De-risking Diabetes Drug Development

De-risking Diabetes Drug Development

www.businesswire.com

“Diabetes in humans is complex and we are losing the war with this complexity. Much of drug development in Type II Diabetes, T2D, is in limbo, due to the inability to predict clinical benefit or risk from targeted interventions,” commented Dr. Hellerstein, “The future of T2D medicines development will belong to those who understand the pathogenesis of this disease in its various forms in human populations, not necessarily to those with the best targets and chemistry.”

(visit the link for the full news article)



Related AboveTopSecret.com Discussion Threads:
SCI/TECH: Personalized Medicine: The End of Blockbuster Drugs?
SCI/TECH: Eli Lilly Disses Blockbusters, Plugs Personalized Medicine: Medicaid Chokes
SCI/TECH: Mad Cow Madness

Diabetes is on of the Big Four now-pandemic "diseases of civilization" that's been exported around the world.

Diabetes is an increasingly challenging global healthcare problem and in the United States affects over one quarter of Americans over the age of 65. Diabetes is a major cause of heart disease and stroke, and is now also the leading cause of kidney failure, non-traumatic lower-limb amputations, and new cases of blindness among adults in the United States.

The biggest problem with treating "modern" diseases like diabetes is that every individual has an individualized form of the disease - one-size-fits-all blockbuster drugs do NOT work.

Testing new drugs is also a big problem - Research and new drug development has been stalled because of disease complexity and individual variations. A test drug that will 'cure' one person might not work in another, or might create a new disease or even kill the test patient.

...to de-risk Type II Diabetes drug development, “The patient and the biology of disease must be brought front and center. Information will be the key, based on tools for characterizing patient subsets and for predicting clinical response. Drug development in T2D must become more like the practice of medicine by effective physicians: selecting the right patient for a treatment, following clinical response early and longitudinally; anticipating and monitoring for adverse events with informative tools. Only then can the present stasis be overcome.”

The technologies exist for individualized testing and treatment, but so far, the expense has been prohibitive, the complexity of individual variation under-appreciated - and Big Pharma has been blocking the transition.

The tools for personalized medicine are hitting the mainstream market, including tissue microarrays, commercial tests for DNA analysis and pharmacogenetics. www.abovetopsecret.com... " target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow">Drug companies have long resisted the move to personalized medicine, fearing that individualized care would destroy the blockbuster drug market. As pharmacogenetics prepares to celebrate its 50th anniversary, the FDA is backing efforts by the National Institutes of Health to promote the paradigm shift. Personalized medicine focuses on disease prevention, rather than treating symptoms.

Turns out the focus on "genetics" was ill-conceived - and epigenetics is what it's all about. Cutting edge research attends to things like protein folding, prions and other epigenetic mechanisms.

Three Definitions of Epigenetics

1. Transmission of information through meiosis or mitosis that is not based on DNA sequence

2. A mechanism for stable maintenance of gene expression states that involves physically “marking” the DNA or its associated proteins

3. Mitotically or meiotically heritable changes in gene expression that are not coded in the DNA itself

Now, several companies are developing technologies and tests to be inexpensive and widely used. The source article provides a general summary and describes one such effort, which will be used to develop drugs for personalized diabetes 2 treatments.

...criteria for modern, effective treatments of Type II Diabetes:

Personalized Medicine

Translational medicine

Toxicity prediction and monitoring: This may be the most important need. Many of the most powerful therapeutic classes for Type II Diabetes are...

...critical challenges facing drug discovery:

Focus on causes rather than symptoms: Generating pivotal knowledge for developing blockbuster drugs, by targeting underlying biochemical causes

Systems biology approach: Insight into intact living systems, rather than simplified models, ensures that drug effects are understood in their intended biological context

Reduce late-stage attrition: Early, decision-relevant metrics of drug activity separate winners from losers and reduce later failures to improve the NPV of R&D spend

Powerful assays of disease state: Custom-developed assays create companion diagnostic tests for personalized medicine

The movement away from Big Pharma's blockbusters has been painful to say the least - but it's about time we start to benefit from all the research we've been paying for with our taxes.




More Info:

Death of the Blockbuster Drug

Personalized Medicine

The Orphanization of Drug Development

The Waning Of The Blockbuster Drug

Personalized Medicine in Perspective




www.businesswire.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

After reading the latest news on the big scandal of corruption when it comes to drug research in this nation mostly done by research universities paid by tax payers you can only wonder about why so many drugs to treat conditions are pushed into the markets that are actually causing more harm than good.

Also wonder drugs that after years of tax wasted money they never even make it to the market, because they are nothing but million dollar hoaxes.

Most diabetes drugs of today can not control diabetes cause by life styles specially diabetes type 2, people are becoming too reliable on the drugs to do research and beat the problem on their own before the drugs cause more problems like, HBP and high cholesterol.

Everything is linked at the way we eat and what we put on our bodies, a generation of people that are feeding on nutrient deficient processed food pushed by big food manufactures and backed by our govenrment as safe for consumption when most of it is nothing but crap and poison no naturally found in actuall food.

I will add to the topic is you do not mind Sofi the other epidemic that is killing Americans even with all the tax payer money going to research

A recent episode of 60 Minutes revealed how Dr. Anil Potti, a cancer researcher at Duke University, was found to have manipulated research data to support his hypothesis, which led to over 100 terminally ill cancer patients participating in a fraudulent cancer trial

articles.mercola.com...

Drug research in the US is nothing but a big joke and we the people are the ginea pigs to be used and gouge for the benefits those in power pockets.

Diabetes, Cancer, cholesterol are the biggest money making diseases for big pharma.

reply to post by marg6043


S& You know I agree with much of what you say. But the facts remain:

1. Our food, air and water are full of poisons that are making us all sick.

2. The best medicines we've got are good food with plenty of phytonutrients, clean air and water, and exercise - but sometimes they are not enough to counteract all the poisons - many people who've never smoked or drunk alcohol, who've always lived responsibly and healthfully still get cancer and other diseases.

3. All the ancient healing traditions correctly treat every patient individually, and focus on bringing the patient back into harmony with the environment. Which raises some interesting questions:

* What might this mean if the environment has poisons we cannot remove? ...Should we try to harmonize with the poisoned environment, or do our best to escape it?

* Are "sick" people actually adapting while "healthy" people are just unexposed? Will as-yet unexposed individuals die if they're challenged by exposure to normal environmental poisons?

* Are we best off letting our bodies go through "disease" processes that might lead to mutation and adaptation?

reply to post by soficrow


Either we do something about our environment or hope for "evolution" but at the end it will cost millions of lives that could be prevented if all for profits could be regulated for the benefit of the people.

As someone who has been diagnosed with T2D I can speak from, an albeit singular, perspective. When diagnosed it was 2 yrs after taking a Territory Manager position with a company that had me on the road 5k-6k miles per month. I was eating irregularly, poorly and was awash simple carb's. I would drive four or five hours a day and visit accounts for four or five hours a day between drives. What a recipe for disaster. I was prescribed metformin, diet change and exercise. Last June I was able to drop the metformin, it was actually causing fluctuations as I was bringing my health back into order. Now I do understand this about diabetes, type 2 is less a disease and more a result of environmental and toxic overload.

Diabetes Article

There has been a long time connection between a lack of Chromium in the North American diet and Diabetes as well.

Chromium Article

Plus, the very thing many cola/soda addicted people turn to for aid in weight loss and 'health' may be detrimental to the cause.

Link Between Diabetes and Artifical Sweeteners

I have been off any medication since June of last year and when I follow a healthy intake that includes 3-4 miles a day of walking or equivalent exercise, no starch after 3pm and caloric intake heavy in the morning, light at night...My glucose came back to 'normal' ranges.

Not preaching, offering insight I know it took me a while to get here and I hope it can help inspire others that maybe can get there too!

Namaste.

reply to post by soficrow


Our environment is critical to our health and yes, I agree, we are bombarded every day with simple carb's, sugar, chemical additives that are SO unnecessary, chlorine, fluoride, ammonia in food processing, acidification, the list goes on and on. Take back your health, grow your own food. ANYONE can do it. If someone reads this and claims they can't, message me I can help.

Reading labels is becoming less and less safe as the FDA is approving chemical additives now without the need for inclusion on the manufacturers nutrition facts labeling. The nutrasweet people come to mind their latest artificial sweetener.

Neotame

Knowledge and the free sharing of that knowledge is essential to the growth and survival of the species.

reply to post by EarthChilde


S& for you. I also have diabetes 2 - was told years ago to expect to get it as part of the progression of fibromuscular dysplasia (FMD - triggered in me by an allergic reaction to penicillin at age 5). I think of FMD as the original epigenetic prion disease.

Because of my healthy lifestyle, I did NOT progress to diabetes til last year at age 59 - have NEVER relied on fast food, drunk sodas, alcohol or other bad things - but the metabolic syndrome hit with heart, high blood pressure and diabetes. Was on meds to control HBP (resulting from FMD blocking blood flow in kidney arteries) and heart, but was still controlling diabetes with diet and exercise.

Then - hit a high stress period that coincided with solar and geomagnetic activity - everything went wonky, and I ended up on Metformin. The official analysis is that stress was the deciding factor, but I suspect it was a double whammy with the geomagnetic influences.

I know our best medicines are food and exercise - has always worked for me despite my underlying and chronic health issues, and I hope/expect I can pull everything back on track soon.

My concern with the whole diet-and-lifestyle focus is that it sometimes wrongly blames the victims. We DO have some power to fight against our now-toxic world - but not everyone who's sick made themselves sick. Diabetes is now pandemic along with the other big 3 "diseases of civilization" - and it's not just our "freely chosen" intakes creating this pandemic.

Originally posted by soficrow
reply to post by marg6043

 

S&

You know I agree with much of what you say. But the facts remain:

1. Our food, air and water are full of poisons that are making us all sick.

2. The best medicines we've got are good food with plenty of phytonutrients, clean air and water, and exercise - but sometimes they are not enough to counteract all the poisons - many people who've never smoked or drunk alcohol, who've always lived responsibly and healthfully still get cancer and other diseases.

3. All the ancient healing traditions correctly treat every patient individually, and focus on bringing the patient back into harmony with the environment. Which raises some interesting questions:

* What might this mean if the environment has poisons we cannot remove? ...Should we try to harmonize with the poisoned environment, or do our best to escape it?

* Are "sick" people actually adapting while "healthy" people are just unexposed? Will as-yet unexposed individuals die if they're challenged by exposure to normal environmental poisons?

* Are we best off letting our bodies go through "disease" processes that might lead to mutation and adaptation?

A couple points:

While it's definitely true that living in the modern world involves exposure to toxic substances that cause diseases pre-industrial populations did not have to worry about, many of the negative health effects are by-products of technologies and activities which also have positive health effects. For example, processed food may be less nutritious than foods produced by more traditional methods, but it can be produced at industrial scales which dwarf the capacities of traditional methods. As a result, a lot more mouths can be fed. Hunger is reduced dramatically within this paradigm, while average nutrition generally suffers. This is an unfortunate circumstance, but we shouldn't ignore the bottom line: many more lives can be sustained by industrial food production, even while the rates of many disease related to nutrition increase. We can keep more people alive, but many are less healthy than they would be if the food was of a higher quality. At this point, we can't have the best of both worlds: enough food and healthy food. We've sacrificed quality for quantity to some extent, and many people are alive because of it.

Toxic substances abound in the modern world, but the modern world also facilitates a large population and high life expectancies. For example, air pollution associated with industrialization exposes the population to carcinogenic toxins. On the other hand, industrialization is associated with dramatic improvements in food production, average quality of life, economic prosperity, and a modern medical establishment in which basic medicines can be produced in great quantities and medical technologies improve disease outcomes. We've eradicated Polio in the US, and we couldn't have developed the vaccines or produced them in the necessary quantities without a large industrial infrastructure. It's that same infrastructure which is responsible for many environmental toxins.

The ancients may have treated some diseases effectively on an individual basis, but the reality is that they had far fewer individuals to treat, and many diseases could not be addressed using pre-industrial approaches. We need blockbuster drugs that can be produced on a large scale because the scale of the problems are large. We need lots of antibiotics, lots of blood pressure medication, lots of pain medicine, ect.. Vaccines depend on mass treatments. We simply don't have the resources to tailor highly individual treatments for every individual. Many disease can be treated effectively on a large scale with generic/one size fits all drugs. Until we make significant technological improvements facilitating individualized medicine, we need to take what we can get in many cases.

As for your questions, I think the answer is not to wait to evolve resistances to environmental toxins. That would require countless generations. A resistance would have to spontaneously arise in an individual; it would have to increase that individual's rate of reproduction relative to the normal population; then it would be a matter of eons before the normal population was replaced with the descendants of the resistant individual. Medical intervention and reduction in environmental risk factors are preferable approaches. The entire point of medicine is that we don't have to wait for everyone who is susceptible to a disease to die, leaving only a resistant population - we can intervene and treat the sick and reduce the impact of diseases. It doesn't make sense not to try to cure disease when we might be able to.

Sugars are all running high for no apparent reason, must mean we need more drugs!

Why doesn't anybody ever consider that maybe we're not eating right. We have 3-4 g of sugar in our blood at any time. Why in the hell is it recommended that we have 300 g minimum daily? Particularly since the brain is pretty much the only organ that requires sugar excusively (compared to fat and protein). Sugar is toxic to the body in high concentrations, why do we still insist on endorsing it so when civilizations have flourished without carbs whatsoever (the eskimos for example had pretty much all fat diets). I strongly recommend to everyone to watch The Big Fat Fiasco and do some independent research themselves on the lipid hypothesis that started the whole carb craze. It`s truly shocking when you start looking into it, we've been malnourished for decades. It's no wonder why diabetes is so rampant....

EDIT: BTW, sugars have actually changed so much and the norm for most diabetics has changed so much that hospitals are currently changing the "normal lab values" of glucose to a higher level. Forget specifics, but our hospital has recently implemented this

reply to post by OnceReturned

...Hunger is reduced dramatically within this paradigm, while average nutrition generally suffers. This is an unfortunate circumstance, but we shouldn't ignore the bottom line:

That's the problem - the bottom line rules.

We can keep more people alive, but many are less healthy than they would be if the food was of a higher quality. At this point, we can't have the best of both worlds: enough food and healthy food. We've sacrificed quality for quantity to some extent, and many people are alive because of it.

Erm, no. Business certainly sacrifices quality for quantity, as you say - but "feeding the masses" is NOT the motive. Industrialized food production methods are designed to increase profits, not "feed more people."

Toxic substances abound in the modern world, but the modern world also facilitates a large population and high life expectancies.

Another myth - children born today are the first generation expected to die before their parents.

For example, air pollution associated with industrialization exposes the population to carcinogenic toxins.

Old science restricted its considerations to carcinogens, teratogens, mutagens and the like. New science looks at epigenetic changes, and endocrine and metabolic disruption - for example. The health impacts are MUCH larger than cancer - arguably the end stage following a life time of progressive debilitation and disability.

On the other hand, industrialization is associated with dramatic improvements in food production, average quality of life, economic prosperity,

I take it the press about the global financial crisis and the 1% (versus the 99%) slipped your notice?

and a modern medical establishment in which basic medicines can be produced in great quantities and medical technologies improve disease outcomes.

Erm - not sure where you get your information but I'd say your position is almost indefensible.

We've eradicated Polio in the US, and we couldn't have developed the vaccines or produced them in the necessary quantities without a large industrial infrastructure.

At what cost? Not just in terms of environment, but in the creation of new diseases?

It's that same infrastructure which is responsible for many environmental toxins.

Bingo.

We need blockbuster drugs that can be produced on a large scale because the scale of the problems are large.

They don't work - and they create more problems than they address. ...Just because the debilitating and disabling effects of the resultant chronic diseases are delayed, does not mean they're not real.

We need lots of antibiotics,

Don't tell me you missed the news about antibiotic resistance too?!

Vaccines depend on mass treatments.

Don't get me started on vaccines.

We simply don't have the resources to tailor highly individual treatments for every individual. Many disease can be treated effectively on a large scale with generic/one size fits all drugs. Until we make significant technological improvements facilitating individualized medicine, we need to take what we can get in many cases.

Blockbusters create disease - and it's "taking what we can get" that helped create the NCD Pandemic. ...37 million people will die this year alone from chronic disease - many more are debilitated and disabled. The system doesn't work. Time to rethink.

I think the answer is not to wait to evolve resistances to environmental toxins. That would require countless generations. A resistance would have to spontaneously arise in an individual; it would have to increase that individual's rate of reproduction relative to the normal population; then it would be a matter of eons before the normal population was replaced with the descendants of the resistant individual.

Sorry to be the one to break it to you, but environmental factors (including medication exposures) create epigenetic change in humans and other complex organisms. The evidence suggests these changes become permanent if they're beneficial, after about 3 or 4 generations. Moreover, beneficial genetic changes tend to be transmitted horizontally like disease, at least in yeast - so why not in humans?

Besides, we're all connected - and share information. Even genetic information. From Aeons:

"Viruses are carrying RNA transfers between linked species for communication about environmental changes, and audit controls.

Bacteria and fungus are performing a similar function with genetic exchange."

reply to post by OnceReturned


PART 2

Medical intervention and reduction in environmental risk factors are preferable approaches. The entire point of medicine is that we don't have to wait for everyone who is susceptible to a disease to die, leaving only a resistant population - we can intervene and treat the sick and reduce the impact of diseases. It doesn't make sense not to try to cure disease when we might be able to.

Medical intervention only makes sense if we know what we're really dealing with - and it doesn't make sense to create diseases.

It emphatically does not make any sense to design a strategy that dismisses nature's responses, and ignores the impacts of evolution on our and other species.


But yes - it makes absolute sense to reduce environmental risk factors - including reducing individuals' exposures to medications that are inappropriate and potentially destructive to their individual proteome, metabolism, etc.

Just sit back and have a small glass of red wine after supper and don't worry about getting Diabetes. If it tastes good eat it if it tastes too good don't

fands

Low-calorie diet cures diabetes in 8 weeks
ANI Jun 24, 2011, 01.23pm IST
Tags:diabetes
(Low-calorie diet cures diabetes in 8 weeks (Thinkstock photos/Getty Images))A successful trial has led scientists to believe that a 2-month low-calorie diet could free nearly 2.5 million Britons of the 'type two' diabetes.

The diabetics, by consuming just 600 calories a day for eight-weeks, (the same amount many people would eat at lunch alone), were able to throw away their tablets.

Even after 18 months, some of them are still free of the disease, which is linked to obesity and usually attacks in middle age, reports the Daily Mail .

Researchers from the Newcastle University have described the results as remarkable, proving that the condition need not be a life sentence.

articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com...

I am in a similar boat
hypertension kidney disease early stages of diabetes...
I have been using Strausses bloodpressire and kidney drops and they seem to be working quite well
Im going to have to work on the diet too

reply to post by Danbones


...My doctors are amazed at my overall good health and lack of progression - except for the recent setback.

...I put handfuls of salad greens in the blender for my smoothies - along with protein powder, psyllium, cinnamon, sometimes cocoa. In summer I add dandelion greens, plantain and other good weeds along with domestic greens.

...Turmeric is essential - but turns teeth yellow. ...Green tea too. ...And cut the gluten right out (hard to do sometimes).

...Food IS medicine. Plus exercise - love my walks.


PS. I'm not obese but not a size 7 anymore. I do puff out depending on kidney function, weight often fluctuates by about 20 pounds even with diuretics. ....My daily caloric intake is probably about 1000 calories - and I remember when I ate all day and never gained an ounce. lol

Originally posted by soficrow
Business certainly sacrifices quality for quantity, as you say - but "feeding the masses" is NOT the motive. Industrialized food production methods are designed to increase profits, not "feed more people."

You may find certain beliefs and desires morally objectionable, but I don't see how the intent or motive is relevant to the facts of the matter. Whether motivated by a desire to "feed the masses" or to "profit by feeding the masses," industrialized food production is responsible for supporting literally billions of people.

For >99 of human history, our population was less than a billion. We took at least hundreds of thousands of years to reach our first billion in 1800. We took 127 years to get to 2 billion in 1927. Less than a hundred years later we're at >7 billion. We added our last billion in 12 years. Why do you think that is?

The accepted explanation is that this is due to medical advances and increases in agricultural productivity. World food exports increased by 400% from 1961-1999. That's the time frame following the Green Revolution, which consisted of the industrialization of agriculture.

Green Revolution refers to a series of research, development, and technology transfer initiatives, occurring between the 1940s and the late 1970s, that increased agriculture production around the world, beginning most markedly in the late 1960s.

The initiatives, led by Norman Borlaug, the "Father of the Green Revolution" credited with saving over a billion people from starvation, involved the development of high-yielding varieties of cereal grains, expansion of irrigation infrastructure, modernization of management techniques, distribution of hybridized seeds, synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides to farmers.

Improving seeds through experimentation is what people have been up to
since the beginning of agriculture, but the term "Green Revolution" was
coined in the 1960s to highlight a particularly striking breakthrough. In
test plots in northwest Mexico, improved varieties of wheat dramatically
increased yields. Much of the reason why these "modern varieties"
produced more than traditional varieties was that they were more
responsive to controlled irrigation and to petrochemical fertilizers,
allowing for much more efficient conversion of industrial inputs into
food.

Essentially, the food industry involves the commercial movement of food from field to fork. The modern food industry is the result of technological and cultural changes that have occurred over the last 150 years. Traditionally, over thousands of years, food production was centered around two activities:

Labor-intensive agricultural activities, the farming of grain, produce and livestock.

Personal food preparation, where individuals and families acquire raw and minimally processed ingredients, and prepare them for their own consumption.

A significant percentage of the population was directly involved in farming, and in the process, many people actually fed themselves, from field to table. By contrast, the modern food industry relies far more on technology, particularly on mechanization and biochemistry, than on human and animal labor. In this way, food is raised, manipulated, preserved and moved around, resulting in a food industry that is to a great degree global in nature, with food and related resources travelling great distances. For example, farm machinery and parts from Europe and agrichemicals from the US may routinely travel to farms in South America, where farm products are raised and shipped to North America for fresh market consumption, or for use in processed foods which may then travel to further points around the world. The point at which foods are gathered and prepared has also become fragmented: much of what we eat has already been assembled for consumption.

This modern food system relies heavily on technology, transportation, management and logistics for physical fulfillment, and on marketing and government regulation for maintaining an efficient consumer market. An incredibly wide range of businesses and individuals are employed by and profit from all aspects of this huge and complex system. A tremendous amount of governmental regulation and administration is also involved in this continual flow of materials, food products, and related information.

Sources:
en.wikipedia.org...
en.wikipedia.org...
en.wikipedia.org...
www.foodfirst.org...
www.foodsfortrade.com...

Originally posted by soficrow
Another myth - children born today are the first generation expected to die before their parents.

You're talking about a minor difference over the course of a couple decades. In the big picture, people live much longer and there are a lot more people in the modern world. The average human life expectancy even as late as the early 20th century was in the 30's. Today it's 67. In the early 20th century there were a couple billion people, now there are three times that many. The decrease in life expectancy of American children born today relative to their parents is negligible compared to the 100% increase in the global average observed over the past 100 years.

Old science restricted its considerations to carcinogens, teratogens, mutagens and the like. New science looks at epigenetic changes, and endocrine and metabolic disruption - for example. The health impacts are MUCH larger than cancer - arguably the end stage following a life time of progressive debilitation and disability.

I'm aware of this, and I agree we should address environmental toxins. I just think despite these risks we're still better off health wise as a result of the systemic transformation into a modern industrialized society, even though that transformation is responsible for many of the environmental disease factors we have to contend with.

I take it the press about the global financial crisis and the 1% (versus the 99%) slipped your notice?

This is another issue where I look at the big picture. You're talking about people not being able to afford college, or having to sell their home. I was thinking more along the lines of starvation, homelessness, and general abject poverty. On the whole, industrialization has been concurrent with a dramatic increase in quality of life.

Most pre-industrial economies had standards of living not much above subsistence, among that the majority of the population were focused on producing their means of survival. For example, in medieval Europe, as much as 80% of the labour force was employed in subsistence agriculture.

Some pre-industrial economies, such as classical Athens, had trade and commerce as significant factors, so native Greeks could enjoy wealth far beyond a sustenance standard of living through the use of slavery. Famines were frequent in most pre-industrial societies, although some, such as the Netherlands and England of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Italian city states of the fifteenth century, the medieval Islamic Caliphate, and the ancient Greek and Roman civilisations were able to escape the famine cycle through increasing trade and commercialisation of the agricultural sector. It is estimated that during the seventeenth century Netherlands imported nearly 70% of its grain supply and in the fifth century BC Athens imported three quarters of its total food supply.

ndustrialisation through innovation in manufacturing processes first started with the Industrial Revolution in the north-west and Midlands of England in the eighteenth century.It spread to Europe and North America in the nineteenth century.

Literature on the subject is prevalent.

and a modern medical establishment in which basic medicines can be produced in great quantities and medical technologies improve disease outcomes.

Erm - not sure where you get your information but I'd say your position is almost indefensible.

How many people have infections effectively treated with antibiotics in the United States every year?

That's just an example. There's no information source you could point to that would suggest antibiotics aren't produced in great quantities or that they don't improve outcomes.

At what cost? Not just in terms of environment, but in the creation of new diseases?

Polio and smallpox alone were much worse than all of the new diseases associated with modern civilization (do you mean antibiotic resistant stuff? HIV? Which new diseases did modern civilization create?). I've never said the situation is ideal, but if you add up the benefits of eradicating and effectively treating many traditionally significant diseases and subtract the consequences of new health concerns associated with modernity (diabetes and heart disease rates, expose to toxins, ect...), we still come out way ahead.

Originally posted by soficrow
They don't work - and they create more problems than they address. ...Just because the debilitating and disabling effects of the resultant chronic diseases are delayed, does not mean they're not real.

See I would say the same thing to this as you said earlier, I don't know where you're getting your information but your position is indefensible. By what measure is this true?

The effects of disease being delayed is better than them being immediate. We can't live healthily forever, but we're doing a lot better now than we were 200 years ago.

Don't tell me you missed the news about antibiotic resistance too?!

Right, that's a problem, but we're still better off. I continue to agree the situation is not ideal. In this case, it would be better if antibiotics just cured infections and didn't lead to resistant bacteria. However, all told, the antibiotics do more good curing the infections than they do harm in creating infectious organisms that are harder to treat.

Don't get me started on vaccines.

Fair enough. That's sort of a separate conversation and I have no problem avoiding that issue here.

The system doesn't work. Time to rethink.

The system is not perfect, it's the best one we've come up with so far, we should continue to think about how to improve it...

Sorry to be the one to break it to you, but environmental factors (including medication exposures) create epigenetic change in humans and other complex organisms. The evidence suggests these changes become permanent if they're beneficial, after about 3 or 4 generations. Moreover, beneficial genetic changes tend to be transmitted horizontally like disease, at least in yeast - so why not in humans?

Besides, we're all connected - and share information. Even genetic information. From Aeons:

"Viruses are carrying RNA transfers between linked species for communication about environmental changes, and audit controls.

Bacteria and fungus are performing a similar function with genetic exchange."

Alright, this is where you went a little off the deep end. Horizontal gene transfer has never been observed in any animal, and there is no known mechanism by which it could occur. Yeast and other bacteria do it but use parts of their cells that no animal cells have. The answer to "why not in humans" could go on for pages, but the gist of it is that we don't have the hardware at the cellular level to do it.

The post you quoted is presumably referring to the transfer of antibiotic resistance genes between bacteria. This has been observed and can be induced in the lab: a gene makes one bacteria resistant to some antibiotic, the individual copies the gene and transfers it horizontally to its friends. Then all of their descendants have the resistance gene and you have a resistant population.

Neither of these things really have to do with epigenetics. Even so, I've only ever heard of undesirable epigenetic effects from toxins, never something like inducing a resistance to the toxin. That kind of this usually just makes your offspring more likely to have a disease, and in no way better off.

Medical intervention only makes sense if we know what we're really dealing with - and it doesn't make sense to create diseases.

It emphatically does not make any sense to design a strategy that dismisses nature's responses, and ignores the impacts of evolution on our and other species.

I agree about know what we're dealing with. When it comes to creating disease, I think that some things do more good than harm, even if they do some harm. I think overall, antibiotics are worth it, even though they are responsible for antibiotic resistant bacteria. I think objectively, to date, more people have benefited from antibiotics than have been harmed by resistant bacteria. Also, the resistance only means we can't treat them with the thing you don't think we should be using anyway (antibiotics), so, if society takes up your position we will be known worse off. Antibiotic resistant bacteria only makes it harder to use antibiotics.

As for nature's response: if it were enough, we wouldn't need the medical intervention in the first place.

reply to post by soficrow


Check out the diuretic you are taking if you are allergic to Sulfa. Some are sulfonamides and the allergy many times applies. quick sporadic weight gain/loss is sometimes a symptom.
I see you understand some of the best cheap/free medicines. Too much Turmeric can sometimes cause some congestive heart problems because it acts as a cox 2 inhibitor. It is a good anticancer herb though.

Plantains and Dandelions

reply to post by rickymouse


Thanks rickymouse - especially for the info about diuretics and sulfa, and turmeric being a Cox-2 inhibitor - didn't know!

reply to post by OnceReturned


I wanty to argue with you - but the sun is shining! I live in Winterpeg, so that makes it a special day. Be back when it snows again.