It's About Liberty: A Conservative Forum
Topics => General Board => Topic started by: charlesoakwood on May 30, 2011, 04:23:15 PM
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We have never had shortages of necessary drugs like this in the history of modern medicine.
Hospitals and pharmacists are forced to find substitues for drugs to treat ailments from cancer to cystic fibrosis to cardiac arrest. This is causing delayed treament in some cases.
Link (http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_MED_HEALTHBEAT_DRUG_SHORTAGES?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2011-05-30-07-41-58)
"It's just a matter of time now before we call for a drug that we need to save a patient's life and we find out there isn't any," says Dr. Eric Lavonas of the American College of Emergency Physicians.
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Yep. "Pharma Shrugs". This is what happens when corporations are constantly demonized, put upon, and regulated to the point that it's literally not worth the effort. People mindlessly parrot these criticisms about large corporations, as if the size itself warrants their ire. Clearly, they have not for a second considered the many disparate resources that must be brought together to design, test, and manufacture a pharmaceutical agent. By the time you have all the talent and materials needed, you have a large organization by default.
It's only going to get worse.
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Yep. "Pharma Shrugs". This is what happens when corporations are constantly demonized, put upon, and regulated to the point that it's literally not worth the effort. People mindlessly parrot these criticisms about large corporations, as if the size itself warrants their ire. Clearly, they have not for a second considered the many disparate resources that must be brought together to design, test, and manufacture a pharmaceutical agent. By the time you have all the talent and materials needed, you have a large organization by default.
It's only going to get worse.
That's because they're a collection of mindless drones that can only be led by the noses.
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Why is the FDA sitting on drugs that are in short supply?
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According to a doctor I know, one of the big factors is (as we all expected) regulation. In particular, regulations have increasingly mandated shorter expiration dates on drugs. According to this doctor, this sort of regulation results in tons of perfectly good drugs and precursor compounds being discarded because they have reached an arbitrary date printed on the container. Many of these are known to be chemically stable for years or even decades under proper storage. Another factor he cites is the increasing rarity of compounding pharmacists. For various reasons, mostly regulatory and liability, institutional pharmacies (i.e. at the hospital) are more likely to depend on off-the-shelf formulations whereas in years past they frequently compounded formulas out of readily obtainable precursor chemicals. He said some of the drugs on the shortage list are not actually in short supply from a chemical perspective, but in short supply in certain forms, such as injectable solution. One example he listed (which I now forget) is something sold in capsule form at health food stores everywhere, but in its IV form it is in short supply. He says a pharmacist worth his salt could make up an IV solution in-house from these readily available capsules, and that "in the old days" that was one of the fundamental skills of a hospital's pharmacy staff.
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Today's pharmacies and pharmacists are little more than dispensaries, a vestigial remnant from the days of the compounding pharmacist. At the retail level this contributes to cost to the customer. At the retail level the pharmacist has become an expensive department manager.