission to take a vast number of medications into UAE, including opioids and even common antidepressants.

I went through this process before COVID, with the intention of travelling to Dubai, and they knocked back my request about 10 times for spurious reasons, and were adament that I couldn't enter Dubai with a single pill more than was required for the duration of my time in Dubai. Which of course is completely unrealistic - I'd need some for travelling back, and a small buffer because of flight delays or whatever.

Honestly, travelling with certain medications is a major PITA.

The point I was making is that right now a one-time cure seems impossible. If you think it's doable, please come up with some evidence for it.

Please have your strawman back as I said nothing about the feasibility of a one-time cure. I was backing up dTal's right to say that a one-time cure would be superior, without suffering a pointless ad-hominem rejoinder that why don't they find one if they're so clever.

One-time cures may be a sci-fi dream but they are highly desirable, as anyone who needs regular/prophylactic treatment for any severe ongoing condition knows.

> Now you have to cancel the trip or go without the medicine.

International travel is a minuscule thing to give up if you get effective depression (or pretty much any chronic condition) treatment in exchange. Heck most people can't justify the expense of international travel in the first place and the number of people who do it regularly for work and have depression is very small compared to the number of people who have depression. Practically nobody is going to let a chronic condition that affects their daily life go untreated because there's a short list of countries they can't have that treatment in.

What exactly are you arguing? That people should be happy with the flaws of the status quo, and that we should not follow up on promising new treatments that don't have those flaws, because...?

I thought my point was fairly clear and I'm not sure how you managed to derive the "people should be happy with the status quo and not follow up on promising new treatments with less flaws" from what I said. I'm arguing that "prevents international travel in some cases" is an inconsequential side effect for anything that treats an often debilitating chronic illness that is not even within the realm of consideration for the overwhelming majority of patients and that likewise "no negative effects on international travel" is not really a meaningful improvement over the status quo of treatments (all else being equal). Basically, if your biggest gripe with a treatment for a chronic illness is that you can't travel internationally then that's a pretty small gripe.

It was one example to illustrate one of the potential problems.

A much bigger issue is as pointed out by harimau777: prescriptions often don't get filled on time and sometimes not at all. Plenty of people run out of pills on holidays and have to suffer withdrawals, with suicidal ideation and actions being one of the symptoms of acute withdrawal from benzos.

Daily medication that requires a prescription is a huge problem for people that actually have to take it. What if they can't afford it at some point? What if their physician changes and the new physician doesn't want to prescribe it?

Why are we even defending daily medication? If there is any possibility of a permanent cure, obviously that is a much better choice of treatment.

His biggest gripe is that the pill has to be taken every day or very frequently. There are loads of circumstances which make that less desireable than taking a pill a few times a year instead. You've latched onto the travel example he gave.

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