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» Hatrack River Forum » Active Forums » Books, Films, Food and Culture » Democrats at least pretend to have a spine, it's a Christmas miracle! (Page 9)

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Author Topic: Democrats at least pretend to have a spine, it's a Christmas miracle!
Parkour
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So, have nothing to say aboout the approval of aspirin thing?
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The Rabbit
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Ron, I still have no idea why you chose to address me with the question, implying my arguments indicated I'd forgotten the obvious. Perhaps you were confusing me with someone else?

My question to fugu13 still remains. Can you give me a source for your numbers? I have searched and the highest estimates I've been able to find for lives lost due to FDA delaying miracle drugs are ~100,000, which is a factor of 100 less than the minimum number you cite. I would not expect you to make up that kind of number so I am very curious where it comes from.

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fugu13
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Sorry, I've mostly been avoiding this thread because of the, ah, lowering of quality by certain posters.

The estimates you're seeing are around 100k statistical lives per year. That is, entire average human lifespans made to exist that wouldn't have before, each and every year. By lives saved all I meant was that people who would have otherwise died from something would not die from that thing, or at least not for a very substantial period of time. If the average extension of lifespan is around twenty years, that's already about 500k lives saved in my terminology, easily hitting tens of millions over a few decades. Also, that's a relatively recent estimate; I said " by the elimination of the FDA at some point in the past". The rate of lives saved by new drugs has decreased dramatically from the mid-20th century, roughly when I was imagining the elimination. Even nowadays the calculus of lives saved would be huge (100k statistical lives a year is a breathtaking number on a population the scale of the US).

To deal with a few other tropes that have popped up in this thread now and again:

quote:
Without the FDA, I'm not sure those "miracle drugs" would ever have existed in the first place, much less make it to the market sooner.

Why not? We have extraordinarily successful research programs in numerous areas.

quote:
If you do invent a miracle drug, why should a doctor prescribe yours over the other dozens of drugs that claim to cure the same illness?

This doesn't make any sense at all. There are numerous professionals in numerous fields who somehow manage to deal with evolving techniques, procedures, and technologies without the government pre-approving, yet they aren't taken in by "snake oil" at any noticeable rate. What is it about doctors that will somehow lead them to be deluded en masse into failing to do research and learn which sources can be trusted and which cannot? Again, this will happen in some cases and for some doctors, but where's the evidence that it will happen to a huge degree leading to outweighing the huge numbers of lives saved each year by having drugs available more rapidly?

Also, I note that many defenders of the FDA as absolutely, indubitably necessary seem to also think that drug companies regularly put one over on the FDA right now. There seems to be at least a little cognitive dissonance going on.

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The Rabbit
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quote:
The estimates you're seeing are around 100k statistical lives per year.
No the estimates I've found are 100 K lives, total since the 1960s. These were not statistical lives, they were defined in the same way you are defining it.

You still haven't given me a reference. Please, I want to know where these numbers are coming from.

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fugu13
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Then I'm not sure where you're finding such estimates. Could you cite your study particularly the lack of using statistical lives as a measure of comparison?

You can find numerous estimates, both higher and lower than what I've described, in papers linked from this page: http://www.fdareview.org/harm.shtml You'll see mentioned even in the overview examples of drugs that would have saved tens of thousands of lives a year if deployed a few years earlier (and were in Europe, which had pre-approval, but with a shorter delay). It is hard to see how tens of thousands of lives a year (in those few cases where we have an effective lag for assessing the effect) can only become a a hundred thousand lives over several decades.

Oh, a reason for believing drug discovery might be better off in some ways without the FDA. Right now a drug will only be pursued with large amounts of resources for development if it stands a substantial chance of being a blockbuster drug profitable enough to make a huge profit in the years it is patented minus the years it awaits FDA approval. Take a few years off the timeline for drug approval, and suddenly the profitability margin drops by a substantial amount, encouraging new drug development.

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Ron Lambert
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Parkour, the people whom I have heard question whether asprin would be approved by modern standards were medical people. It was merely their opinion, though I give it some weight because of their backgrounds.

The Rabbit: Never mind.

fugu13, in the interest of crystal clarity, are you advocating that it would be better if the USFDA were abolished? That seems to be what you are saying. If so, then feel free to move to Mexico, or some other country in Latin America, where their standards for food and drugs are more lax. Somehow I do not see those countries as evincing greater health. Mexican doctors can treat you with laetrile, but I do not believe their cure rate for cancer is any greater than that of our doctors.

Having said that, I do still take exception to the practice of USFDA agents barging into health food stores and confiscating apricot seeds (from which laetril is derived), as they did frequently back in the 1970's. A friend of mine who operated a health food store actually had to defend himself in court for selling apricot seeds.

[ January 04, 2011, 04:37 PM: Message edited by: Ron Lambert ]

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The Rabbit
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Thanks for the link fugu, I will check out the details and let you know what I think.
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