Comment on Alternative medicine

• mirshafie@europe.pub ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  My pharma professors liked to say that if Aspirin was discovered today, it would never pass the bar for human trials, because after all these years the mechanism of action isn’t properly understood.

  That’s the best argument for alternative medicines that I’ve heard, and it’s also something to consider when we think about how insanely high the bar is for compounds that are approved as medicines.

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  • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Most medications are poorly understood (at best!) lol, it’s trial and error all the way down.

    With some exceptions like the RNA messenger covid vaccine…

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    • nymnympseudonym@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      it’s trial and error all the way down

      Oh God LD50 is the craziest thing ever.

      Here’s how it works:

      Let’s just assume dose-response is linear. So, go find what concentration of chemical X (medicine, food additive, cosmetic, whatever) kills 50% of the bacteria/rodent/etc population. Draw a line from there down to 0% dead at 0 concentration.

      Now decide what % of deaths is acceptable, given the benefit of chemical X. Use the line we just drew and that tells you what the regulations should set for max concentration under as-directed usage.

      This ignores that - response curves are very often literally curves, sometimes with more than 1 minimum - response curves (and lines!) often depend heavily on all sorts of other chemicals’ presence in the environment, in varying mixtures & amounts

      It’s a combinatorial explosion we can never meaningfully test against. We do what we can, with the tools that we have.

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      • mirshafie@europe.pub ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Almost every signal response, and certainly in chemistry, is an S curve. A small span of that curve may be approximately linear, and you absolutely can not approximate it by just the mid point.

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  • Viceversa@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    because after all these years the mechanism of action isn’t properly understood.

    That wasn’t a blocker with antidepressants, for better or worse.

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    • Jarix@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I wonder if there because we know very little about how the brain actually works in regards to how behind create thoughts. It’s so very much a mystery in many ways where thoughts are created

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