44 Water takes forever to pump off, so much so that I would rather pump off toluene despite its higher boiling point. That being said, I’m pumping excess water off one of my samples and had a bit of extra time on my hands on this day, the Lord’s Sabbath. What-to-do-what-to-do? There’s literature, of course, but I’ve pretty much read everything of general interest to me and done a good once over of the abstracts of the boring shit, so I figured I would do a drug Sunday to fill the vacuum of my life (so sad…).
Darvon or Darvocet or Distalgesic or Doloxene or Co-Promimol or whatever the hell you want to call it is typically served as a mixture of acetaminophen (that’s paracetamol for my international friends) and some hot and spicy synthetic opioid called Dextropropoxyphene. First prepared back in the days when America was generally viewed with far less contempt (JACS DOI: 10.1021/ja01114a019) the active ingredient is said to be very analogous to codeine.
Codeine to the left, Dextropropoxyphene to the right. Whatever. I have taken both drugs at various stages of my life. Codeine finds its way to me during cluster migrane season (which isn’t a season so much as it is a random, horrible period of my life that reoccurs because of all the bad Karma I’ve put into the world. It surly is a punishment for no innocent man should suffer so!) and Darvocet was given to me once when I had a particularly nasty throat infection. Instead of going on about the history and sales of Dextropropoxyphene, which is what I usually do, I’ll just give my very subjective advice: don’t take it… unless you absolutely have to. There are two reasons why you may have to. 1. Your doctor was born in 1834, doesn’t trust you with real drugs, hates you or otherwise can’t spell codeen codein codene codeine. It made me want to destroy myself after about a week (i.e. I felt like I was losing my mind). It was either suffer with my throat infection or take the drug and feel like there were ants in my skin. It was a HORRIBLE choice1. It’s not like real opiates, where you maybe get a little of the pukies and that’s about it, it’s seriously stupid shitty medicine that has been withdrawn from some markets. OR 2. You want to be a stud. I know! How cruel that this drug, a crappy analgesic that makes your skin vibrate, should also make you go slightly numb “down there” such that you could seriously impress the ladies for hours. No happy finish for you, but whatever. You can always stop taking the drug – your reputation as Don Juan with the gross mouth will live on for months in the dorms even if it’s only half true. (Seriously, my mouth is is very clean. The infection was due to stress or something).
The synthesis is pretty straight forward. The actual active product is separated from a mixture of diastereomers. Some of them do nothing but make for good cough medicine.
1Ralph Nader agrees with me. Except he’s not a stud.
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Codeine on the left.
Oops. Fixed. That was a rather systematic error, too.
So, you did what, codeine or morphine?
It is interesting how rarely morphine is found in analgesics, compared to codeine. Guess it has something to do with notoriety of morphine as a drug in the worst sense of the word?
Codeine, but thats just a produg. It is metabolized into morphine. So the answer to your question might be yes.
I have searched my Kurti and Czako book for the “Duh” reaction but I can’t find it. You have a link, Kyle?
Be a man – either azeotrope water into a Dean-Stark trap or lyophilize it out. Pumping water into a water aspirator is a job for the faint of mind.
Darvon unscrews the top of your skull, craps in the hole, then rescrews the access hatch. Possibly entertaining but poorly therapeutic. What you need is a stiff jolt of Tramadol!
Abnormal ECG, abnormal gait, allergic reaction, amnesia, anaphylactoid reactions, anaphylaxis, angioedema, appendicitis, bronchospasm, cataracts, cholecystitis, cholelithiasis, clamminess, cognitive dysfunction, concentration difficulty, creatinine increased, deafness, dysuria, edema, gastrointestinal bleeding, hallucination, hemoglobin decreased, hepatitis, hyperglycemia, hyper-/hypotension, joint stiffness, libido decreased, liver enzymes increased, liver failure, menstrual disorder, MI, migraine, muscle cramps, muscle spasms, myalgia, myocardial ischemia, night sweats, palpitation, pancreatitis, peripheral ischemia, proteinuria, pulmonary edema, pulmonary embolism, seizure, serotonin syndrome, speech disorder, Stevens-Johnson syndrome, stomatitis, suicidal tendency, syncope, taste perversion, tachycardia, tinnitus, toxic epidermal necrolysis, urticaria, vertigo, vesicles, yawning
Ahhh… “taste perversion” Try getting Happy Fun Ball to do most of that for you.
The lord’s sabbath is on Saturday (and starts on the evening of the calendar day before). I don’t know where christians get their silly ideas from.
My lord’s sabbath used to be on Thursday evenings when The Office was on, but he has forsaken us for the time being. I blame Republicans.
you should blame Al Gore, for inventing the internet. Without the internet, there would be no “multimedia content rights” and therefore no writers’ strike.
Also, there would be no TheChemBlog upon which you would air your complaints about said forsakenhood.
I agree completely. Where do they get the whole “Sunday” thing anyway?
Dickens’ numbness is a common side effect of a high-dose Zoloft – although you may not notice because it makes you completely disinterested to try.
Darvon is a typical example of a lousy drug; the only reason for why it was developed is that the company spent lots of money on it already.
great chemical blog.
I am also a blogger on chemical and process engineering.
Thushara
http://www.chempro.org
Ughh…No personal experience with d-propoxyphene, but I hate hate HATE codeine. What a terrible drug. For one, it makes me my whole body itch, especially my head (see, scratching myself silly like a homeless person with crack-psychosis). And, it gives me none of the fun opiate effects I have found from any other opiate drug I’ve been prescribed.
And Kyle: I also get migraines, and they suck. My doc gave me codeine once for that, but I couldn’t finish it. I prefer a good triptan drug. Works great for me, but you have to take it right at the onset of the symptoms. Have you talked to your doc about those drugs?
Codeine isn’t the only drug I take. I take it mostly because it calms me down and helps me sleep a little, if I need to. Taking Codeine alone does absolutely nothing for them but in conjunction with other drugs, it helps quite a bit.
I remember having some Darvocet when I got knocked in the head with a softball bat by my supposed good friend. I had some stitches and the doctor said that it would help with the pain. He also said there could be some hallucigenic side-effects.
Mind you, I was 18 at the time, so I don’t remember having any limp noodle issues, but I also remember being somewhat disappointed in not having any hallucinogenic episodes. Even my dreams weren’t any more messed up than normal.
As you probably know, just because the two “look” “similar” does not mean they bind similarly to the receptor. Both the molecules could exploit totally different binding conformations.
I was surprised to see the anti-Darvon/Darvocet/co-proxamol comments here.
The drug has been severely restricted in the UK.
I can discern a very clear pattern in the UK – one of dismal medical incompetence and a blinkered refusal to listen to coherent and consistent patient feedback. If Franz Kafka had lived longer the medical professions in said countries would have provided him with material for another iconic novel.
As a preliminary remark, I should state that I take medicines with great reluctance. The human body is a finely tuned machine and, while it can be resilient, it is not invulnerable and can be damaged by artificial substances, whether they be junk food, additives, recreational drugs or medicines.
However, 12 years ago I suffered an injury in the back/shoulder area while playing tennis. I had my arm outstretched to hit the ball, and my body was also rotating, so that I could get more power. Something just gave. Physiotherapy helped to some degree, but the doctors had to keep me on co-proxamol long term. I have taken it, not constantly, but regularly, since then.
It is a very effective painkiller and is particularly good at easing severe headaches caused by injuries further down the spine which transmit pain upwards. The claim that paracetamol (Acetaminophen) is equally effective is unquestionably incorrect and almost absurd. This is an attempt by the medical profession to justify their decision to withdraw the drug. A qualified survey analyst ought to go through any studies which claim to demonstrate this statement: I suspect that flaws will be found in the methodology or the calculations.
The argument that co-proxamol can be used for suicide is redundant given that one can buy 500mg paracetamol (Acetaminophen) tablets over the counter, whereas one needs a prescription for co-proxamol tablets, which contain only 325mg of paracetamol. (Ten 500mg paracetamol tablets will kill you if taken at once.)
I have stopped taking co-proxamol on a number of occasions. There are withdrawal symptoms: in my case, as I did not take the maximum dose, I just felt a bit odd for a few days, but I can imagine that it might be worse for someone taking 8 tablets per day. Do not stop suddenly.
The alternatives to co-proxamol look particularly unappealing. Codeine-based medicines actually cause pain, including headaches, for many people.
I would support any reasonable action to have the UK ban reversed.
Jolt of tramadol. That tool is clearly retarded, tramadol is not the solution, doctors thought it was for me and i ended up in the hospital pissing on myself with a seizure. Ur best bet would be to talk with your doctor and explain everything to him, to find the best medication for you or try other options. Tramadol, ha, moron.
Tramadol! Ya thats a good on, i ended up with a seizure from that one. Go take it, its fab! Morons.
Dear Sirs,
Ulf Jonasson, Doctor of Public Health, on YouTube:
Darvon, Darvocet, Co-Proxamol – the worst drugs ever.
http://www.youtube.com/results.....rch=Search
Friends,
I would like to tell you a story, a very sad story about a painkiller that has been around in the Amer-ican society since 1957 – that is exactly 50 years. The name of the drug is DARVON or DARVON-N or DARVOCET. It is basically the same drug. In Europe the drug is called DISTALGESIC or CO-PROXAMOL. The working substance in the drug is PROPOXYPHENE or DEXTROPROPOXYPHENE as we call it in Europe.
We think drugs – containing PROPOXYPHENE – are the worst drugs ever, among prescribed drugs. No single drug in the history has caused so many fatal deaths as these drugs have done during the last 50 years.
How come I can sit here and say that? Are you supposed to believe me?
We – my wife Birgitta and myself – Ulf Jonasson, we are both doctors, PhD:s – have studied the dan-gers with PROPOXYPHENE since 1993, that is 13-14 years.
We have written and published eight scientific articles about PROPOXYPHENE. We have also written and defended two doctorial dissertations about the drug and its fatal consequences. And to get our alar-ming data outside the academic world, we also wrote a popular science version of our research that was published both in Swedish and English. The English name of the book is “Fatalities due to use or misuse of painkillers “
We think we have studied the consequences of using PROPOXYPHENE in a quite proper way, and therefore we will tell this sad story about a drug that probably have killed more people than any drug in the history.
One of the “Big Pharmas” in US, Eli Lilly “invented” PROPOXYPHENE in 1953 and it took some years before it came out on the market. There was a need for a painkiller – without side effects in the early 50s – and Lilly found PROPOXYPHENE. Have you heard this story before – a drug without side effects???
The drug was called DARVON – I am sure you have heard about it – and it became immediately very popular. It was not for the pain killing effects the drug became a financial success. Later on, studies showed that the pain killing effect was not better than aspirin or acetaminophen – like Tylenol. The users felt good, because DARVON is an opiate – close to methadone, morphine and heroin – and it influence your brain, you feel good. The drug influences your Central Nervous System.
As I told you before, we have studied PROPOXYPHENE since 1993. Our main result was that during the investigated years 1992 – 1999 – eight years – 200 persons in Sweden, were poisoned to death every year due to PROPOXYPHENE – poisoning. 200 persons died every year because they used a very popular painkiller and we thing this was very alarming. Sweden is a quite small country we have just about nine million inhabitants. In United States there are soon 300 million inhabitants and we knew, thanks to international statistics, that the American people used even more PROPOXYPHENE that the Swedish people did. Is it therefore possible for us to assume that there is more that 30 times as many fatal deaths in United States as in Sweden. Yes, we think so.
If we look at the consumption of PROPOXYPHENE in United States compared to Sweden, we find some very interesting figures. The average consumption of PROPOXYPHENE in Sweden – during the investigated years 1992-1999 – was 2 400 kg/year. In United States you consumed an average of 99 400 kg/year. It is more than 41 times as much in US than in Sweden. Is it possible that the numbers of fatal deaths in US are about 40 times more??? What do you think?
Here are some more figures. We know that consuming 2 400 kg/year in Sweden, caused 200 fatal death every year. You can say that it became one fatal death for consuming every 12 kilograms in Sweden. I think you understand and accept the metaphor. How many fatal death could that be if you consumed 99 400 kilogram a year in US??
The numbers are so high, you will not even think about them. And it gets even worse if you think back 50 years, consuming 80 – 90 – 100 000 kilograms a year in 50 years!!! In 2005 the consumption was 110 040 kg.
I will also mention some figures about the PROPOXYPHENE-situation in United Kingdom. They have also had huge problems with fatal poisonings due to PROPOXYPHENE. In the year 2004, some 1,5 million persons got 7,5 million prescriptions on their version of PROPOXYPHENE, namely CO-PROXA-MOL. These 7,5 million prescriptions became more than 900 000 000 CO-PROXAMOL pills. In the same year there were around 24 million prescriptions in United States, these 24 million prescriptions became almost 3 billion pills containing PROPOXYPHENE. This is 3 followed by nine zeros…
The medical product authorities in UK; the MHRA, decided January the 31st, 2005 that PROPOXY-PHENE – products would be phased out in the country till the end of the year. They did not succeed doing that. Why, there were so many problems to stop using the drug for the users, so many side effects, so much suffering to get rid of the drug.
MHRA then decided the drug to be out of the market in the end of the year 2006, but they did not succeed this time either. Today – the MHRA are saying that the drug definitive will be out of the market last December this year. Will they do that??? I do hope so.
Why do not the US authorities inform the American society about these harming drugs? We can put the answer in just two worlds, THE LAW. We have different laws in Sweden and in US. In Sweden we have one federal law for all four branches of the forensic medicine, which are medicine, chemistry, psychiatric and genetics.
In United States you have different laws in different states. In some states you have the old English system of CORONERS – and they are more investigators than medical doctors, you also have the MEDICAL EXAMINER SYSTEM, and they are medical doctors, but usually not specialists in forensic medicine.
And most important of all, in Sweden, the medical doctors take a blood test of all dead persons that come to the forensic medicine station. And these blood tests are all screened for every legal drug there is in Sweden, and that includes PROPOXYPHENE. Thanks to that routine we find our PROPOXYPHENE-cases, and unfortunately you do not find so many PROPOXYPHENE cases.
In Unites States, the decision to take a blood test is on the level of every one of the 3 200 counties in the country. And by many reasons the needed blood tests are mostly not taken. I think this is a big problem for your country, you loose lots of important information in many areas of medicine, missing the prevalence of PROPOXYPHE is just one.
I would like say a few more worlds about who are responsible for these tragedies, the many fatalities due to poisoning from PROPOXYPHENE. The manufacturers are – as I said earlier – ELI LILLY. The have earned billions of dollar during the last 47 or 48 years. Why do I not say the last 50 years?
The reason I say 47 or 48 years is that ELI LILLY sold the rights to their brands DARVON and the others – to some less known US pharmaceutical companies. And these companies were apparently not aware of our research. If they have known about this research, they would have been stupid to get into this crazy business of a drug that kills. LILLY has known about research since 1999 – at least in Sweden. We have printed proof for that.
LILLY is afraid of the consequences when the drug will be banned. They are afraid of how many people that will sue them because they have lost some dear ones, a father, a mother, a brother, a sister, a cousin, an aunt, an uncle or just a very close friend – that have died after that they have used a painkiller, fore example DARVON, DARVON-N or DARVOCET.
Do you remember VIOXX?? This drug was withdrawn from the market in 2004. The manufacturer, MERCK & Co, said that there was in increasing risk to get heart problem when using VIOXX. They talked about increasing risk,we talk about fatal deaths, thousands of fatal deaths – just in United States. Now MERCK & CO has to pay billions of dollars in damages.
You can say, that ELI LILLY, almost to the last minute – earned millions of dollars every year on their PROPOXYPHENE- drugs. Both in Sweden and in UK they did the same thing. They sold DISTALGESIC to another company in Sweden and UK. Kind of a surprise for this company – they bought a drug that was banned just after a short time.
Money are apparently more important than human lives for ELI LILLY, It is a simple as that.
I would like to finish this message by telling you how things could develop. After restrictions were implemented twice in Sweden, 2001 and 2005, thanks to our research – we now can say that 500 – 600 lives have been saved, just in Sweden. During 1992-99 some 200 persons were poisoned to death every year. The Medical Product Agency in Sweden recently informed that during the year 2005, 56 persons were poisoned to death. And we feel proud of what we have done.
We now feel a moral obligation to inform about the dangers with PROPOXYPHENE all over the world. And we know that, when the FDA will ban DARVON and the OTHER PROPOXYPHENE-brands, lots of lives- thousands and thousands – will be saved in Unites States. If the FDA doesn´t do that, the sad story continues.
We thank you for watching this video.
Good bye
Ulf Jonasson
Doctor of Public Health (DrPh), Journalist
Lövdalsvägen 5, SE-640 20 Björkvik, Sweden
Phone: +46(0)155-714 55
Cellphone: +46(0) 730 23 26 00
http://www.folkpartiet.se/ulfjonasson
Hm, but Merck did the right thing — they withdrew vioxx voluntarily, and basically as soon as the statistics on the heart stuff were significant. And there are people who say, “fuck it, I’ll take my chances with a heart attack, you only live once, you might as well not have arthritis pain”.
It’s tough to be on the side of those people who are receiving multimillion dollars from the vioxx lawsuits. It makes you want to punch John Edwards in the face.
It’s tough for them because they’ve suffered irreversible heart damage. If it weren’t for the John Edwards’, I’m quite certain, drug agencies would have absolutely no accountability since the FDA’s oversight abilities are at the very least questionable.
Voluntarily withdrawing your dangerous drugs from the market does not indemnify you from lawsuits, guilt or (most importantly) accountability. The one thing – the only thing – America needs to know about its drug supply is that it’s safe. Everything else can be placebo for anyone’s concerned.
Uhm. What about personal accountability? Don’t take experimental drugs, if you’re afraid of possibly getting some sort of unknown side effect. If a drug was invented 5 years ago, you can’t expect to know what the effects 5 years down the line are. Drug companies do not have a magic ball that will miraculously tell them exactly what will go wrong. I’m not saying drug companies are benevolent and always the paragon of good propriety. But the Vioxx case makes me not want to *ever* design a drug. Fuck that. I’ll make my money in hedge funds. What kind of message does it send when a company does almost everything right (no one’s perfect) and they still get slapped with a huge fucking lawsuit.
Maybe you should blame the doctors for not doing their homework and warning the patients of unexpected side effects.
What if you’re not white? Chances are, the drug has not been adequately tested in your racial background, and there could be unexpected side effects. You have to assume these risks when you take drugs. Wow, isn’t that unfair? Perhaps, I should engage in a class-action lawsuit against the drug-research-industrial complex for not forcing more college students of my minority group (they’ve exceeded quotas anyway, might as well kill them off) to test out drugs for my future consumption. I’m entitled, aren’t I?
OK. I’m going to leave ranting mode and present a slightly more comprehensible answer:
“The one thing – the only thing – America needs to know about its drug supply is that it’s safe.”
No fucking way. What America needs to know what the known risks of a drug are, and that the drugs have what they say they have in them. If a company cuts their drug with some filler, or hides a nasty side effect, rain hell on them. If it turns out that one Micronesian family gets lupus when they take the drug, well, sorry, these things happen. We didn’t know that your A234T mutation in ETHO3 gene would make the drug hyperactivate your killer T cells.
There is no such thing as a completely “safe” drug. You might as well require all Americans to have compulsory asteroid/spy satellite strike insurance.
Yes, blame the doctors, and watch as malpractice insurance rates continue to skyrocket, forcing doctors out of states where malpractice insurance is already exorbitant, such as my home state. How is it different, exactly, when a company who makes a drug fucks up and takes it to market post-FDA approval as opposed to a doctor to prescribes it? What of personal responsibility then? Either way, you’re blindly trusting professionals with your health.
Please explain how Merck “fucked up”. Yeah they pushed a bit on the slightly rosier trials, but they issued a heart warning in 2002 after the first study, and eventually pulled the drug. The irony here is that Vioxx is probably safer than Aspirin.
You can get reye’s syndrome from aspirin, you can get ulcers, tinnitus, outbleeding. The difference is that we *know* about the counterindications for Aspirin, but then again, aspirin has been on the market for almost 100 years now. It took way longer to figure out the crappy parts of aspirin over the the crappy parts of vioxx.
It’s like that shitty defense secretary’s statements, about “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” and whatnot. Do we live in a coddling society where the slightest spectre of death fears us into inaction or devolution of responsibility?
If you don’t trust the US, because our medical system is so in bed with big pharma, perhaps you trust canada a midge more:
http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/dhp-mps.....ox2_e.html
No. Vioxx wasn’t an experimental drug. Period. It was a tested and deemed safe drug. Personal accountability also extends to drug companies. You’re just passing the buck onto the consumer – blaming them for taking an “unsafe” drug, when all the mechanisms in place to ensure their safety were saying there was no risk.
You’re grossly mislead on this one.
I agree with Darksyde on this one. There is no such thing as a safe drug. Acetomenophen can cause as much damage as Vioxx for christ sake. It’s removal and the punishment of Merck is a victory for the bad guys. For the love of god and all that is holy, don’t you get it that there is ALWAYS RISK!? With ANY DRUG!? Especially if you mix shit, like your cold medicine with booze.
Not that I don’t like punishing Merck of course, but they weren’t in the wrong here. If Vioxx came out 30 years ago, it would be a huge success today and still on the market, even with the heart attack deaths.
“Unknown risk” is never an acceptable risk. Hence the entire point of clinical trials. People taking Vioxx could anticipate some of the other side effects, but it’s not the patient’s job to anticipate the unanticipated. Patients are neither expected to know nor are generally excepted to be able to understand the complicated results which may arise from taking these drugs, especially ones that cause damage to an organ like the heart. Caveat Emptor might apply to cars and dishwashers but not health care. Let’s keep it that way, shall we?
Merk did the responsible thing, but it doesn’t mean the people that were seriously injured from their incomplete testing don’t deserve recompense for their suffering and disability. Allowing that practice green lights a dangerous practice of expediently slamming drugs into the market and issue an abrupt ‘mea culpa’ and withdraw when they kill a few people because of shoddy testing.
Blaming the victim is the lowest form of slander (or libel, as the case may be). Let’s try to stay above that, in any regard.
Yes, the victims should be compensated, but Vioxx should not be withdrawn from the market. Bring it back with an extra warning.
Also I disagree with the bold statement. Unknown risk is an acceptable risk, especially with new medicines. Doctors prescribe them all the time without knowing the side effects it will have when mixed with other medicines that the patients are also taking. That seems to be an acceptable unknown risk to the doctors and patients that do this. After about ten years, they become known risks.
Well, if you’re satisfied with a system that permits (indeed expects) some drugs to have horrible side effects, only to be discovered by the consumer, then fine. Find another fine free trade nation to do that in. The FDA’s job is to ensure this doesn’t happen. That’s not to say it won’t happen, but it is beyond imperative for the safety and the economics of drug discovery. No one wants (OR EXPECTS) to be a guinea pig when they go to the doctor’s office and they have a right to that.
Suggesting that they “just don’t take the drugs” is a hand waving bullshit argument intended to stop a debate ala principium tertii exclusi. There is an obvious other option: learn from it, take the drugs as prescribed (not longer, as the patients in the Vioxx case had been doing) and make sure these sorts of things are done correctly.
In the mean time, get out the checkbook ’cause you fucked up. Learn from it. Move on.
I never suggested patients “don’t take the drugs”. It seems like the FDA is to blame on this one since they didn’t do their job, like you say.
Also, no one expected Vioxx to have horrible side effects based on medical trials. You’re wrong that no one expects to be a guinea pig when they go to the hospital. It’s not only with drugs, but with new medical technology that people will jump at a chance to be a guinea pig. If you’re a migraine sufferer who can’t take any of the traditional medicine for some reason, you might be tempted at a novel brain operation that turns off some part of your brain. What else will happen after the operation? Who the hell knows, as long as the daily migraines stop.
P.S. I know you have migraines, but I couldn’t come up with a better hypothetical example.
Except for this one case in Russia where a drug addict let them do an experimental treatment on him where they took out a little bit of his brain from the part responsible for addiction.
This expectation of flawless treatment is definitely something I have not noticed much before. Before antibiotics, relatives were afraid to go to Davos as they would catch tuberculosis from their nephew. The doctors there tried to get Thomas Mann to stay and he got scared and got out of the city as fast as he could after the obligatory few days with the wife who had bronchitis. A hospital was seen by some as a death sentence. That’s becoming true for some patients again with drug resistant bacteria that live in surgical wards. I try not to go to the doctor and take drugs unless I abosolutely have to. I still have that fear in me from all the early 20th century literature.
Then this is where we must agree to disagree. I’m not interested in returning to the horrors of 20th century health care. What purpose is all this if we cannot demand social expectations to raise with the technology we invent and the things we discover? We do these things, after all, for the benefit of society – not the individual.
But I’ve been accused of being unable to see the trees for the forest before.
We cannot go back to the days of brushing responsibility for other’s errors onto the person that fell victim to them. Fortunately, society at large agrees with me. Unfortunately, it’s enforced in civil suits and not regulatory agencies. But, in the end, it doesn’t matter. It’s more than about protecting people from themselves, it’s about protecting people from those who have a natural greater interest in their money than their wellbeing.
Okay, we’ll have to disagree. I think that society at large is wrong to take their health for granted and to expect, what for now is, the impossible.
In other news, in the current issue of Andjewandte, one of the authors in a paper has two first names that sound exactly like, or very close to, “Fuck yeah” and looks very close too. At least the way I pronounce it and the people in the following video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v.....re=related
The paper is right above the Dan Romo paper. I’m sure you’ll have no trouble finding it. For some reason, this has amused me all morning today.
P.S. No, I do not need it spelled out what the reason for my amusement is.
“Blaming the victim is the lowest form of slander (or libel, as the case may be). Let’s try to stay above that, in any regard.”
Victimhood is often in the eye of the beholder.
I’m not going to say some form of recompense for the individuals is unwarranted. I am against frivolous medical malpractice lawsuits, but if a doctor fails to inform you of what is known about a drug, and fails to inform you that all drugs come with risks (especially new ones) then that’s not frivolity. So. Slap the doctors with the punishment.
I’m reminded of the case where John Edwards extracted 25 million from a pool drain cover manufacturer for not putting a “do not remove” sign when a poor girl got disemboweled by the pool pump. A “do not remove” sign will not prevent stupid kids from pulling off the drain cover, and the city had ordinances requiring the lifeguards to check that the covers were on at all times (which were unheeded) and besides, the cover they used was *6 years old* and manufactured just before the pool cover manufacturer added the “do not remove” warning.
Sure, the girl deserved recompense for her suffering. And obviously the company is not blameless — maybe there should have been a more aggressive campaign to replace the covers (hell it would have made them money with the new orders). But in the end the wrong people were punished and the most egregiously irresponsible parties (kids who pried off the cover, lifeguard trainers, city ordinance enforcers, pool pump installer — who forgot to install an emergency shutoff switch) all got off relatively scot free (I think the city and the pump installer settled for a few thousand dollars).
“Caveat Emptor might apply to cars and dishwashers but not health care”
Why not? Because the everyday person doesn’t have the expertise to critically judge whether or not their health care quality is good? The same applies to cars and dishwashers, and at least cars can still kill you (don’t know about dishwashers). The best you can do is provide people with their information they can use to make a choice on their own.
“Allowing that practice green lights a dangerous practice of expediently slamming drugs into the market and issue an abrupt ‘mea culpa’ and withdraw when they kill a few people because of shoddy testing.”
No matter how good your testing is, you cannot assess in two years what will happen in five. You can guess, but you cannot know for sure. So, the way I see it is this: You can solve this in several ways.
1) You can refuse to give the drug to anyone who will sue you for any side effects (by having the patient sign an indemnification). This is done during phase I, phase II, testing anyways, so, why not extend it. That way you’ll never sue the doctors because signing indemnification will be compulsory.
2) You can extend patent life of drugs to 50, 100 years? So that lifespan testing can be done. You still will miss groups, such as minorities, for whom statistically significant populations will not be able to be obtained. After all, Britney Spears (and her progeny) get rights to “oops I did it again” for 25+ years after she dies. Why not expand drug patents, too.
3) Kill all the lawyers. As much as I hate them (my father excepted), I think this is unacceptable.
Oh right.
4) Stop making drugs. If people aren’t willing to accept responsibilty, then they don’t deserve it. Everyone dies anyways. Suffering builds character. There’s nothing more pathetic than someone clinging to life or, hell, even “quality of life”. There a children in Ethiopia starving and children in the Sudan facing genocide, for god’s sake. Having drugs to palliate our already lavish lifestyle is nothing more than 21st century deadly sin of “gluttony”.
Or learn from this and adapt clinical trials to study long term effects of medications that go on beyond 2 months. I think Merck can be held accountable for shit that happens past TWO MONTHS let alone the 18 months before people started dying from the shit (or is a year and half too long for you?).
I really hate it when chemists give drug companies a free pass. It’s tacky and whorish.
But there were no effects in animal models. Obviously this doesn’t mean there will be no effects in humans, but at least they did enough testing to not have “rushed the drug through”.
Besides, “in April 2002… warnings on Vioxx labelling concerning the increased risk of cardiovascular events”.
I don’t think you should accuse me of “giving drug companies a free pass”, and calling me “whorish”. Slander or libel? Besides, I’m not a chemist. I haven’t done a transformation in an RB in about 3 years.
“Pre-approval Phase III clinical trials, like the APPROVe study, showed no increased relative risk of adverse cardiovascular events for the first eighteen months of rofecoxib usage (Merck, 2004). Others have pointed out that “study 090,” a pre-approval trial, showed a 3-fold increase in cardiovascular events compared to placebo, a 7-fold increase compared to nabumetone (another [NSAID]), and an 8-fold increase in heart attacks and strokes combined compared to both control groups [8] [9]. Although this was a relatively small study and only the last result was statistically significant, critics have charged that this early finding should have prompted Merck to quickly conduct larger studies of rofecoxib’s cardiovascular safety. Merck notes that it had already begun VIGOR at the time Study 090 was completed. Although VIGOR was primarily designed to demonstrate new uses for rofecoxib, it also collected data on adverse cardiovascular outcomes.”
This is interesting, I was looking for codeine info ended.
I like Darvocet, it’s good stuff. I’ve noticed it doesn’t work for things like headaches. But it’s excellent for tooth pain. The bulk of US usage is probably Orthodontic, because orthodontist hand that stuff out like candy. It works for that too, I only use it for toothaches. I think I’ve used for muscle aches and it was okay. From reading the comments, it seems European doctors are prescribing it for pains that it’s no good for. So people keep upping the dose until it kills them?
As far as codeine goes you can have that stuff. It causes me to see Hallucinations whenever I close my eyes, and prevents me from sleeping. Oh my body goes to sleep but I’m conscious. So I’m left with the choice of laying there all night hallucinating, or opening my eyes and laying there all night. Of course opening my eyes is the complicated bit, as it’s difficult to tell if they’re open, then actually opening them is hit or miss. Of course that all well and fine if you were wanting a recreational effect, but when you so tired and all you want to do is sleep, but you can’t, it’s not so good.
I think doctors should actively take patient feedback about the things they prescribe. That’s at least as important as what the manufacturer claims it does. Most doctors just turn you loose and don’t want to hear anything about it, unless you get worse.
As one who is so very allergic to CODEINE and its derivatives that with 13 surgeries I am so very greatful, there is a product on the market to ease the pain.
Tylenol alone does not work, Tylenol with Codeine means an ambulance ride to the hospital for chest and back pains that make me roll in pain.
I can’t take many pills for pain as so many have codeine or morphine and I would be so screwed with the meds when I need them as for after surgery.
This drug should not be taken off the market. That is like saying codeine should be taken off. What are people to do when the have severe pain and need the medicine that works for them.
I have chronic pain and have tried numerous medications over the years, I have a p450 issue, can’t tolerate most medicine, but darvon has been alife saver, it has least side effects on me and most importantly helps decrease the pain. You can find research good and bad on any drug, I don’t know why some folks have it out for darvon, maybe dr ulf lost someone he cared about, but like it was said earlier, that could happen from aspirin.