- cross-posted to:
- piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- cross-posted to:
- piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Sharing because I found this very interesting.
The Four Thieves Vinegar Collective has a DIY design for a home lab you can set up to reproduce expensive medication for dirt cheap, producing medication like that used to cure Hepatitis C, along with software they developed that can be used to create chemical compounds out of common household materials.
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Idk. Medicine is one of those skills where I prefer someone that has studied for 7 years vs me who watches a 15 min how to video and read webmd
Well that’s the coolest part about this, everything is based on the existing research.
The drugs they’re making are the exact same chemical compounds formulated by the drug companies, and contrary to popular belief, the compounds can actually be relatively simple, it’s the process of finding which compound that takes the most money from R&D.
So if you have 2-3 very standard chemicals, with well known reactions and outcomes, and you have the exact blueprint of what the final result should look like, and you can chemically test it afterward to see if it combined as expected, then anyone who has enough reason to use this instead of traditional means (i.e. being priced out of lifesaving medication completely) can be reasonably confident it will work.
Obviously the people who would benefit most from this technology would prefer a doctor and pharmacy to be involved as well. The point is that personal preference doesn’t really mean much when the preferred option is inaccessible and the alternative is death or a dramatically reduced quality of life. You do the best with what you have.
Here’s a fun thought, the drug you make fails but doesn’t kill you.
Instead you now have another life long ailment that cause pain/degradation of daily life.
Sounds like a great idea.
And that’s different from the commercial pharmaceutical industry how?
Commercial drugs are giving people life long diseases on top of the ones they’re trying to cure?
News to me, got any source?
Never heard of, eg, Vioxx or thalidomide, I take it?
The most notorious is probably thalidomide, but there are plenty others on this list of withdrawn drugs that cause long-term side effects.
Very interesting, I wasn’t aware of specifics. Obviously I don’t think it’s impossible, but I would think that the grand majority don’t, while this bootleg technique would have a higher rate of creating worse problems for people already suffering and essentially sealing their fate.
We need to tackle big pharma for the problem it is: greed and neglect and I don’t think a pirated solution will make that in any way better for people.
Maybe it does for some but hurts others worse. Which is the same coin as big pharma but worse for some. That’s my perspective, but I hope that an open-source style solution would gain more traction rather than one that’s essentially just ripped music.
People deserve to be healthy
As opposed to dying from the disease you already have because the traditional pharmaceutical industry makes the drugs you need out of your price range?
It won’t be a life long ailment for long if you’re going to die from a lack of care soon anyways.
No no.
In addition to
And stop pretending that the only people to use this are those that would absolutely need it. You know damn well penny pinchers would also go after this
This is fantastic. If you know what the problem is, because you’ve been diagnosed or whatever, and you know what medicine will do it, and you are capable of making it, I see no issue at all with this. You don’t need a PhD in computer science to browse the internet.
You’ve gone to a malicious website. Now you’ve died.
See, the risks of surfing the web incorrectly are slightly different than the risks of creating medicine incorrectly.
You’ve committed the “crime” of being poor while diagnosed with a lethal (but curable) illness that you can’t afford. Now you’ve died.
See, the risks of being poor are slightly different than the risks of not being poor.
Surely. But let’s be realistic. If you’re poor and sick, you’re broke and have no free time.
I fucking love pirate medicine. Fuck the US healthcare system, what good is having the “best healthcare in the world” if you can’t even afford mediocre healthcare?
If it was the best healthcare in the world, we’d have the best outcomes and we don’t even have that for rich people. We have a (non-metric) shit ton of world class research universities and highly respected agencies like the FDA and NHS but Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, can’t even get the mental health services he obviously needs.
I’d obviously rather go to an American hospital than a hospital in most of the world but spending a lot to cover up a shitty system isn’t as good as a functioning system.
The NHS is British, not american
Yep. Thanks for catching that. I meant NIH, the U.S. National Institutes of Health and accidentally combined it with HHS (the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services that NIH is an agency within) and that was apparently too many acronyms.
but Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, can’t even get the mental health services he obviously needs
Lmfao
I’d rather get healthcare at all. I’ve been too poor to afford any medical care at points in my life, I’d settle for even some low quality care as opposed to none at all and hoping that this new weird pain either is insignificant and goes away without issue, or it gently takes me out in the night.
I’m excited to see where pirate medicine goes. I’ve met a trans woman who told me that her DIY HRT was life changing in the best possible way, and I can only dream of what would happen if people started making their own Insulin or T or whatever
Did you really call the US healthcare system the best in the world?
No. Of course not. I put it in quotes since I was being sarcastic.
No, they specifically put it in quotes, to make the distinction.
Haha that name is fantastic! It’s a riff on the best selling vinegar that you get at Costco and similar places called “Four Monks” vinegar.
Actually it’s the name for a mix of vinegar, garlic, and herbs that was a home remedy to help prevent the plaque.
Oh interesting, I guess I had the name attribution backwards!
I was first on the fence, but yeah, at the very least, it’s a clear signal to big pharma, and I welcome that move. Also, if this will actually get safe, reliable, and controlled enough, I’d love to have some basic spare parts and make my meds at home. But that would probably require something more complex than Microlab.
Don’t trust your life with this unless you have to. Curious project nonetheless!
This could be very good for people with orphan diseases(diseases that are rare enough that they aren’t profitable for private companies to research)
Also, having an orphan disease often results in insurance companies denying coverage for everything because they don’t have a policy written up for that specific disease… so there’s no script for the workers to follow. Then your doctor has to argue with them, which can take weeks, in the meantime you have no medication.
Yeah, I’m not mad or anything. I wish I could’ve cooked up my own meds when insurance denied me life giving meds because they’d never heard my disorder.
True! Hopefully, their tools are able to suggest ways to safely produce those meds, too.
Also, I strongly hope they’ll build something able to accurately verify that processes went through as intended, with the desired product present and no known harmful compounds formed. Chemistry is full of surprises…
That would ideal! Also it’d be good if it didn’t accidentally explode like meth labs tend to. Like you said, chemistry isn’t easy, but if this thing can work it’d make us far less dependent on greedy insurance companies and corrupt pharma companies.
I think that is one of the cases where it wouldn’t help. The medical research still needs to happen and it requires experts.
The tools provided by this organization are useful for manufacturing your own medication off of an existing, proven formula.
What we need is for all this research to be government funded, so profitability isn’t what decides whether a disease needs to be researched.
It would if there’s already a therapeutic medication available(but more research could create a cure, or better therapies).
Usually insurance will deny a medication for these diseases either because the medication currently available is older(no one prescribes that anymore!), or it’s too expensive, or it’s too new/was developed in another country. For example ireland developed a new medication for narcolepsy, but it’s impossible to get in the US, nevermind getting insurance coverage.
I’m on one med that was developed in the 60’s and it’s the only one that actually works. It’s over $300 a month. The other newer one I tried made in the 90’s is over $1000 a month and doesn’t work as well. Insurance tried to deny coverage for both.
The problem with older meds is there’s fewer manufacturers so they can charge whatever they want due to lack of competition. There’s little demand, so the few people who need it are charged out the ass for them since insurance will deny deny deny.
Insurance is absolutely, unambiguously, the worst. I had a stress echocardiogram denied by insurance yesterday because they don’t think I need it. A test to try to identify a problem, what’s my alternative? Wait to see if I drop dead? I guess in that sense I don’t need it but c’mon. And I’m on one of the “good” plans.
It seems like “deny everything and we’ll save money on the people that can’t/won’t fight the denial” is actually common practice now.
I hope their actuaries get to experience the bullshit and have time to regret their contributions to human suffering.
…well, this is a good way to shine the spotlight on a massive problem. I’d be pretty hesitant to take DIY meds unless it was life-critical and my only option (which… lots of don’t have that option, and just die after hitting the health paygate…). The value here is its potential to slap some sense into the US and get our broken-as-fuck healthcare system caught up with the rest of the world so people don’t need moonshine insulin or w/e in the first place.
That this conversation is even taking place is testament to how horrible our current system is.
My first thought when I saw the headline was “Can it help me pull this tooth without it hurting so badly?”
Honestly… is there a practical reason why something like lidocaine isn’t available to the average consumer?
It is, eg lidocaine patches. It has to be injected to really do much. Not aware of any injectables that are over the counter.
Clove oil. Put a few drops on a cotton ball and put it against the tooth. Your whole mouth will go pretty numb but it will usually kill the pain for a while.
American healthcare sucks.
I’ve had relief for gum/tooth pain by just holding a whole clove on the affected area.
I have no idea. I’ve got some lidocaine viscous they gave me for the pain. I’m lucky enough to have medical, just not dental. But from experience, it helps temporarily numb the surface pain, but if it’s in the root, or if you’re pulling the tooth, it does not help.
it is, but you need to have some chemistry knowledge to be able to extract it from things like anal lube, and that’s where I think this DIY project will shine
What’s broken is largely insurance setting prices.
I don’t see this fixing it.
They have released a guide on making a CLR (basically several different pieces of lab equipment controlled to automate some of the process) and software to run on it to assist in the process of making the medications. Specifically to try and improve consistency of the medications produced.
It’s a really great cause. Worth reading the article. If someone had to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars cost to access life-saving medication, and they couldn’t afford it, something like this could legitimately save their life.
And it’s only made more inspiring by the fact that he has his own personal history with the pharmaceutical industry that didn’t work for him.
I found another article on him and the collective, and there’s this honestly saddening quote:
“A toast to the dead, for children with cancer and AIDS,” Laufer said, raising a glass of bourbon and quoting the hip hop artist Felipe Andres Coronel, better known as Immortal Technique. “A cure exists, and you probably could have been saved.”
It’s even posted up on their page for the MicroLab right at the top.
He does mention the fact that medicine research is hard and requires money but doesn’t explain how to solve that. This is a big argument of big pharma prices, they say it finances future research. I think a good example is how incredibly fast we got a COVID vaccine. It happened because private investors had massively invested in research platforms and they invested because they are expecting gains.
that’s not the full story though. according to the NIH, the US government spent over 30 billion dollars on the covid vaccines.
and this is not unique to the covid vaccine. here’s a source with two particularly damning quotes:
“Since the 1930s, the National Institutes of Health has invested close to $900 billion in the basic and applied research that formed both the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors.”
and
A 2018 study on the National Institute of Health’s (NIH) financial contributions to new drug approvals found that the agency “contributed to published research associated with every one of the 210 new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration from 2010–2016.” More than $100 billion in NIH funding went toward research that contributed directly or indirectly to the 210 drugs approved during that six-year period.
Ok, so we should be able to control the prices for drugs where the research has been publicly funded. But how do we avoid losing the private investors who contributed?
well, according to the congressional budget office,
In 2023, federal subsidies for health insurance are estimated to be $1.8 trillion
and this report by research america shows that the private sector spent around $150 billion on “research and development” in 2019.
it’s no secret that the private healthcare industry jacks up the prices of things to increase profits. so, some napkin math makes me think it’s not that far-fetched to think that we can save more than $150 billion in healthcare subsidies if we stop privatized healthcare and dramatically lower the costs of medical care. we could then put that $150 billion back into research, without needing to appease the private sector at all.
Medicine still works in europe and is also being developed in europe. Maybe look at how the EU/european countries do it? A lot of it is having regulations. The free market isn’t free if the choice between getting the product or not is the difference between life and death.
How to solve it is simple, our tax dollars already pay for the research, the results are public property
Isn’t it the case that a lot of the research is funded by governments through universities and then the pharmaceutical companies come in and scoop up the IP and charge crazy prices.
Not only that, but then they go and blow half of their budget on adverts instead of R&D.
Nitro Clorox Queen 👑! For your COVID! It’s better than over the counter hydrocloroqueen!
With the same risk to blindness as moonshine?
If you’re going to die because you can’t afford it, then does the risk really matter?
And when you do die, you won’t see it coming!
I you make your own, there is no risk for blindness. Blindness comes from methanol, not ethanol. If you use a yeast based process to produce the alcohol and then distill it, there is no way to accidentally produce methanol in that process. The cases where people get blind or die from moonshine stems from when the feds replaced moonshine with methanol to be able to make that claim and disrupt the business of organized crime during the prohibition. There are still cases now and then where people try to make drinkable alcohol from some industrial base and don’t know how to.
TLDR: Don’t buy, make.
And use copper pot still with silver solder.
That was due to additives to ethanol cleaning agents - it was a thing done on purpose
Hail Four Thieves Vinegar Collective!
More DIY, right to repair, open source living.
Four Thieves are legit. Controversial but they’re confronting a lot of uncomfortable truths that need to be addressed .
As is typical of Piracy.
Yeah, no.
Your body isn’t a simple laptop where you plug out some broken componi, replace that component, and you’re done. There is a reason why even “simple” nurses go through years of training before being able to call themselves nurses.
If it comes to your body, shits complicated, yo!
Everyone should, must have the right to good quality healthcare, but it can’t be from yourself, by yourself. You need a doctor!
Even those trans humanist types that put magnets and such in their bodies are really on the edge with what will and won’t kill you. Add DIY CRISPR sets, which is just the worst thing I’ve ever heard, and you have arecipe for disaster.
There’s a difference between injecting unknown crispr mutations and replicating known chemical compounds. I would guess the main danger here is the impurity
I also don’t have faith that people would do it properly. Chemicals are weird and not following instructions or not knowing what you’re doing can lead to disaster.
I just hope that at the very least those that try for their own use wouldn’t get penalized for it if they’re desperate enough to try
I mean, that’s fair. I would just hate to see people seriously hurt themselves because they don’t have access to something. But that brings up a whole new conversation, and it’s just sad that we even have to consider this.
Another aspect that came to mind is: people hurting themselves and ‘putting stress’ on the hospitals. Obviously that’s pretty unrealistic, might be a point someone would argue though.
There is a difference between knowing which medicines to give someone. And then having that knowledge of which to choose (after seeing a healthcare professional), and then being able to buy (make) any brand of that item.
Man, I would be so worried about impurities and side reactions. A good example is the recalls of drugs because of nitrosamine contamination. If stuff like this already happens to the experts.
And what is with the whole galenics side? How to make sure the absorption is about right…
If stuff like this already happens to the experts.
Keep in mind that almost all drugs are made in India. There is a huge issue with corporate corruption as well as poverty wages that prevent workers from ever whistleblowing. It’s a disastrous combination. It’s frankly a miracle that things don’t go wrong more often.
The corruption runs so deep that pharmaceutical factories keep exploding and wiping out whole towns every few years.
