FDA cracks down on drugmakers, drugmakers crank up the prices

In an age of skyrocketing medical costs, it is in the Federal government's best interest to ensure our medicines are as safe and precisely targeted as possible. Enter the FDA, charged with regulating and monitoring drug safety. Unfortunately, their recent efforts to lock down drugs has resulted in 50x increases in drug prices for patients who can ill afford the cost, by creating pseudo-monopolies. Thus, increasing medical costs for everyone, including the Federal government.

Beware the well-intentioned bureaucrat!

Until January, colchicine was sold by many companies and cost as little as 10 cents a pill. Now it's available only under the trade name Colcrys, sold by a Philadelphia company called URL Pharma—for five dollars per pill.* The colchicine story, and a few others like it, have provoked ire among some patients and doctors about an otherwise praiseworthy effort by the FDA to get rid of old, untested, potentially harmful drugs.

Take the case of 17 alpha-hydroxyprogesterone caproate (17OHP), a synthetic hormone designed to prevent preterm births in pregnant women...The drug's retail price jumped from $15 to $1,440 per treatment, a shock to obstetricians and their patients, as well as to those who write checks at insurance companies and Medicaid. The tens of thousands of women who receive the treatment each year typically require 20 injections during the course of their pregnancies.

To be fair, though, it appears that the FDA is not entirely deaf to these complaints, and is taking some action.

Drugs are NOT the answer... to relationships

More and more, society seems to think that medication is the answer to every problem. Lack of attention span? Drug. Lack of desire? Drug. Now, doctors are pitching a new drug to make men more sensitive in relationships. The drug is derived from the bloodstream of nursing mothers.

The Cambridge and German scientists gave 24 healthy men nasal sprays containing oxytocin while 24 others received a placebo.

Afterwards the men were shown heart-wrenching photographs including a little girl in tears, a child embracing a cat and a man in mourning, and asked them to describe the level of empathy they felt with those in the pictures.

'The oxytocin group showed significantly higher emotional empathy levels than those men who had taken the placebo,' said Dr Rene Hurlemann, of the Friedrich-Wilhelms University of Bonn.

First-Aid Mythbusting

Urban legends are generally harmless, if annoying. But there are some bits of "common wisdom" that can be extremely dangerous. Take all of the anecdotal "cures" that you see on television? It is important to know the facts so that a minor injury doesn't become something worse.

A child pulls a pot of boiling water off the stove or sticks their hand on a hot burner

Do you put butter or mayonnaise on the burn? Hurriedly remove the child’s clothing because it is stuck to the burn? Get out the ice?

Those are the common reactions in the case of a burn, but all of them are myths.

Butter, mayo or other types of grease may cause even more damage to tender skin and pulling clothing or other materials stuck to the burn could damage the tissue or pull the skin off completely.

The correct action is to rinse gently with cool water and coat the burn with antibiotic ointment.

I know we have nurses, mothers, and outdoorsmen who read this blog. What other tips do you have for the RIGHT ways to treat injuries that are counter-cultural?

Can diet heal cavities?

During the last year, I have been quite focussed on my diet, but really with an eye toward weight loss than larger nutritional issues. Of course, this means I am eating a LOT more vegetables and fruits, and have been feeling better. But it never occurred to me that diet could affect my dental health (with, of course, the exeption of more sugar meaning more cavities). But at least one doctor is claiming that a diet low in grains and high in calcium can reverse tooth decay.

In group 1, oatmeal prevented healing and encouraged new cavities, presumably due to its ability to prevent mineral absorption. In group 2, simply adding vitamin D to the diet caused most cavities to heal and fewer to form. The most striking effect was in group 3, the group eating a grain-free diet plus vitamin D, in which nearly all cavities healed and very few new cavities developed. Grains are the main source of phytic acid in the modern diet, although we can't rule out the possibility that grains were promoting tooth decay through another mechanism as well.

Dr. Mellanby was quick to point out that diet 3 was not low in carbohydrate or even sugar: "Although [diet 3] contained no bread, porridge or other cereals, it included a moderate amount of carbohydrates, for plenty of milk, jam, sugar, potatoes and vegetables were eaten by this group of children."

I am skeptical, but it seems like something worth looking into.

Removing the Moral Dilemma to Stem Cells

When George W. Bush announced a freeze on Federal support for Stem Cell research in 2000, he was roundly condemned by the medical establishment who accused him of "wanting Alzheimer's patients to suffer." But at the time, Pro-life advocates were already pointing to sources of stem cells which did not require the death of an embryo - fetal cord blood, for example. Now, scientists have announced they have found a way to produce stem cells without embryo death from any patient! A mere 8 years - when added to a little political pressure - was enough to completely free the way for future stem cell experimentation.

In a breakthrough that could have huge implications, British and Canadian scientists have found a way of reprogramming skin cells taken from adults, effectively winding the clock back on the cells until they were in an embryonic form...

Because the cells can be made from a patient's own skin, they carry the same DNA and so could be used without a risk of being rejected by the immune system.

So, not only is it a morally-defensible solution for Pro-Lifers, it is actually a better solution medically because it uses the patient's own cells and obviates the need for anti-rejection drugs (which suppress the immune system in general). In my ever-so-humble opinion, this justifies GWB's decision from 8 years back.

Controlling Prosthetics With Your Brain

The "old" way of allowing movement of a prosthetic arm was to attach a motor for each motion and use muscles in your back or upper arm to control the motor. This required great concentration from the amputee. Doctors have discovered a way to allow more motions, at the same time, and with less thought on the part of the amputee. The procedure, reinnervation, requires the connecting of existing nerves to the another muscle. While cost is a factor and it won't work for every patient, since the process only requires surgery and medical devices that have already been approved, it does not have to go through an approval process. This is great news for the field of prosthetics.

When Blowing Your Nose Might Be Bad For You

Turns out that something I do often when I have a stuffy nose - blowing it to relieve stuffiness - may be putting me at risk for worsening my infection by sending viruses or bacteria into my sinuses. The solution? Decongestants or blowing one nostril at a time.

Saving Money On Generic Medicine

I figured that the price of prescription medicine might vary slightly between stores, but on the whole it didn't matter where you bought your medicine. I was very wrong. The article uses as an example generic Prozac where the price for 90 tablets ranged from $12 to $117! To be fair, there are other cases where the price is not so different. In general, Costco and Sam's Club are the best places that the article looked at to get your prescription filled and apparently they don't require a membership to use the pharmacy. There is a more in-depth article on The Wall Street Journal's website.

HIV does not need a break to enter the body

For years, conservatives has been ridiculed for claiming the only sure way to prevent AIDS was to abstain from sex outside of marriage or at least outside of a committed relationship with a tested, monogamous partner. We have been told over and over that there are plenty of effective alternative methods to prevent HIV transmission. But again, we are learning HIV is wily and extremely flexible in its infection strategy.

Instead of infiltrating breaks in the skin, HIV appears to attack normal, healthy genital tissue, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday in a study that offers new insight into how the AIDS virus spreads.

They said researchers had assumed the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, sought out beaks in the skin, such as a herpes sore, in order to gain access to immune system cells deeper in the tissue...

He said until now, scientists had little understanding of the details of how HIV is transmitted sexually in women.

But fear not. I am sure the leaders in our public schools will never allow abstinence to be taught.

Drinking fruit juice nutralizes medications?

Somehow this article feels like something doctors will have to retract within a few years, when they regain their sanity. Otherwise, one must wonder how you are to get as many fruits and vegetables as are recommended for a healthy diet, if you can't have any juices while on medication.

Drinking fruit juice dramatically reduces the effectiveness of drugs used to treat cancer, heart conditions and high blood pressure, scientists say.
Research has shown that orange, apple and grapefruit juice can also wipe out the benefits of some antibiotics and hay-fever pills.
It is thought the drinks stop drugs from entering the bloodstream and getting to work in the body - possibly rendering them useless.
The potential effects are so serious, researchers warned, that if in doubt, patients should swap fruit juices for water when on medication.

Why do they euthanize horses with broken legs?

After the sad end of Eight Bells in the Kentucky Derby, the logical question was raised, "Why not put her on a horsey bed and let her recover?" this article explains why this makes sense for a human but not a horse, in a medical sense.

http://www.livescience.com/mysteries/080506-llm-horse-bones.html

Why ethicists needs to watch Star Trek

I have gotten grief over the years for my enjoyment of science fiction. Many see it as an art form devoid of maturity, suitable only for adolescent boys seeking wish fulfillment. But the fact is that science fiction is the story form of the moral dilemma. It allows one to put a character into extreme situations where ethics are pushed to their limit, and it works out the proper course of action. From 1984 to Star Trek (Guardian on the Edge of Forever) to The Matrix, it helps us to find the edges of our morality and find the human answers to hard questions.

The reason I bring this up is a new report from the American College of Chest Physicians which attempts to figure out how to properly triage patients during a worldwide pandemic. In an attempt to provide objective, universal guidelines, they have laid out an Orwellian nightmare where doctors are choosing which of us have more or less value. The old, the handicapped, and those with mental diseases are to be put to the bottom of the list. Is it reassuring to know that John McCain (old man), FDR (paralyzed from the waist down), and Abe Lincoln (extreme, crippling depressioN) might be left to die under these guidelines?

But science fiction has crossed this rubicon many times, in many different short stories, novels, television shows, and movies. The real human method of triage is simple and the same one used in battlefields all over the world. Treat the patient LEAST likely to die first, then the next, and so on. The only judgement required here is medical in nature, not ethical, and thus no doctor or medic is forced to make the impossible choices of whether a retarded boy, an old woman, or a seriously injured soldier is more "worthy" of treatment. The only question to ask is, "Who am I mostly likely to be able to save.

We need to send these people the DVDs to Firefly. Seriously.

If antibiotic resistant was not bad enough...

...now some bacteria has developed the ability to live off of nothing BUT antibiotics. No, I am not kidding. For now, this is just soil bacteria, but it is common for different kinds of bacteria to exchange genetic material.

"Many bacteria in many different soil isolates can not only tolerate antibiotics, they can actually live on them as their sole source of nutrition," Church said in an audio interview on the journal's Web site.
Other researchers have found antibiotic-eating strains of bacteria, but Church's study is among the most systematic. It offers more clues about why bacteria quickly develop resistance to antibiotics, and why drug companies must constantly develop new antibiotics to defeat them.

This is why doctors try to AVOID prescribing antibiotics for illnesses that do not require it. If you are someone who asks for them for every sniffle, you may be creating a world where antibiotics are of no help to your children or grandchildren.

Death and Medicine

I have been fortunate to not lose too many people close to me to death (two of my four grandparents died before I was born). An article on Wired talks about preliminary research into drugs that could stop age related diseases. The downside? In the lab animal tests the animal still died around the age they would have. The difference is that there is no cause of death that they can pinpoint it too. The question posed by the author is, how would this change our life knowing that there would be no signs of coming death? I'm somewhat torn on this... on the one hand, it would be nice to not have people suffer. On the other hand, in my limited experience with dealing with the death of loved ones, I would think that having some warning is easier than no warning at all. One commenter brings up another issue... if there are no signs of death, we couldn't allow those past a certain age to do anything dangerous such as driving. What do other Mod-Bloggers think... if available (and side-effects were minimal to none), would you take the drugs? Would you want your loved ones taking the drugs?

Warning: I have not watched the videos with the article. They appear to be clips of movies, but I do not know if they are family friendly or not.