Drugs without Doctors
The Long View
It is a long process from discovery of a desirable property (like selective killing of parasites) in a new compound, to establishing the drug new in the pharmacopeia, that universal list of all known drugs and their effects.
Before ingesting an unknown substance, it is good to grasp what it is and what its effects (both good and bad) are.
Is it likely to cure you or kill you? Within which boundaries of time and concentration? What are the side effects? Does it impact different species the same way? Does it go where it is supposed to go in the body, and does it go where it is not supposed to go? Does it remain forever or is it excreted with waste, and if so, on what time scale? Does it produce mutations or cancers?
The federal government has a role in screening such things ostensibly without commercial gain as the primary motivation.
Politics of pharmaceuticals ought not be involved, but it often is. If the federal government mandates certain treatments through health departments, someone stands to make significant money.
If money is made and the patients benefit, so much the better so long as money is not made at the cost of patients.
The Covid story provides ample basis for generations of future investigative reporters in the perennial battle between truth and how those who gain financially, would like perception to be.
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There a romantically attractive field known as “Green Medicine” in which scientists try to track down the truth and effects of folk remedies.
Traveling to the Amazon rainforest, for example, to discover time-honored tribal cures unknown to modern medicine.
There are extreme natural environments such as deep sea hot water vents, where life has found a way to survive in conditions that are inhospitable to normal life biochemistry in the extreme.
Likewise, the normal flora of soil is populated by untold billions of microorganisms, some of which make their living through uncanny and evolutionarily ingenius methods.
This well describes the discovery of the natural microbial product that came to be know as ivermectin.
This presentation, however, is not about glorifying the microbe hunters of history, but to address and explain a suddenly popular (digitally “viral”) drug that many view as a medical magic bullet.
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