[ExI] drugs and diagnosis

[Darin Sunley]

Well, as with most things, there's a history here.

Medicine in america /was/ pretty unregulated.

Then in 1932 a major national sports celebrity, Eben Byers, died from
spending 5 years of chugging so much radium water his skeleton started
dissolving. He died of, basically, cancer-of-the-everything.

The federal government, which was already in a
flexing-it's-muscles expansive kind of mood, used the incident to build the
foundations of our modern medical regulatory state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Byers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radithor

On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 11:23 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> When I was a young libertarian I thought that all people should be able to
> take any drug they wanted to.  The older I got the more I realized what
> tremendous damage that would create.  Now I support prescription drugs.
>
> Now another issue comes up:  I read about a 'lab on a chip' technology,
> which promises to be able to diagnose many diseases.  Physicians probably
> will be against this.  They are against self-medication and probably will
> be against any reliable and valid diagnostic tests.
>
> Do we have rights here? A right to know what our body is doing and maybe
> get us to the physician before real trouble begins?  A libertarian has to
> say yes.  The physicians will argue that self-diagnosis will lead to more
> self-medication and not necessarily more physician visits.  And that's
> probably true.  But where does this end?  People doing their own
> chemotherapy?  And that many patients will not be aware of errors, such as
> false positives. (I read that the virus test with 90% accuracy will have
> 70% false positives because of the rarity of the disease - Bayes Theorem).
>
> I probably have missed some points, here, so supply them at will.
>
> bill w
>
> ?
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