[ExI] medical marijuana

[darren shawn greer]

Sure isn't.  I would counterpropose that we pay the
>> price another way.  We
>> make most medications over-the-counter accessible, without
>> a doctor's help
>> if the prole chooses to go that route.  With every
>> medication comes
>> literature that carefully explains the known risks, and the
>> caveat that if a
>> prole takes this stuff and does it wrong, she might be
>> injured or seriously
>> killed, buyer beware.
 

 
There are places where this is done. In many parts of Asia, including Thailand, you can purchase most anti-biotics over-the-counter from pharmacies without the approval of a doctor. I decided to go ahead and do this in Krabi eight years ago. I switched from Larium to doxocylcine as a prophylaxis against malaria, because I self-diagnosed the former as causing depression. So I simply asked for a new anti-malarial medication and was given by an indifferent pharmacist doxocylcine. My next stop was Delhi, and little did I realize that doxocylcine is completely useless for preventing malaria in India. Most strands of the bug there are resistant to it. Result? I got malaria and nearly died. If I had seen a doctor prior to making the switch, he or she would almost have certainly checked my itinerary before putting me on a new drug.
 
Also, some medications don't treat symptoms but underlying causes. HIV medications are a good example. Reverse transcriptease inhibitors, protease inhibitors, fusion inhibitors all interfere with cellular reproduction of the virus. Sometimes it takes several different kinds at once to effectively reduce viral loads, and you only know if it's working by having regular CD4 and viral load counts. All of these drugs have resistance issues, and it is preferable to know about them before you become symptomatic, which with this disease is always a dangerous proposition. This also requires lab testing. In addition, some herbal medications, such as St. John's Wart, inhibit uptake of anti-virals into the body through the liver. This field changes so rapidly that even specialized doctors who attend conferences constantly find it hard to keep up. General practitioners often don’t even bother to try and refer patients to infectious disease clinics instead. Some diseases are very complex, and require specialized physicians to treat patients. It is often not enough to just take a pill. I see making certain drugs available without a prescription hazardous in terms of the health of the general population. This could create viruses such as HIV with a higher profile of resistance at time of sero-conversion because of wide-spread misuse of medications due to ignorance of the science involved. 



Per Ardua Ad Astra
For more info on author Darren Greer visit 
http://darrenshawngreer.blogspot.com



 



From: spike66 at att.net
To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2010 15:33:30 -0700
Subject: [ExI] medical marijuana


 
 
> --- On Tue, 7/13/10, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
>> Sure isn't.  I would counterpropose that we pay the
>> price another way.  We
>> make most medications over-the-counter accessible, without
>> a doctor's help
>> if the prole chooses to go that route...
>

### Users do not have to read the manual - they can call the IT
department, and the smart ones do it before they spend money or monkey
around the BIOS. Same applies to drug users. No need to have a
Department of Safe Software, making sure nobody gets to use programs
except ones verified by indifferent programmers hired on governement
money to check things they don't care about, like the FDA...Rafal
 
 
Thanks Rafal.  The opinion of an actual doctor is worth more than others.  I like your approach.
 
I had a friend who lived along the Kern River, adjacent to an Indian Reservation (Indian with a feather not a dot).  The tribe had a medicine man, but he didn't do anything with the traditional remedies, the local plants or incantations and such.  He had formal training in pharmacology, so (had he maintained a license) he would be a titled a pharmacist.  He used all standard drugstore medications as far as I could tell.  He couldn't help you if you had some oddball condition, but he was really good at helping his tribe in all the stuff that he saw nearly every day.  His patients tended to have the classic problems: alcoholism, flab and diabetes, the ones that are eating up the rest of the US population at an ever greater rate.  
 
Interesting aside: medics are debating genetic based medicine, where they take into account the genetics of the patient.  I wonder how it would help if all of the medicine man's patients are closely related?  The Kern River people were all more or less genetically related, having descended from a very small core group. 
 
Where the Kern River medicine man was really good was knowing when he could prescribe something he had in his own shop and when he had to recommend the patient go on down to see the white man's doctor.
 
spike
 
 


 
 
 		 	   		  
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