I'm pretty sure that interactions with drugs created or repurposed in the recent past don't have a history going back millennia.
The drug ritonavir, which is used to treat AIDs, for example, was only approved in 1996 and it apparently has an interaction with colchicine. The shamans aren't going to be a help with learning that.
Interesting that he chose dentistry. Over at Science Based Medicine I learned about the new Science Based Dentistry group. They are a few years behind the medical field, but this group is trying to push for more scientific rigor in the field of dentistry. In the podcast that introduced me to the Science Based Dentistry folks they actually mentioned the fact that most of the "best practices" of dentistry have not been rigorously studied. They pointed out a recent study that demonstrated that flossing doesn't actually help prevent gum disease and didn't really provide any benefit to dental health. Completely against the "conventional wisdom" - and to be honest pretty much completely against common sense. Apparently this was the largest and most rigorous study on the topic ever performed. Since it isn't my field of interest, I didn't follow up, but I still found it very instructive that something as "scientific" as dentistry is so weak on clinical studies.
Medicine has its own problems in that regard. Most primary care level doctoring seems to be experience based and informed by science, more than purely scientific. Sadly, I ran into the result of this just this week. My pediatrician recommended what she termed an "herbal remedy" that they had samples of in the office. She wasn't sure if it worked, but she offered a free sample. I told her I suspected woo, but took it anyway. Once I got the box in hand I could see that not only was it based on completely made-up herbal history - it was a 5C homeopathic preparation of the herbs in question. Pure, unadulterated snake oil. Really a sad state of affairs.
That still doesn't get you where you want to go since corporations don't "control" the government. Politicians are still voted into office by voters, not corporations.
A big part of the blame should go to the failed market and its greedy occupants that cause $1 worth of chemicals to cost more than many people make in a year.
A big part of the problem discussing this is clueless people that assign no cost or value to the development and maintenance of scientific and industrial facilities to support investigation of new drugs, and the many person-years of scientific research to identify new drugs, develop the means to economically manufacture them, test them to ensure that they are safe and effective, deal with the growing government bureaucracy, get them to market, and deal with the court cases from the outliers and mistakes.
How about this - we have two drug markets that you can sign up for. One drug market is pretty much as things are today, but maybe with a bit less regulation. The other drug market is one in which anyone that can scrape $1 of chemicals into a pouch and get it to drug stores can sell it for whatever they think it is good for. Maybe they could honor that second market name with a name: patent medicine.
Which will you be signing up for?
Except that the site was NOT required. Most states did NOT implement their own site, and either default to the federal site or formed a regional partnership.
In order to qualify legally for the subsidies under the law each state had to set up its own exchange. If the state is going to have an exchange then people need to have a way to access it. How are you going to do that without a web site? Snail mail? Telephone? Currier?
Obamacare’s Architect Agreed That Only State Exchanges Could Offer Subsidies
There are many states where people are not legally eligible for subsidies. They have been illegally receiving them, but they shouldn't count on that to last..
How about colchicine? It cost about $8/month. Then, one company did a million dollar study, generally considered to have contributed nothing to medical knowledge, and so got temporary exclusivity from the FDA and suddenly it costs $450 for the same thing.
I guess you consider dosage and drug interaction information to be overrated? You know that neglecting that sort of thing kills people?
Do you want your medicine based on modern science, or the "wisdom" of the ancient Greeks and various hill people?
Oral colchicine had been used for many years as an unapproved drug with no prescribing information, dosage recommendations, or drug interaction warnings approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).[8] On July 30, 2009 the FDA approved colchicine as a monotherapy for the treatment of three different indications (familial Mediterranean fever, acute gout flares, and for the prophylaxis of gout flares[8]), and gave URL Pharma a three-year marketing exclusivity agreement[9] in exchange for URL Pharma doing 17 new studies and investing $100 million into the product, of which $45 million went to the FDA for the application fee. URL Pharma raised the price from $0.09 per tablet to $4.85, and the FDA removed the older unapproved colchicine from the market in October 2010 both in oral and IV form, but gave pharmacies the opportunity to buy up the older unapproved colchicine.[10] Colchicine in combination with probenecid has been FDA approved prior to 1982.[9
Based on the immensity of the pharmaceutical companies, they aren't exactly losing money.
And some people think thriving businesses can lose money on every sale but make it up "in volume."
That is "Really Big-O" notation, to which you can add, "Oh no!"
"... a recent General Accounting Office report on U.S. military equipment procurement concluded that only 1% of major military purchases involving high technology were delivered on time and on budget."
That book says the problem is due to a sociological mistake. My understanding is that it is entirely intended, a way of making money from the largely hidden military purchases of the U.S. government. For the U.S. government, killing people is an enormous, extremely profitable business.
The book is wrong, it isn't a "sociological mistake." The problems tend to come from changing requirements (from the gov and events), under bidding (by the company), stop and start funding and various directives (from the Congress), legal challenges from the losing competitors, and the nature of the procurement system.
And no, killing people is not "an enormous, extremely profitable business" for the government. It is quite the opposite.
A big part of the blame should go to the Democrats in Congress that passed the law requiring the site to begin with.
Oracle should explain that their software accurately depicts the state of the law. It may be an adequate defense.
I figure once you've got 5 Gbit, you're good:
http://web.forret.com/tools/vi...
That's 5Gbit for 4K video (the movie size, not the TV size, but at the higher TV frame rate), completely uncompressed...
Khan Academy isn't smart. I watched one of their "courses" on moments of inertia. It's a colored etch-a-sketch of someone writing, with voiceovers. There were major factual errors and wrong signs. It's low-budget content with no proofreading or editing. Subjecting kids to that is just wrong.
If we're going to have have massive online courses, the quality needs to come up to at least History Channel level.
The trouble is, you might first have to conduct a side-channel attack on the crypto chip in your fridge to get its key so you can properly encrypt the messages to say "everything is all right".
You don't have to put up with jerks.
For almost every crap business, there's a competitor that isn't crap. Find them.
I find it funny how people who defend capitalism in this day and age like to say that what we have is "crony capitalism" and if we'd just give real capitalism a try for once it would be super awesome.
What does that sound like?
The key elements in human thinking are not numbers but labels of fuzzy sets. -- L. Zadeh
