Drugs
revere | June 17, 2008Since we don't do much health services posting around here I sometimes forget how terrific the blog Health Care Renewal is. It's always interesting. Sometimes it brushes against things we are concerned about here and last week there was a post with some good links about GlaxoSmithKline, a Big Pharma company active in influenza antivirals (Relenza) and pandemic vaccines. The companies of Big Pharma represent some of the most profitable on earth, making so much money that normal rates of profit, like what you might get from defense contracting, are considered failure. They justify their obscene…
revere | June 15, 2008Of the many tag lines I've seen as part of people's electronic signatures, the most apt for this post is this one:
"I used to care about stuff. Now I have a pill for that."
Sergeant Christopher LeJeune was anxious and depressed after long duty on Baghdad's dangerous streets. He often had to collect enemy dead from houses he had attacked. Sometimes there were tiny shoes and toys scattered around. The whole package was starting to get to him. So the Army took care of his problem:
While the headline-grabbing weapons in this war have been high-tech wonders, like unmanned drones that drop…
purepedantry | May 27, 2008One of the more common questions I get is why they haven't found any drugs to treat Alzheimer's disease. (But they have, haven't they? What about cholinesterase inhibitors like Aricept? Ed. Those drugs mask the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, but they do not change the clinical course.) Drug companies are particularly gifted at finding molecules to inhibit all the enzymes in our bodies. We know the enzymes involved in the etiology of Alzheimer's (as I will explain in a second). Why can't we inhibit them?
The problem with inhibiting the enzymes involved in Alzheimer's and hence treating…
revere | April 20, 2008The National Post recently had an interesting article on "disease mongering," an article I largely agreed with. The major point was that fostering a fear of "germs," promoting the idea that following medical advice, especially advice involving "taking your pills," and the very definition of who is diseased and who is not has a suspiciously commercial aspect.
Consider the marketing of hand sanitizers, a subject of interest to the flu obsessed:
The slogan of Purell -- a hand sanitizer manufactured by Pfizer -- is "Imagine a Touchable World." It's hard to miss the implication that the world in…
edyong | April 18, 2008It's late at night and although I want to finish this post, I'm pretty shattered. At the moment, I sorely need to boost my concentration and attentiveness and stave off the effects of fatigue. In lieu of actually getting some sleep, the ability to pop a little pill that will have the same effect sounds pretty enticing. Unfortunately (or perhaps luckily), the closest thing I have available is some coffee in the kitchen.
But for many people, taking a pill to sharpen your mental faculties - a so-called "cognitive enhancer" - is a much easier deal. A large number of prescription drugs can…
revere | April 15, 2008I haven't posted on the vaccine/autism question for several reasons. It is quite well covered by other science bloggers, it tends to generate more heat than light, and we didn't have anything new to say. I have on several occasions discussed it with two of the world's top experts on the health effects of mercury and one of the world's top autism experts. None of the three felt there was a vaccine-mercury connection to autism. But news that the US government was going to include vaccine critics in shaping national vaccine policy made me change my mind about posting. I won't be addressing the…
moleculeoftheday | April 3, 2008As Uncle Al mentioned, many antioxidants are ill-tolerated by the liver. However, it loves one antioxidant: silibinin.
Silibinin, found in Blessed Milk Thistle, is actually hepatoprotective - to the extent that it's used in toxic mushroom poisoning in hospitals in Europe!
revere | March 28, 2008I sometimes wonder if ordinary people in Texas are as stupid as many of the leaders they elect, but the evidence is that most aren't. Take the west Texas jury who heard case of Tim Stevens of Amarillo, 53 years old, and suffering from HIV/AIDS. He also had a cyclical vomiting syndrome, for which he treated himself with a toke here or there from some inhalable Mary Jane. So who cares? Some asshole who notified police after they saw Stevens share a joint on a friend's porch. They nabbed him with a twelfth of an ounce of marijuana and he was charged with a Class B misdemeanor, with a possible 6…
grrlscientist | March 25, 2008tags: spider, web building, mind-altering drugs, streaming video
This streaming video documents that spiders web-building abilities are affected by exposure to mind-altering drugs, like weed, as demonstrated by in 1960 Dr. Peter Witt. [1:49].
revere | March 21, 2008They say politics makes strange bedfellows, so now that John McCain and Joe Lieberman are in bed together I hope they screw each other's brains out. John McCain may have sparked a little lover's spat yesterday when he encouraged Americans to go to Canada to buy lower priced drugs, something Joe Lieberman (the Senator from Big Pharma) looks on with horror. I sure don't object, but some McCain's other health care ideas strike me as politically suicidal (of course it also doesn't both me if he sends himself down the toilet, either):
John McCain is bolstering his reputation as a maverick by…
revere | March 17, 2008Sometimes when I surf the net looking for things to write about I run across things I don't ordinarily write about but attract my attention because they are especially pertinent to my own health. Here's an example. I recently herniated a disk, for which I took fairly hefty doses of anti-inflammatories. Mostly it was extra strength aspirin but often it was horse doses of ibuprofen. I am also of the age that it makes sense to take low dose aspirin for its anti-platelet effects. There is good data to suggest this is a preventative for heart attack and stroke. Now it turns out I may have been…
revere | March 7, 2008The Medicare Drug Prescription debacle ("Part D") was supposed to keep drug costs down by introducing competition. Write this bigger and you have John McCain's health care plan. But back to Part D. The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), the lobbying group for geezers like me that I resigned from because they backed this same Plan D some years ago, has now found that under the intense competition, prices for oldsters like me have risen double the rate of inflation since the program went into effect:
The increase in average prices paid by wholesalers and direct buyers was the…
moleculeoftheday | March 7, 2008As I mentioned in the previous entries on HF, mercury fulminate, and phosphine, I really like Breaking Bad.
As an astute commenter noted yesterday, they sometimes make some mistakes:
Like pentavalent carbon (green dots).
But they usually do a pretty good job and even sneak in some real chemistry:
See Walter fill orbitals!
During Walter's chemo last week, you saw some red stuff flowing into his IV. This was likely doxorubicin:
Doxorubicin is a DNA-binding molecule, like proflavine, ethidium, or paraquat.
Proflavine and ethidium are intercalators - they slip between the bases in DNA. Paraquat…
revere | March 7, 2008There are a lot of open questions about the influenza antiviral drug oseltamivir ("Tamiflu"), among them whether it works at all for bird flu (highly pathogenic influenza A/H5N1), and if it does, whether resistance will develop making it ineffective. But all the questions have a common assumption: that the patient is actually taking Tamiflu. How would you know if you were or not? Because the bottle says so? Not necessarily. In December 2005 U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Officers seized 51 shipments they said were counterfeit Tamiflu pills at their air mail facility in San Francisco…
purepedantry | March 5, 2008And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. He looked, and behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. (Exodus 3:2)
Moses was high when he saw that bush. Or so speculates Benny Shanon, a professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem:
High on Mount Sinai, Moses was on psychedelic drugs when he heard God deliver the Ten Commandments, an Israeli researcher claimed in a study published this week.
Such mind-altering substances formed an integral part of the religious rites of Israelites in biblical times, Benny…
moleculeoftheday | February 27, 2008Dutasteride is of the same class of drug as Propecia and Proscar - the so-called 5-alpha-reductase inhbitors. These inhibit the enzyme of this name from converting testosterone into dihydrotestosterone.
Interestingly, the class is useful for both prostate hyperplasia (proscar) and hair loss (propecia) - these two are the same molecule. Avodart, which has been approved for prostate hyperplasia, was in trials for hair loss awhile back, but these were since dropped.
revere | February 27, 2008I'm away from home and I did something really, really bad to my back. I could hardly tie my boots this morning (boots needed; it is snowing like stink up here). One of my fellow scientists took one look at me and said, "I guess you need some Vioxx." Then he laughed. Since I hardly know this person I don't think he was trying to kill me -- he wouldn't have laughed, then, I'm guessing. But Vioxx has killed some other people before the FDA finally acknowledged it could do that. They were soundly (and appropriately) criticized for keeping too quiet. Now, it seems, some are complaining because…
revere | February 20, 2008The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) doesn't want Americans to buy legal pharmaceutical products from Canada where the identical drug is considerably cheaper because the imported drug might not be safe. Those unreliable Canadians. Better to pay top dollar for heparin from the American subsidiary of a Big Pharma multinational, Baxter Healthcare. Except that the active ingredient in Baxter's intravenous heparin came from China. From an uninspected plant. And there was indeed a safety problem:
More than 350 adverse reactions to the drug have been reported to the FDA since the end of 2007,…
revere | February 16, 2008A lot of things that seem on first glance to be "news" are really just reprints or slight edits of press releases written to tout a commercial product. This is also true of "Newsletters" that charge money for inside news.
Datamonitor is a company that claims to be "the world's leading provider of online data, analytic and forecasting platforms for key vertical sectors. We help 5,000 of the world's largest companies profit from better, more timely decisions" (Datamonitor website). Some of the stuff they give away, since I see it and I don't subscribe to anything they sell. But based on its…
moleculeoftheday | February 8, 2008Certain derivatives of coumarin called psoralens have the effect of sensitizing you to the sun. This can be useful for treating certain skin conditions with psoralen plus a little UV lights. It can also get you really, really tan. The downside of psoralen+UV is that it's riskier skin cancer-wise than UV alone.
In the go-go 50's, however, a man named John Howard Griffin was cavalier enough to use a psoralen to get really, really tan. Tan enough that he could pass for black and write a book about his experiences in the deep south called Black Like Me. The book is one of the seminal works about…