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.
Nitro Clorox Queen 👑! For your COVID! It’s better than over the counter hydrocloroqueen!
I believe every American knows someone whose life is made substantially worse because of a lack of access to healthcare.
I want to set this up and learn to use it. I want to keep it and maintain it and wait. Because I’ll inevitably hear from someone that they can’t afford their life-saving medication.
Oh, also I have an exceedingly rare hereditary disease, so it feels like a certainty I’ll need it for myself someday.
I know someone whose life is made substantially worse because they have a lack of access to healthcare. They live in Europe and can’t get access to the specialized medicine that they need in the timeframe that they need it in. I’m not saying that socialized medicine is bad—I’m actually all for it—but it needs to be implemented well foe it to actually work. This is just my anecdotal evidence to say that just because everyone has access doesn’t automatically mean it’s adequate access.
I can’t really comment on the European experience though, so I said American, which I am, and which I am qualified to talk about.
I’m not European either. I’m also American. I wasn’t contradicting anything you were saying; I agree with it. I was just trying to add to the discussion by suggesting that if we are going to get universal healthcare right in America, we have to consider a lot more than just free access.
Hope John Green is aware of this. He’s fighting tuberculosis globally!
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
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.
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.
Four Thieves are legit. Controversial but they’re confronting a lot of uncomfortable truths that need to be addressed .
As is typical of Piracy.
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?
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.
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.
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.
How to solve it is simple, our tax dollars already pay for the research, the results are public property
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Piracy is how you got Netflix.
This is how we’ll change the pharmaceutical industry. They’ll overreact and Streisand Effect this and it’ll blow up. Become normalized. The open source tech will improve.
This is a good thing. Period.
I wish there was some kind of open source collective organization under which you could release anything with eternal open source license that’d be free forever. It could be anything from software, tech or medicine like penicillin so that megacorps could not benefit from it in any way.
Pirating movies and games can’t kill you
Home brewing seizure medication can
This is America dude. Human life costs $7.25 an hour here. We can’t even do anything to keep children safe from their number 1 killer here.
Nobody cares. Those who do care are completely powerless to change anything.
Yes. Mistakes will happen. People will die. People die every day right now. Many of them because they can’t afford life saving medicine. I’d happy take a risk on this before I’d saddle my family with $50,000 a month for medicine that you can get in Canada or Mexico for $50.
Move to Canada.
Canada doesn’t accept just anyone for no reason.
Can confirm. I tried. Long time ago. Spoke to a lady at a Canadian Embassy.
I didn’t meet the education requirements.
Instructions unclear, moved to Alberta and I’m surrounded by Trump flags and austerity measures.
We can’t even do anything to keep children safe from their number 1 killer here.
By this the parent commenter means “car crashes,” by the way. Car dependent zoning is literally mass-murdering more children than school shooters ever did and we’re doing almost nothing to fix it.
I personally think open source software and hardware is a good starting point to making DIY stuff legal in the future.
The all new sudafeb…like Sudafed but with a D at the end because they’re chemically the same just with a D at the end.
Hail Four Thieves Vinegar Collective!
More DIY, right to repair, open source living.
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?
Did you really call the US healthcare system the best in the world?
No, they specifically put it in quotes, to make the distinction.
No. Of course not. I put it in quotes since I was being sarcastic.
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.
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
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.
When a person has nothing left to lose they will take chances that otherwise they wouldn’t. If we weren’t living in a corporatocracy, perhaps there’d be no demand for this sort of thing, but we do and there is.
This is super cool and helpful as a resource but I really don’t think people without a chemistry background should be doing anything more than following precise instructions, hopefully with some form of verification test at the end. The idea to have people without a chemistry background use a forked version of askcos and just run with it is a little scary.
The affordable Controlled Lab Reactor for diy is fantastic for helping people follow precise instructions to the letter just all of those instructions should be meticulously vetted by actual chemists and have some safeguard tests at the end where necessary. It seems the founder wants that vision too at the end of the conference just there’s not enough of a community yet to support it.
Might be safer for HRT, than having to trust a 3rd party to buy it from if you live in a place that can’t get it thru insurance or Dr.
Yeah… This is a bit sketchy. Pharmaceuticals aren’t just something that an amateur can make by following step by step instructions. Even something as simple as baking a cake requires some basic experience to know when things are going right or wrong.
Even maintaining the calibration on a CLR requires some background experience, let alone building and programming one all on your own. With your actual reactor being as small as a mason jar, it means the margin for error is going to be small as well.
This is neat for people with a background in chemistry, but I don’t really see it as anything but dangerous for the general public. They also are fudging their math a bit to make things seem a lot cheaper. Reagents can be really cheap at bulk prices, but you have to spend the time looking for them, and they aren’t equating the cost of a trained chemist making these medications.
I see drug lords getting into this if it is feasible and it isn’t a good scenario. It would paint them as real saviors and make the situation more unstable.
Technically, drug dealers are using the tech (more specifically, other people are using it, then selling the product to the drug dealers, who then sell it to their customers as a ‘service’ included with the drugs)
The thing is, they’re not doing it to make stronger drugs, or for PR purposes. They’re actually adding pre-exposure prophylactics (PrEPs) into their heroin, which then creates the side effect of preventing the contraction of HIV from the needles. (referenced about 1/3rd of the way down this article)
If people are already going to be addicted to these drugs, them not getting HIV from it is just one harm reduction measure that can reduce their risk of serious, permanent illness.
You wouldn’t download a
carlife saving medicine!
