I briefly worked as a retail pharmacy technician 12 years ago. There were a few pharmacists that I worked with during this time and all of them were aware that phenylephrine essentially did nothing.
I hadn't really thought about it until now, but these pharmacists did not directly work with each other, so it must have been obvious that phenylephrine was ineffective.
Every human with a nose knew it didn’t work, because when you took it, it didn’t work. The fact it was marketed was purely a regulatory exploit by pharmaceutical companies. The truth is, they could have continued to let pseudoephedrine be behind the counter and it would have been fine. But someone realized phenylephrine was approved OTC and sounded sort of like pseudoephedrine, so they could claim the shelf space and edge pseudoephedrine products.
Their defense to the FDA in being allowed to continue to market despite being proven even before they began their cynical ploy was consumers want convenience, which sadly is clearly true, that despite knowing if you walked five feet further and got the pseudoephedrine they would get relief they grabbed the drug conveniently placed. Fortunately lobbying money only went so far this time.
A lot of pharmacies have limited hours and long lines for people to say "give me the thing" compared to just grabbing it off the shelf at any time of day with no line.
Some people I know are essentially nocturnal, and have to significantly disrupt their lives whenever they have to do an irregular medication pickup rather than having it shipped ahead of time.
So it can be beyond just "slightly more work" for many people to get it.
Personally, I try to remember to get some whenever I refill meds at the pharmacy, not because I go through it that often, but because if I'm feeling poorly enough that I'm taking it, I probably am not in a state where I want to wait an hour in line just to ask for it.
This is sadly so true for many many categories of consumer products; by the time sufficiently enough people discover the product is bullshit to turn general public opinion the original sales already made the "innovator" enough money to make the whole endeavor worthwhile.
All professionals knew it did nothing. But the problem is by law FDA only needs to certify that OTC medications are safe not that they are effective. So drug companies go to town making billions off those old safe but useless medications
The real change is to add the mandate of efficacy to FDA for OTC medications.
you don't want to go down the road of the "FDA mandating efficacy". However, requiring "truth in medicating" i.e. demonstrable efficacy rates would be nice.
> Many OTC medicines, including phenylephrine, are sold because they have an ingredient that FDA generally recognizes as safe and effective (GRASE) when used as recommended on the product labeling, which is documented in an “OTC monograph.” If FDA determined that oral phenylephrine is not effective, the agency would first issue a proposed order removing phenylephrine from this monograph.
The funny thing is phenyl ephedrine is actually very effective - when given IV, or directly applied to mucus membranes. Which this OTC drugs will never be used for.
So it is an effective drug, overall. Just not when used this way.
So good luck nailing whichever bureaucrat approved this.
Oh man, good luck with that one. I’ve never had someone super into horoscopes that would stop being super into them, no matter how much you proved they were bullshit.
They will try to shiv you though if you keep trying.
I've found the best approach is showing a genuine humility and interest in the "lore" and "vibe" of it, the sort of witchy mystical aesthetic while keeping a firm understanding that you're clear it has no predictive power. People don't usually initially get into these for it's effectiveness but for other reasons
Can you elaborate? I worked as a pharmacy tech when I was younger and never saw drugs dispensed without a prescription from a doctor. I also can't find anything on the web about this being possible in the U.S.
Actually modafinil is a schedule 4 stimulant (which matters in some states). And Pharm.D.s can get into an agreement with Physicians to dispense medication on their behalf as they see fit, it's called Collaborative drug therapy management.
It looks like the Grindhouse Wetware blog is now private, but while it was still public, many people voiced concerns in blog comments about the safety of the battery and the likelihood of overheating/swelling -- prior to the device being implanted. I guess they assumed the concerns were unfounded?
A mixture of potassium chlorate and aluminum powder is the original composition for M-80 firecrackers. Potassium perchlorate is a modern day swap-in. I imagine the flash bang composition is tweaked to increase the flash.
I worked at an NGO in Cambodia at about the time they were considering a country-wide roll-out of OLPC. I believe the OLPC organization initially demanded an all-or-nothing implementation, but later agreed to a pilot program run in just Siem Reap. The pilot went poorly and the implementations wasn't extended. Because it was a failure, there weren't PR releases done by any of the parties involved.
From what I've heard, the problems they saw were with things like the cost of electricity consumed when doing multi-unit charging at schools and difficulty in integrating OLPC devices into teacher-driven curriculums.
In Cambodia at the moment, it seems like inexpensive Android devices are starting to deliver on some of the promises of the OLPC program. They're rugged, energy efficient, simple for children to use, and have a large variety of educational apps and material available (though fewer are available in Khmer). A family owns it, so issues like theft and damage are their responsibility. I vacationed in Cambodia last year, and was amazed to see how many smart phones were in common use, even in poorer areas.
Having switched and then switched back, I will agree with you. If you're inclined to write your own package installers, Homebrew is worlds better than MacPorts. But otherwise, MacPorts has many more packages that-just-work.
As mentioned in the article, he was living in an apartment above an expat bar, on the very touristy riverside strip in Phnom Penh. It sounds like he wasn't really trying to hide. Perhaps because he was chronically ill, and needed to make frequent hospital visits anyway?
I think it's pretty unlikely, even if he did take various measures to hide, that he'd be able to if influential foreign governments were putting pressure on the Cambodian government to find him. Cambodia is a pretty tiny country.
