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What Is Open Source Pharma (and Why Should You Care)?
Andy Updegrove writes: Humanity today is almost completely dependent on huge pharmaceutical companies to create the drugs we need. But these companies focus exclusively on drugs that can be sold at high prices to large populations — in other words, to patients in developed nations. This means that those who live in the emerging world that suffer from the remaining 'neglected diseases,' like Malaria and drug resistant TB, have no one to depend on for relief except huge charities, like the Gates Foundation. They also have no way to afford many of the patented drugs that do exist. But there is another way, modeled on open source software development, which relies on crowd sourced knowledge, highly distributed, volunteer efforts, and advanced open source tools. That methodology is called Open Source Pharma, and it has the potential to dramatically drive down drug development while saving millions of lives every year.
I have Chinese neighbours and they're showing me new (to me) stuff all the time
You mean like how grinding up the horn of a rhinoceros and eating it will fix erectile dysfunction because, you know, horns are sort of phallic looking, and if there are only a few of the animals left in the world, it's a sure sign that their horns must be really really effective? Yeah, that's how Chinese medicine operates. It's almost entirely placebo effect, and ... shocking! ... Chinese people die of cancer every day.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
"Oh herbal medicine has been around for thousands of years. Indeed it has and then we tested it all and the stuff that worked became 'medicine' and the rest of it is just a nice bowl of soup and some potpourri."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Your statement about pot curing cancer also has to be one of the stupidest, most easily disproven thoughts I've seen in awhile. Turns out that when people get cancer often they need help managing pain and apatite and marijuana DOES help with those, so a good portion use it. Guess what? They don't get cured. I've had two people close to me who got cancer and died, both who use marijuana to manage symptoms.
You dumbass potheads do more harm to getting it legalized than any of your opponents could by making shit up. The more you lie about what it actually does, how it actually works and the actual risks (yes there are risks, everything has risks) the less people are going to listen to you about the real benefits.
Grow up.
Reasons for government to do all drug research: #1-drug companies do research for profit only, unprofitable drugs don't get developed no matter how many lives it would save. #2-high cost and risk of developing new drugs. #3-developing a cure is less profitable than a treatment, so corporations would only make the treatment. The drug companies should only do production and distribution.
#8 The drugs researched by government can be produced by any suitable company and they must compete on price. This eliminates patent extortion, pay 10,000% margins or suffer die, when done by truly psychopathic corporations. If fact a huge proportion is done by government at taxpayer expense only to see that research sold to private corporations for cents on the dollar. Stop the bullshit, the only thing private does better than government is feed the greed of psychopaths.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Clearly because government run medicine is so much better, right?
The US pays its doctors some of the highest salaries in the world, publishes the most and best medical research in the world, and also charges its patients the most in the world.
You can find the best and worst care in the US. For the rich who want the best care -- American or not -- the US is their destination of choice. It's just that the rest of the developed world gives a damn about providing decent care to the vast majority of citizens who are not rich. By focusing on that, they take care of the rank and file and still leave the opportunity for the richest to travel abroad to pay through the nose for better care, so nobody really suffers.
And as the poster below points out, medical tourism is not exactly the best metric of your system's quality. India and Mexico aren't exactly shining models of medical care.
Hey mate, spare a sig?