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14 Comments
- anonatron, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8This will upset pharmaceutical companies, they seem to use the side effects as a reason to force you to take more drugs. My grandmother takes about 15 pills per day, 7 of them are to stem the side effects of the other 8.
- drunkenoaf, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4anonatron, Pharma companies want to have the best drug on the market-- naturally it will have fewer side effects compared to its benefit. They then sell more drugs and make more money.
They can't guarantee that the other drugs prescribed to alleviate the side effects will be made by them. Rich companies, eh? Let's moan about them. They're not deliberately being evil by engineering drugs to have side effects! - grayBot, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3i used to work in a pharma lab...
scientists as a community are still infants when it comes to understanding how the brain works and how drugs will effect it. Technology is always great, but until we get smarter , what WE NEED is simply an independent consumer reports for commonly used drugs....
This data would be more telling, less biased , and most importantly more useful than anything we are likely to EVER get out of a publicly traded pharma company...
when you go on a pharma companies website and on their homepage there is a note to investors about all of there exciting new drugs its pretty easy to figure out that drugs are being pushed out as quickyl as legally possible. - endersadvocate, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@stomicron: there are tons of drugs that require things like that, Even worse, If you take blood thinners you stay on them for the rest of your life. My Grandmother took those and when they pulled her off for about a month she had a stroke. Thankfully, she recovered.
- SoccerBoy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2My neighbors are a retired couple. And they both take a tremendous amount of pills and it seems for each pill, they take another one or two to combat the side effects. It's great they we can do as much as we can with medicine, but it seems we are far from perfect...
- IQ70, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Article is about effects as in good effect. Not side-effects as in bad effects.
- stomicron, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4"My grandmother takes about 15 pills per day, 7 of them are to stem the side effects of the other 8."
I find that hard to believe. Can you name them when you get a chance? - CarlisleCockney, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Well, they didn't find out the side effects of a drug they were testing on a few guys at Northwick Park Hospital in North London a few weeks ago.
After administering a drug that was being tested on humans for the first time they blew up so much within minutes of administering the drug that their family did not even recognise them!
A couple of them almost died and they will be ill for the rest of their lives now although they were all fit and healthy guys.
I think computer simulations need to go a LOT further before they start administering drugs to mostly students that need the money!!! - IQ70, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3This is exactly the way drugs are discovered in the first place. Take a chemical and screen it for its effect on the cells to see what pathways are activated/inhibited in the cells. Then the chemical becomes a drug with a possible therapeutic value. The Nature paper surely deserves credit for their computer modelling because it is a new way to analyze drug effects in the academia but drug companies have been doing this for a few years now.
- jacks0n, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1pharmaceutical companies don't design drugs for their side effect profile. They'd only do that if they were the only producer in the market. Perhaps like microsoft. They profit from their bugs, since they're releasing an anti-spyware/anti-virus software.
It's like saying Toyota makes their cars inefficient, and signs a deal with BP. People will just buy another car. And people will just take another drug. I must admit, many current drugs do need to be re-designed side-effect wise. I'm on mirtazapine, and olanzapine. And yet I need to take sertraline and reboxetine to keep me awake. As strange as it sounds, I feel normal being on them all. - shmatt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1damn right, well said
- sogracefully, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0it's still difficult, because of the way that drugs affect each body differently. take birth control pills, for instance--there are a zillion different types, specifically because having different types of progestins and different dosages of both hormones (in a combined pill) help control side effects depending on the individual. if this was more common with other types of drugs, rather than pharmaceutical corporations scrambling to monopolize/patent whatever they make, drugs could be tested better and be better for people. instead, we have tv commercials to tell us what we need to take for whatever yet-undiagnosed illnesses we have. a consumer reports type thing could be really helpful to some people, but it wouldn't be universally applicable at all because the reality is that drugs don't actually do the same thing for everyone who takes them.
- CarlisleCockney, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0That is just oh so true! :o/
- AntiMe, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0There is one, at least for all the psych meds. remedyfind.com
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