Tim Minchin is creating an animation for his popular beat poem, “Storm.” It’s definitely one of my favorites from him:
Can’t wait to see the whole thing!
Update: There’s also a blog about the production.
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Storm is definitely the best ~9 minutes of poetry I’ve ever heard.
This is very interesting as I do not believe in a lot of types of medication especially the kind that causes people to commit suicide or strokes, heart attacks, etc. I do believe in medical care though. 2 sides of the same coin I suppose but that’s what I believe. Pharmaceutical companies would put out anything they can make money on and I’m against them taking advantage of that and bribing FDA officials.
I’m not really sure what the meaning of your post is. I don’t think anyone wants “bad” medicine but just because “big evil pharma” isn’t perfect and makes money doesn’t mean that quackery is the way to go.
I have to agree with AnAtheistsPhilosophy. I don’t think medicine is bad, but I do think that the medical industry is wrong on a lot of levels. However, the animations alone here make me want to see the full thing.
If pharm companies didn’t make money, we wouldn’t have most of the drugs we have today. And as costs decrease, it is available for pretty much anyone in developed nations (for instance, who can’t buy a bottle of aspirin or immodium or whatever?).
“If pharm companies didn’t make money, we wouldn’t have most of the drugs we have today.”
Well yes and no … we would have many of the drugs we have today it’s just we would have funded them in a different way, taxes for example in much the same way health care is provided. Maybe some of the more useless drugs wouldn’t have been made in the first place but I’m not sure that is such a loss.
We’d have a fraction of the drugs we have today, and we’d have a lot more we don’t. Let me explain through example:
Fluoxetine and Zimelidine were developed during the ’70s and ’80s as a radical new type of anti-depressant, Selective Seretonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs). You probably know Fluoxetine better under it’s proprietary name, Pro zac.
From the September 2009 BNF, the class of drugs known as SSRIs now includes: Citalpram, Dipoxetine, Escitalopram, Fluoxetine, Fluvoxamine, Paroxetine, Sertraline, Zimelidine.
(Note: Paroxetine is better known as Seroxat, and is no longer prescribed under normal circumstances since a rash of suicides among people taking it during the mid ’00s. I was actually on that drug myself at the time).
Here’s my point: None of these new drugs are actually “new”. They all do the same thing that Prozac does, and they all do it in a very similar way. They haven’t taken the years of time and billions of dollars that the original SSRI drugs took to develop, they’re just slight tweaks on an existing formula, dressed up and pushed on the medical industry as the latest, greatest thing.
The medical industry does this as standard with all “classes” of drugs – Disease Modifying Anti Rheumatoid Drugs (DMARDs), which are immuno supressants, Proton Pump Inhibitors (PPIs) which stop you getting gastric reflux such as Lansoprazole and Omeprazole, Non Steroidal Anti Inflamatory Drugs (NSAIDS), which are pain killers that also reduce swelling, such as Ibuprofen and Naproxen. There are many others.
Here’s my point. These easy-to-develop new drugs which cost the pharmacos pence to develope and less to produce: Are they cheaper than the originals? Does the lack of massive expenditure on development reflect in their prices? No and no. Are they therefore far, far, far more profitable than developing effective new drugs? Oh yes. Yes, indeed they are.
People talk about cures for cancer, AIDS, the common cold. Well, if pharmacos weren’t wasting time and money on virtual clones of already existing drugs in the name of an easy buck, I guarantee you those cures would already exist.
I’m having to repost this with a lot of drug names altered because the spam filter eats it otherwise:
We’d have a fraction of the drugs we have today, and we’d have a lot more we don’t. Let me explain through example:
Flu0xetine and Zime1idine were developed during the ’70s and ’80s as a radical new type of anti-depressant, Selective Seretonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs). You probably know Fluoxetine better under it’s proprietary name, Pr0zac.
From the September 2009 BNF, the class of drugs known as SSRIs now includes: Cital0pram, Dip0xetine, Escital0pram, Flu0xetine, Fluv0xamine, Par0xetine, Srtra1ine, Zim1idine.
(Note: Par0xetine is better known as Ser0xat, and is no longer prescribed under normal circumstances since a rash of suicides among people taking it during the mid ’00s. I was actually on that drug myself at the time).
Here’s my point: None of these new drugs are actually “new”. They all do the same thing that Pr0zac does, and they all do it in a very similar way. They haven’t taken the years of time and billions of dollars that the original SSRI drugs took to develop, they’re just slight tweaks on an existing formula, dressed up and pushed on the medical industry as the latest, greatest thing.
The medical industry does this as standard with all “classes” of drugs – Disease Modifying Anti Rheumatoid Drugs (DMARDs), which are immuno supressants, Proton Pump Inhibitors (PPIs) which stop you getting gastric reflux such as Lans0praz0le and 0mepraz0le, Non Steroidal Anti Inflamatory Drugs (NSAIDS), which are pain killers that also reduce swelling, such as Ibupr0fen and Napr0xen. There are many others.
Here’s my point. These easy-to-develop new drugs which cost the pharmacos pence to develope and less to produce: Are they cheaper than the originals? Does the lack of massive expenditure on development reflect in their prices? No and no. Are they therefore far, far, far more profitable than developing effective new drugs? Oh yes. Yes, indeed they are.
People talk about cures for cancer, AIDS, the common cold. Well, if pharmacos weren’t wasting time and money on virtual clones of already existing drugs in the name of an easy buck, I guarantee you those cures would already exist.
I have an acquaintance who works for Pfizer. His take on the ‘virtual clones’ was enlightening.
He told me that the profit margins of Aids drugs and Cancer drugs was currently in the negative when you offset the cost of R&D. Throw in the cost of sending the drugs cheaply to Africa (in the case of AIDS drugs) and the margins drop even more.
He said that a big part of the work in slightly changing older drugs was just to avoid patent expiration. Once a patent on a drug expires, cheap generic copies can be made. As long as 1st world countries can be sold the ‘new and improved’ version of the drug, the companies can still rake in high profits on old compounds. His entire job is telling physicians how the new version is so much better than the old version.
He is no philanthropist by a long shot, but he said if we didn’t overpay for prescriptions of the new patented compounds, there would be no money left over to help developing countries.
I don’t buy his line completely, but it does add a lot of grey to an area I used to think was black and white.
My mother worked for Pfizer for many years, funnily enough. In Kent, I forget the town. Small world. Pfizer really can’t complain about profit margins; they aren’t too shabby – last time I checked they were running at about $2.5 billion per year – and that’s just in profit. The v1agra era didn’t exactly hurt them, either – they were charging such a premium for it that the NHS couldn’t afford the whole cost of prescribing it and made patients contribute £25 per four pills – the whole charge was considerably higher than that. I think they more than made their R&D money back on that deal!
Ya, I’m not totally convinced that the capitalist market is the best way to get new drugs invented. A good % of the new patents comes out of universities that are supported by governments, but the private pharma companies do produce some amazing compounds. You can make a good case that they wouldn’t bother if the money wasn’t there.
Just like everything else in this world, there is no simple answer.
Indeed. The devil we know will do for now.
Custador, you state
‘NHS couldn’t afford the whole cost of prescribing it and made patients contribute £25 per four pills”
This never happened and would be illegal. The price was actually fairly high so the government panicked and generally (with a few exceptions) banned its prescription on the NHS. So patients have to get private scripts and pay the full price of the drug, which is about 7 pounds per tablet.
Well, I’m happy to learn :-) I do live in Wales, though; our prescription system is quite a bit different from England.
I just remembered that I once set out to experiment on myself the relative efficacies as a painkiller of different treebarks made as tea. I know I definately made one of willow, knowing it was the original source of asprin. I distinctly remember writing down how much pain I was in before and trying to evaluate how well it worked.
Man, I was a dipshit when I was 14. It was the height of my pagan phase too.
Don’t feel bad Korny – We’re all dipshits when we’re fourteen. Part of life is looking back at yourself as a teenager and thinking “Muppet!”. I take it as a positive indication, though, because if 15 years has taken me from muppet to stone-cold awesome, imagine how good I’ll be in another 15 years ;-)
‘Part of life is looking back at yourself as a teenager and thinking “Muppet!”’
Speak for yourself … I really can’t think of anything I did (was?) that put me in the complete muppet range!
Ooooooh, I can. Too much drugs, too much drinking, too little self control… Don’t get me wrong, I had a great time, but I was a muppet.
We must have different versions of muppet or too much then!
I don’t know if I like this song over his live performance. This is most notable at the end where he says “Do you know what we call alternative medicine that works? Medicine.” The medicine in this version is kind of blank, while in his live version he enunciated it to get the point across more.