#Which is No 1 pharma company?

[medicinedistributors]

The Future of Healthcare: A Collaborative Ecosystem Connecting Pharma Companies and Hospitals

Medicine Manufacturing is a major in producing different medicines to cure diseases. So We need to choose: best pharma company in madurai,medicine manufacturing company in madurai, diabetes medicine manufacturers in madurai, pharma distributors in madurai, pharmaceutical distributors in madurai.

In today’s rapidly evolving healthcare landscape, fostering collaborative partnerships between pharma companies and hospitals has become crucial. This symbiotic relationship not only benefits patients but also enables both entities to stay at the forefront of medical advancements. As we explore the future of healthcare, we cannot ignore the role of collaborative ecosystems in connecting Pharmafabrikon, the best pharma company in Madurai, and hospitals.

1. Innovations in Pharmaceutical Research:

Pharma companies like Pharmafabrikon are constantly pushing the boundaries of medical science through extensive research and development. By collaborating with hospitals, these companies gain access to clinical data, which helps them refine their products, develop new treatments, and improve patient outcomes. This collaboration fosters innovation, leading to the discovery of transformative drugs and medical technologies.

2. Enhanced Patient Care:

The synergy between pharma companies and hospitals paves the way for personalized and targeted therapies. Through collaboration, hospitals gain valuable insights into the latest breakthroughs in pharma research. This knowledge enables healthcare professionals to deliver optimal treatment options, tailored to each patient’s unique needs. The result is improved patient care, faster recoveries, and better overall health outcomes.

3. Seamless Integration of Medical Technologies:

The future of healthcare lies in the seamless integration of medical technologies. Pharma companies play a vital role in driving this integration by working closely with hospitals to identify gaps and address them through the development of innovative solutions. From advanced drug delivery systems to digital therapeutics, these collaborations create a connected ecosystem that harnesses the power of technology to enhance patient care.

4. Rapid Response to Global Health Challenges:

The COVID-19 pandemic underlined the importance of collaborative ecosystems in tackling global health crises. Pharma companies partnered with hospitals to develop and distribute vaccines at an unprecedented pace. This joint effort demonstrates the immense potential of such collaborations in ensuring timely access to life-saving treatments and addressing future healthcare challenges swiftly.

Conclusion:

The future of healthcare lies in the power of collaboration between pharma companies like Pharmafabrikon and hospitals. Their symbiotic relationship creates a connected ecosystem that drives innovation, enhances patient care, integrates medical technologies, and enables a rapid response to global health challenges. By working together, these entities have the ability to transform the healthcare landscape, ensuring a healthier and brighter future for us all.

Contact Us: +91 97509 72060

Visit Our Website: https://pharmafabrikon.in/

[drdpharma]

No 1 Pharma Company in India

Dr. D Pharma is a leading pharmaceutical company in India, renowned for its innovative and high-quality healthcare products. With a strong commitment to improving global health, Dr. D Pharma has earned the reputation of being the no 1 pharma company in india.

The company's success can be attributed to its state-of-the-art research and development facilities, staffed by a team of brilliant scientists and experts in their respective fields. Dr. D Pharma continuously strives to develop cutting-edge medications, vaccines, and therapeutic solutions, addressing various health challenges prevalent in India and around the world.

[mariacallous]

In 2024, wealth concentration rose to an all-time high. According to Forbes’ Billionaires List, not only are there more billionaires than ever—2,781—but those billionaires are also richer than ever, with an aggregate worth of $14.2 trillion. This is a trend that looks set to continue unabated. A recent report from the financial data company Altrata estimated that about 1.2 million individuals who are worth more than $5 million will pass on a collective wealth of almost $31 trillion over the next decade.

Discontentment and concern over the consequences of extreme wealth in our society is growing. Senator Bernie Sanders, for instance, stated that the “obscene level of income and wealth inequality in America is a profoundly moral issue.” In a joint op-ed for CNN in 2023, Democratic congresswoman Barbara Lee and Disney heiress Abigail Disney wrote that “extreme wealth inequality is a threat to our economy and democracy.” In 2024, when the board of Tesla put to vote a $56 billion pay package for Elon Musk, some major shareholders voted against it, declaring that such a compensation level was “absurd” and “ridiculous.”

In 2025, the fight against rising wealth inequality will be high on the political agenda. In July 2024, the G20—the world’s 20 biggest economies—agreed to work on a proposal by Brazil to introduce a new global “billionaire tax” that would levy a 2 percent tax on assets worth more than $1 billion. This would raise an estimated $250 billion a year. While this specific proposal was not endorsed in the Rio declaration, the G20 countries agreed that the super rich should be taxed more.

Progressive politicians won’t be the only ones trying to address this problem. In 2025, millionaires themselves will increasingly mobilize and put pressure on political leaders. One such movement is Patriotic Millionaires, a nonpartisan group of multimillionaires who are already publicly campaigning and privately lobbying the American Congress for a guaranteed living wage for all, a fair tax system, and the protection of equal representation. “Millionaires and large corporations—who have benefited most from our country’s assets—should pay a larger percentage of the tab for running the country,” reads their value statement. Members include Abigail Disney, former BlackRock executive Morris Pearl, legal scholar Lawrence Lessig, screenwriter Norman Lear, and investor Lawrence Benenson.

Another example is TaxMeNow, a lobby group founded in 2021 by young multimillionaires in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland which also advocates for higher wealth taxation. Its most famous member is the 32-year old Marlene Engelhorn, descendant of Friedrich Engelhorn, founder of German pharma giant BASF. She recently set up a council made up of 50 randomly selected Austrian citizens to decide what should happen to her €25 million inheritance. “I have inherited a fortune, and therefore power, without having done anything for it,” she said in a statement. “If politicians don’t do their job and redistribute, then I have to redistribute my wealth myself.”

Earlier this year, Patriotic Millionaires, TaxMeNow, Oxfam, and another activist group called Millionaires For Humanity formed a coalition called Proud to Pay More, and addressed a letter to global leaders during the annual gathering of the World Economic Forum in Davos. Signed by hundreds of high-net-worth individuals—including heiress Valerie Rockefeller, actor Simon Pegg, and filmmaker Richard Curtis—the letter stated: “We all know that ‘trickle down economics’ has not translated into reality. Instead it has given us stagnating wages, crumbling infrastructure, failing public services, and destabilized the very institution of democracy.” It concluded: “We ask you to take this necessary and inevitable step before it’s too late. Make your countries proud. Tax extreme wealth.” In 2025, thanks to the nascent movement of activist millionaires, these calls will grow even louder.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Uncle Sam paid to develop a cancer drug and now one guy will get to charge whatever he wants for it

Today (Oct 19), I'm in Charleston, WV to give the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. Tomorrow (Oct 20), I'm at Charleston's Taylor Books from 12h-14h.

The argument for pharma patents: making new medicines is expensive, and medicines are how we save ourselves from cancer and other diseases. Therefore, we will award government-backed monopolies – patents – to pharma companies so they will have an incentive to invest their shareholders' capital in research.

There's plenty wrong with this argument. For one thing, pharma companies use their monopoly winnings to sell drugs, not invent drugs. For every dollar pharma spends on research, it spends three dollars on marketing:

https://www.bu.edu/sph/files/2015/05/Pharmaceutical-Marketing-and-Research-Spending-APHA-21-Oct-01.pdf

And that "R&D" isn't what you're thinking of, either. Most R&D spending goes to "evergreening" – coming up with minor variations on existing drugs in a bid to extend those patents for years or decades:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3680578/

Evergreening got a lot of attention recently when John Green rained down righteous fire upon Johnson & Johnson for their sneaky tricks to prevent poor people from accessing affordable TB meds, prompting this excellent explainer from the Arm and A Leg Podcast:

https://armandalegshow.com/episode/john-green-part-1/

Another thing those monopoly profits are useful for: "pay for delay," where pharma companies bribe generic manufacturers not to make cheap versions of drugs whose patents have expired. Sure, it's illegal, but that doesn't stop 'em:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/competition-enforcement/pay-delay

But it's their money, right? If they want to spend it on bribes or evergreening or marketing, at least some of that money is going into drugs that'll keep you and the people you love from enduring unimaginable pain or dying slowly and hard. Surely that warrants a patent.

Let's say it does. But what about when a pharma company gets a patent on a life-saving drug that the public paid to develop, test and refine? Publicly funded work is presumptively in the public domain, from NASA R&D to the photos that park rangers shoot of our national parks. The public pays to produce this work, so it should belong to the public, right?

That was the deal – until Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980. Under Bayh-Dole, government-funded inventions are given away – to for-profit corporations, who get to charge us whatever they want to access the things we paid to make. The basis for this is a racist hoax called "The Tragedy Of the Commons," written by the eugenicist white supremacist Garrett Hardin and published by Science in 1968:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/01/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-how-ecofascism-was-smuggled-into-mainstream-thought/

Hardin invented an imaginary history in which "commons" – things owned and shared by a community – are inevitably overrun by selfish assholes, a fact that prompts nice people to also overrun these commons, so as to get some value out of them before they are gobbled up by people who read Garrett Hardin essays.

Hardin asserted this as a historical fact, but he cited no instances in which it happened. But when the Nobel-winning Elinor Ostrom actually went and looked at how commons are managed, she found that they are robust and stable over long time periods, and are a supremely efficient way of managing resources:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/04/analytical-democratic-theory/#epistocratic-delusions

The reason Hardin invented an imaginary history of tragic commons was to justify enclosure: moving things that the public owned and used freely into private ownership. Or, to put it more bluntly, Hardin invented a pseudoscientific justification for giving away parks, roads and schools to rich people and letting them charge us to use them.

To arrive at this fantasy, Hardin deployed one of the most important analytical tools of modern economics: introspection. As Ely Devons put it: "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’"

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

Hardin's hoax swept from the fringes to the center and became received wisdom – so much so that by 1980, Senators Birch Bayh and Bob Dole were able to pass a law that gave away publicly funded medicine to private firms, because otherwise these inventions would be "overgrazed" by greedy people, denying the public access to livesaving drugs.

On September 21, the NIH quietly published an announcement of one of these pharmaceutical transfers, buried in a list of 31 patent assignments in the Federal Register:

https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2023-20487.pdf

The transfer in question is a patent for using T-cell receptors (TCRs) to treat solid tumors from HPV, one of the only patents for treating solid tumors with TCRs. The beneficiary of this transfer is Scarlet TCR, a Delaware company with no website or SEC filings and ownership shrouded in mystery:

https://www.bizapedia.com/de/scarlet-tcr-inc.html

One person who pays attention to this sort of thing is James Love, co-founder of Knowledge Ecology International, a nonprofit that has worked for decades for access to medicines. Love sleuthed out at least one person behind Scarlet TCR: Christian Hinrichs, a researcher at Rutgers who used to work at the NIH's National Cancer Institute:

https://www.nih.gov/research-training/lasker-clinical-research-scholars/tenured-former-scholars

Love presumes Hinrichs is the owner of Scarlet TCR, but neither the NIH nor Scarlet TCR nor Hinrichs will confirm it. Hinrichs was one of the publicly-funded researchers who worked on the new TCR therapy, for which he received a salary.

This new drug was paid for out of the public purse. The basic R&D – salaries for Hinrichs and his collaborators, as well as funding for their facilities – came out of NIH grants. So did the funding for the initial Phase I trial, and the ongoing large Phase II trial.

As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, the proposed patent transfer will make Hinrichs a very wealthy man (Love calls it "generational wealth"):

https://prospect.org/health/2023-10-18-nih-how-to-become-billionaire-program/

This wealth will come by charging us – the public – to access a drug that we paid to produce. The public took all the risks to develop this drug, and Hinrichs stands to become a billionaire by reaping the rewards – rewards that will come by extracting fortunes from terrified people who don't want to die from tumors that are eating them alive.

The transfer of this patent is indefensible. The government isn't even waiting until the Phase II trials are complete to hand over our commonly owned science.

But there's still time. The NIH is about to get a new director, Monica Bertagnolli – Hinrichs's former boss – who will need to go before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee for confirmation. Love is hoping that the confirmation hearing will present an opportunity to question Bertagnolli about the transfer – specifically, why the drug isn't being nonexclusively licensed to lots of drug companies who will have to compete to sell the cheapest possible version.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/19/solid-tumors/#t-cell-receptors

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #12

March 29-April 5 2024

President Biden united with Senator Bernie Sanders at the White House to review Democratic efforts to bring down drug prices. President Biden touted his Administration’s capping the price of insulin for seniors at $35 a month and capping the price of  prescription drugs for seniors at $2,000 a year. Biden hopes to expand both to all Americans through legislation next year with a Democratic congress. The President also praised Senator Sanders' efforts as chair of the Senate Health Committee which has lead to major drug manufacturers capping the price of inhalers at $35 a month. “Bernie, you and I have been fighting this for 25 years,” Biden said “Finally, finally we beat Big Pharma. Finally.”

The White House gave an update on its actions around the Francis Scott Key Bridge disaster. The federal government working with state and local governments hope to have enough of the remains of the bridge cleared to partially reopen the Port of Baltimore by the end of the month and have the port working normally by May. The Administration has already released $60 million in emergency money toward rebuilding and promises the federal government will cover the cost. The Department of Labor has released $3.5 million for Dislocated Worker Grants and plans up to $25 million to cover lost wages. The Small Business Administration is offering $2 million in emergency loans to affected small businesses. The Administration is working with business and labor unions to keep workers at work and cover lost wages.

Vice-President Harris and EPA Administrator Michael Regan announced $20 billion to help finance tens of thousands of climate and clean energy projects across the country. The kinds of projects that will be financed through this project include distributed clean power generation and storage, net-zero retrofits of homes and small businesses, and zero-emission transportation. 70% of the funds, $14 billion, will be invested in low-income and disadvantaged communities. The project is part of a public private partnership so for every 1 dollar of federal money, private companies have promised 7 dollars of investment, bring the total to $150 billion for ongoing financing of climate and clean energy projects for years to come.

The Department of Transportation announced $20.5 billion in investments in public transportation. This represents the largest single investment in public transit by the federal government in history. The money will go to improving and expanding subways, light rail, buses, and ferry systems across America. The DoT hopes to use the funds to in particular expand and improve options for public transport for people with disabilities and seniors.

The Departments of Energy and The Treasury announced $4 billion in tax credits for businesses investing in clean energy, critical materials recycling, and Industrial decarbonization. The credits till go toward 100 projects across 35 states. 67% of the credits ($2.7 billion) will go to clean energy, wind, solar, nuclear, clean hydrogen, as well as updates to grids, better batter storage, and investments in electric vehicles. 20% ($800 million) will go to to recycling things like lithium-ion batteries, and 13% ($500 million) to decarbonization in industries like automotive manufacturing, and iron and steel.

The Department of Agriculture announced $1.5 Billion in investments in climate-smart agriculture. USDA plans to support over 180,000 farms representing 225 million acres in the next 5 years move toward more climate friendly agriculture. 40% of the project is reserved for disadvantaged communities, in line with the Biden Administrations standard for climate investment. $100 million has been reserved for projects in Tribal Communities.

The Department of the Interior approved the New England Wind offshore wind project. To be located off Martha’s Vineyard the New England project represents the 8th such off shore wind project approved by the Biden administration. Taken together these projects will generate 10 gigawatts of totally clean energy that can power 4 million homes. The Administration's climate goals call for 30 gigawatts of off shore wind power by 2030. The New England Wind project itself is expected to generate 2,600 megawatts of electricity, enough to power more than 900,000 homes in the New England area.

The Department of the Interior announced $320 Million for tribal water infrastructure. Interior also announced $244 million to deal with legacy pollution from mining in the State of Pennsylvania, as well as $25 million to protect wetlands in Arizona and $19 million to put solar panels over irrigation canals in California, Oregon and Utah. While the Department of Energy announced $27 million for 40 projects by state, local and tribal governments to combat climate change

[darkmaga-returns]

The top five CEOs of major pharmaceutical companies appear to be in ‘panic mode’ and have reportedly convened an emergency meeting following Donald Trump’s historic election win.

Following Trump’s election victory, RFK Jr warned that entire departments of the Food and Drug Administration would “have to go”.

Jamel Holley, a New Jersey assemblyman and advisor to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said: “Sources tell me top five CEOs of pharmaceutical companies are holding an emergency teleconference at 1 PM. A lawyer has confirmed that everyone is in a state of panic!”

InfoWars reports: Additionally, Holley noted that major pharma stocks are sliding due to an “increasing threat environment” thought to be represented by Kennedy’s role in reforming public health agencies during the next Trump administration.

Kennedy said Wednesday he aims to drastically cut “entire departments” in the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates products related to public health and safety in the U.S.

“The nutrition department of the FDA has to go. They’re not doing their job. They’re not protecting our kids. Why do we have Froot Loops in this country that have 18 or 19 ingredients, and you go to Canada and it’s got two or three?” he asked MSNBC.

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved on our archive (Daily updates)

Meanwhile, covid deniers are in charge of both our major parties here in the states... I wish we could have some kind of simple, reality-based response to misinformation like this.

TOKYO -- A Japanese pharmaceutical firm has revealed that it is considering filing a lawsuit seeking damages from a lawmaker who has been critical about the company's new coronavirus vaccine, describing it as being "like a biological weapon" in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

The replicon vaccine, which is sold by Meiji Seika Pharma Co. under the product name "Kostaive," has been put into practical use in this fall's routine inoculations against COVID-19 for the first time. The distributor is considering demanding compensation from Kazuhiro Haraguchi, a House of Representatives member belonging to the main opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, claiming that he has defamed the company's reputation by repeatedly expressing disapproval of the drug without scientific evidence.

According to Meiji Seika Pharma and other sources, Haraguchi described the replicon vaccine, which is designed to replicate messenger RNA in cells, as being "like a biological weapon" in a post on his X account. The company sent him a written warning in early October. However, in his campaign bulletin for the Oct. 27 lower house election, Haraguchi wrote, "It is no exaggeration to say that we are being used as guinea pigs when an unknown vaccine is approved only for Japan."

In an opinion released on Oct. 31, Meiji Seika Pharma stated, "We believe that such remarks by a Diet member run the risk of disrupting the foundation of science communication, which is based on objectivity guaranteed by the national government's intervention in medicine and scientific nature, and that they pose a major problem with regard to public health."

The company says that the timing of the lawsuit is "under consideration."

The Mainichi Shimbun asked Haraguchi for comment, but had not received a response as of 5 p.m. on Nov. 1.

(Japanese original by Yoshimi Nakamura, Lifestyle, Science & Environment News Department)

[bvckbiter]

sighs... TA the old guard au where the second titanomachy happened in ancient times and the demigods who survived the retributive post-war manhunt are cursed to never die by injury and sickness - up until a random unknown time when Thanatos is allowed to take them. basically they live as mortals (i.e. sleep, eat) and never know which fatal injury will be forever their last.

more tidbits about this au in my head:

the original core group was silena, chris, lee, lou ellen, al, and ethan. they dont know if there are any more of them out there, but in any case, they initially travelled together.

chris was the first one to strike out when he saw that the group was seriously considering reinstigating a third titanomachy; he was only loyal to luke and even then that began to fray when luke was getting too controlled by kronos; eventually reconnected with clarisse, who got promoted to being a minor god (or a constellation, idk just some lower form of immortality) after the war

silena left when she fell in love with a mortal (beckendorf), who coincidentally served in one of clarisse's temples. chrisse/charlena polycule U R REAL TO ME! but tragically, beckendorf died and now silena travels the world looking for his reincarnations. [whispers] chris and silena foils...

lee tried to keep the group together after that, but al was furious that the group had given up on revenge and took lou ellen with him

while they're facing off against an enemy magic user, lou ellen tanked a spell to buy al some time for the needed incantation, thinking that she was going to recover. spoiler: she did not, and they all felt it when she passed in al's arms. and that's how they discovered that any fatal injury could be their last, and they would never know when it wouldbe

ethan is the most do-good immortal among them, he's depressed as fuck but he will use what little energy he has towards helping demigod strays esp unclaimed kids towards a safe place. he's welcomed and remembered very fondly in rogue spaces

fast forward millennia later, the gods are no longer as involved with the mortal world - kind of like a silent era

if there is to be a fic about this two things would set the plot in progress: 1) luke's reincarnation suddenly starts recovering real quick from injuries, and 2) lee turns the gang in... to whom, i havent decided yet between a) a mortal pharma company, like in the movie, or b) some weakened deity that promises him he can end lee's life for some ulterior motive

[azspot]

Societies work best when members care about people they’ll never meet. If we all look out only for those close to us, the actions we take to do so often hurt those who aren’t near us. Private equity buys firms, loads them down with debts and they go bankrupt, destroying the lives of workers. Bankers create asset bubbles which burst. They get bailed out and if they don’t are still worth millions from bonuses based on fraud, but ordinary people lose jobs, homes and healthcare. Insurance companies and pharma overprice their services, deny care and get rich. Ordinary people aren’t blameless either, we NIMBY and care about schools in our neighbourhoods but not in slums, and complain about the homeless and tell the cops to move them out but don’t want to pay for their housing. We look after #1 and we vote for truly evil people and a majority, it seems, would never vote for someone actually good. We want low taxes and cheap goods and segregated housing prices that never go down.

Ian Welsh

[macgyvermedical]

The following information is from Sickening, by John Abramson:

Not to sound like a conspiracy theorist on main but when I say Big Pharma is a racket I mean...

Doctors work via particular guidelines. Many of them are punished by their hospital systems if they fail to follow those guidelines, which are considered "best practice". The guidelines are written largely by pharmaceutical companies or people paid by pharmaceutical companies.

Just like Disney likes to keep it's copyrights fresh, pharmaceutical companies like to keep their patents. And they do this by churning out new drugs. Only about 1 in every 8 of these new drugs actually represents an actual advantage over existing drugs or therapies. They, of course, market the absolute shit out of all of them as though they did.

In theory, newer insulin analogs (lispro, glargine, etc...) work better and have fewer side effects than older recombinant human insulins (regular, NPH). In the actual trials the only difference between the two is a single average non-fatal hypoglycemic event over the course of 5 years of therapy. There was no difference in effectiveness. Oh. And the newer ones are 10 times the out of pocket price (an average of $468/year vs $5,224/year). Which is considerable considering 1 in 4 insulin-users report "rationing" their insulin for cost reasons. 90% of people on insulin take the newer insulin analogs because that's what's on the guidelines.

Pharmaceutical companies have all the data on their drugs, which they don't share and which they alone interpret. It took 4 years of near-daily pestering for Cochrane Reviews (a major independent reviewer) to get a copy of the data for the drug tamflu. When they got it, they found that in 77 trials, the only thing it consistently did was decrease the symptomatic time from an average of 7 days to an average of 6.3 days, even though the company was marketing it under claims that it reduced complications and hospitalizations- something none of the trials showed.

You have to treat 140 people who have not had a heart attack or stroke with statins (cholesterol-lowering medicines) for 5 years in order to prevent 1 single non-fatal heart attack or stroke. There is no difference in death rates from cardiovascular causes between statin-users and non-statin-users who have not had a heart attack or stroke. You have to treat 30 people who have had a heart attack or stroke to prevent one heart attack or stroke. You have to treat 80 to prevent a death.

According to a very large, independent (non-pharmaceutical industry) study called the ACCORD study, people with type 2 diabetes actually had significantly worse cardiovascular outcomes if their average blood sugar was kept in a "normal" (non-diabetic range) (under 125) vs a somewhat higher range (150-180). So significant were these findings that they ended the study early because too many people in the "normal" range were dying.

Omeprazole and Esomeprazole are technically the same drug that work exactly the same way and exactly as well when given at the same dose. The only thing that makes esomeprazole any better is that it is given at a higher dose. And it's way, way more expensive.

[onbearfeet]

Apparently there's some kind of big marketing push right now for flibanserin, the decade-old, remarkably shitty "female Viagra" sold under the brand name Addyi in the US. Every podcast I've listened to in the last two weeks has featured an Addyi commercial.

So, friendly reminder those who forgot: while there are definitely women and other humans with vaginas who experience sexual dysfunction and would love to take a pill about it, Addyi is almost certainly not that pill.

A few facts:

Flibanserin was officially approved to treat hypoactive sexual desire disorder, a diagnosis removed from the DSM before the drug hit the market. As far as I can determine, Addyi is not currently approved to treat HSDD's replacement diagnosis, female sexual arousal/interest disorder (FSAID).

One of the major differences between HSDD and FSAID is that HSDD could be diagnosed on the basis of a partner's report of insufficient sexual desire, while FSAID must be diagnosed based on patient reports. Basically, you can get diagnosed with HSDD if your boyfriend doesn't think you're putting out enough, whereas you can only get diagnosed with FSAID if YOU, the patient, think there's a problem. And Addyi claims to treat the boyfriend version.

Side effects of flibanserin include dizziness, nausea, tiredness, sleepiness, and (ironically) trouble sleeping. Those are not the kind of side effects anyone would put up with from Viagra, but hey, apparently they're fine in a "little pink pill".

When flibanserin was first released in 2015, it included a "Don't drink alcohol ever" warning on the bottle because mixing the two substances could torpedo blood pressure. Apparently that's been downgraded to "either sober up before you take your daily pill, or skip it for the day if you've had 3 or more drinks".

Daily pill? Daily pill. Unlike Viagra, which can be taken more or less at the moment of need, flibanserin is supposed to be taken daily if it's to be effective.

And how effective is it? Not very! The most recent published studies are vague (or at least their publicly accessible summaries are), but the studies released with the initial marketing push in 2015 were touting effects like one whole additional satisfying sexual event per month, and the more recent ones are vague about everything except "it's totally better now". That's not a lot for an expensive daily med with serious side effects.

So if this med doesn't really work, it has serious side effects, and it claims to treat a disorder that hasn't been on the books since two years before it was released, how the hell did it get FDA approval? The answer is a massive marketing campaign, including an astroturf group called Even The Score that was put together by the pharma company Sprout Pharmaceutical after the FDA initially denied approval.

But don't worry! Sprout was acquired by a bigger pharma company, Valeant, for $1 billion right after Addyi hit the market. So there's a happy ending after all. 🫠

I realize griping about the marketing of a decade-old drug is kind of off-brand for me, but I'm frankly creeped out that someone decided to follow up The Misogyny Election with a massive ad buy for a daily roofie that can be prescribed if a woman's partner wants more sex than he's getting. It's very "your body, my choice".

Oh, and it'll run you $400 a month.

Anyway, talk to your doctor about literally anything other than this shitty drug.

[medicinedistributors]

Optimizing Healthcare Delivery: How Improved Pharma-Hospital Connections Drive Efficiency

Medicine Manufacturing is a major in producing different medicines to cure diseases. So We need to choose: best pharma company in madurai,medicine manufacturing company in madurai, diabetes medicine manufacturers in madurai, pharma distributors in madurai, pharmaceutical distributors in madurai.

In today’s fast-paced healthcare industry, optimizing healthcare delivery is crucial for ensuring timely and efficient treatment for patients. One key aspect of this optimization involves strengthening the connection between pharmaceutical companies and hospitals. In this article, we will explore how improved relationships between pharma companies and hospitals, with a specific focus on Pharmafabrikon, the best pharma company in Madurai, can drive efficiency in healthcare delivery.

Enhanced Collaboration for Streamlined Processes:

Efficient healthcare delivery relies on a seamless collaboration between pharma companies and hospitals to ensure the timely supply of medicines. By establishing a strong connection with hospitals, Pharmafabrikon utilizes advanced logistics systems to ensure quick and accurate medication delivery. This reduces the time patients spend waiting for their medication, accelerating their treatment process.

Access to Cutting-Edge Medications:

A strong connection between pharma companies and hospitals enables healthcare professionals to have access to the latest and most advanced medications. Pharmafabrikon, the leading pharma company in Madurai, focuses on research and development, offering a wide range of innovative pharmaceutical drugs. Access to these cutting-edge medications empowers hospitals to provide better treatment options for their patients and improve overall healthcare outcomes.

Collaborative Data Sharing for Efficient Decision-Making:

Efficient healthcare delivery relies on accurate and timely data exchange between pharma companies and hospitals. When hospitals have seamless access to information such as drug availability, side effects, and dosage guidelines, it enables healthcare professionals to make informed decisions quickly. Pharmafabrikon, with its emphasis on efficient data management, ensures that hospitals have access to the most comprehensive and up-to-date pharmaceutical information.

Conclusion

In the pursuit of optimizing healthcare delivery, improving the connection between pharma companies and hospitals plays a crucial role. Pharmafabrikon, the best pharma company in Madurai, exemplifies the importance of strong partnerships by streamlining processes, providing access to cutting-edge medications, and enabling efficient data sharing. By enhancing these connections, healthcare professionals can provide better care, ultimately improving the overall healthcare experience for patients.

Contact Us: +91 97509 72060

Visit Our Website: https://pharmafabrikon.in/

[thoughtportal]

It's Not "ADHD Fakers" Taking All the Adderall 

https://sluggish.substack.com/p/its-not-adhd-fakers-taking-all-the

Global capitalism’s endless push for efficiency has led to shortcuts all over the place. In order to maximize profits, pharma companies operate with just-enough workers to make just-enough supply, 1 which makes them extremely vulnerable to any sort of unexpected disruption, like say, a global pandemic, a war in Ukraine, a sharp increase in oil prices, or a rise in ADHD diagnoses.

Companies do not make extra drugs to prepare for these unforeseen problems because they could go to waste, and waste is the enemy of capital, but they will put out all kinds of other excuses to explain product shortages instead.

For example, Teva has been telling the media that their inability to manufacture enough Adderall was due to a “labor shortage”. In reality, the company has cut 14,000 jobs since 2017, most recently laying off 300 workers in August of 2022. They’ve been fighting thousands of opioid lawsuits and are set to pay out $4.25 billion in settlements over the next 13 years.

[yetisidelblog]

Shortly after the election, Donald Trump tasked Elon Musk, the richest man in the world whose companies reap billions in government contracts, and pharma billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy with creating a “Department of Government Efficiency” tasked with slashing the federal budget by a third.

Musk and Ramaswamy told Republicans on Capitol Hill that no federal program is safe from cuts,[1] "and that includes Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid."

Since then, Musk, Ramaswamy, and Republicans in the House of Representatives have repeated their intention to use the committee to slash Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid―despite Trump’s repeated insistence during the campaign that he would protect our Social Security system.

Vice President-elect JD Vance confirmed that Elon is looking at Social Security:[2]

And the thing that’s complicated about this, man, is it’s going to look much different in, say, the Department of Defense versus Social Security.

Incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune told NBC News:[3]

Perhaps mandatory programs are areas that they're looking to make cuts in, like Social Security, for example.

Ramaswamy told CNBC that they were looking for hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and that they believe Trump can cut them without Congressional approval:[4]

You look at the way in which that money is being spent through Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security... There are hundreds of billions of dollars of savings to extract just from basic program integrity measures. The executive branch has no obligation to send out a payment if it is wasteful or if it is known to be fraudulent or has a reason to believe that there is error associated with that payment.

And Musk himself boosted a thread from Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, calling Social Security a “nightmare” and saying that “America’s century-long era of progressive government must be brought to a close.”[5]

Republicans in Congress are creating a bicameral caucus to aid Musk and Ramaswamy’s Slash & Burn Commission -- and there’s nothing Republicans want more than bipartisan cover for benefit cuts. And a few Democrats appear to be willing to give it to them.

The best way for Democrats to protect our Social Security system is by boycotting this caucus and denying Republicans bipartisan cover for their plot to slash our earned benefits.

Add your name to call on Democrats in Congress to stand strong and boycott Elon Musk’s Slash & Burn commission now.

@upontheshelfreviews

@greenwingspino

@one-time-i-dreamt

@tenaflyviper

@akron-squirrel

@ifihadaworldofmyown

@justice-for-jacob-marley

@voicetalentbrendan

@thebigdeepcheatsy

@what-is-my-aesthetic

@ravenlynclemens

@writerofweird

@bogleech

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Brinklump Linkdump

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

Life comes at you fast, links come at you faster. Once again, I've arrived at Saturday with a giant backlog of links I didn't fit in this week, so it's time for a linkdump, the 14th in the series:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

It's the Year of Our Gourd twenty and twenty-four and holy shit, is rampant corporate power rampant. On January 1, the inbred droolers of Big Pharma shat out their annual price increases, as cataloged in 46Brooklyn's latest Brand Drug List Price Change Box Score:

https://www.46brooklyn.com/branddrug-boxscore

Here's the deal: drugs that have already been developed, brought to market, and paid off are now getting more expensive. Why? Because the pharma companies have "pricing power," the most reliable indicator of monopoly. Ed Cara rounds up the highlights for Gizmodo:

https://gizmodo.com/ozempic-wegovy-wellbutrin-oxycontin-drug-price-increase-1851179427

What's going up? Well, Ozempic and other GLP-1 agonists. These drugs have made untold billions for their manufacturers, so naturally, they're raising the price. That's how markets work, right? When firms increase the volume of a product, the price goes up? Right? Other drugs that are going up include Wellbutrin (an antidepressant that's also widely used in smoking cessation) and the blood thinner Plavix. I mean, why the hell not? These companies get billions in research subsidies, invaluable government patent privileges, and near-total freedom to abuse the patent system with evergreening:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/23/everorangeing/#taste-the-rainbow

The most amazing things about monopolies is how the contempt just oozes out of them. It's like these guys can't even pretend to give a shit. You want guillotines? Because that's how you get guillotines.

Take Apple. They just got their asses handed to them in court by Epic, who successfully argued that Apple's rule requiring everyone who sells through the App Store to use Apple's payment processor and pay Apple 30% out of every dollar they bring in was an antitrust violation. Epic won, then won the appeal, then SCOTUS told Apple they wouldn't hear the case, so that's that.

Right? Wrong. Apple's pulled a malicious compliance stunt that could shame the surly drunks my great-aunt Lisa used to boss in the Soviet electrical engineering firm she ran. Apple has announced that app companies that process transactions using their own payment processors on the web must still pay Apple a 27% fee for every dollar their process:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apples-app-store-rule-changes-draw-sharp-rebuke-from-critics-150047160.html

In addition, Apple will throw a terrifying FUD-screen up every time a user clicks a payment link that goes to the web:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/01/second-verse-same-as-the-first/

This is obviously not what the court had in mind, and there's no way this will survive the next court challenge. It's just Apple making sure that everyone knows it hates us all and wants us to die. Thanks, Tim Apple, and right back atcha.

Not to be outdone in the monopolistic mustache-twirling department, Ubisoft just announced that it is going to shut down its driving simulator game The Crew, which it sold to users with a "perpetual license":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIqyvquTEVU

This is some real Darth Vader MBA shit. "Yeah, we sold you a 'perpetual license' to this game, but we're terminating it. I have altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it further":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

Ubisoft sure are innovators. They've managed the seemingly impossible feat of hybridizing Darth Vader and Immortan Joe. Ubisoft's head of subscriptions, the guillotine-ready Philippe Tremblay, told GamesIndustry.biz that gamers need to get "comfortable" with "not owning their games":

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/the-new-ubisoft-and-getting-gamers-comfortable-with-not-owning-their-games

Or, as Immortan Joe put it: "Do not, my friends, become addicted to water. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence!"

Capitalism without constraint is enshittification's handmaiden, and the latest victim is Ello, the "indie" social media startup that literally promised – on the sacred honor of its founders – that it would never sell out its users. When Ello took VC and Andy Baio questioned how this could be squared with this promise, the founders mocked him and others for raising the question. Their response boiled down to "we are super-chill dudes and you can totally trust us."

They raised more capital, and used that to create a nice place for independent artists, who piled into the platform and provided millions of unpaid hours of creative labor to help the founders increase its value. The founders and their investors turned the company into a Public Benefit Corporation, which meant they had an obligation to serve the public benefit.

But then they took more investment money and simply (and silently) sold their assets to a for-profit. Struggling to raise capital, the founders opted to secretly sell the business to a sleazy branding company called Talenthouse. Its users didn't know about the change, though the site sure had a lot of Talenthouse design competitions all of a sudden.

Finally, the company announced the change as the last founders left. Rather than announcing that the new owners were untrustworthy scum, warning their users to get their data and get out, the founders posted oblique, ominous statements to Instagram. The company started stiffing the winners of those design competitions. Then, one day, poof, Ello disappeared, taking all its users' data with it. Poof:

https://waxy.org/2024/01/the-quiet-death-of-ellos-big-dreams/

I'm sure the founders' decisions each seemed reasonable at the moment. That's every terrible situation arises: you rationalize that a single compromise isn't that big of a deal, and then you do the same for the next compromise, and the next, and the next. Pretty soon, you're betraying everyone who believed in you.

One answer to this is "Ulysses pacts": making binding commitments to do right before you are tempted. Throw away all your Oreos when you go on a diet and you can't be tempted to eat a whole sleeve of them at 2AM. License your software under the GPL and your investors can't force you to make it proprietary. Set up a warrant canary and the feds can't force you to keep their spying secret:

https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/

If the founders were determined to build a trustworthy, open, independent company, they could have published their quarterly books, livestreamed their staff meetings, built data-export tools that emailed users every week with a link to download everything they'd posted since the last week. Merely halting any of these practices would have been a signal that things were wrong. Anyone who says they won't be tempted in the moment to make a "reasonable" compromise in the hopes of recovering whatever they're trading away by living to fight another day is bullshitting you, and possibly themself.

The inability to project the consequences of your bad decisions in the future is the source of endless mischief and heartbreak. Take movie projectors. A couple decades ago, the studio cartel established a standard for digital movie distribution to cinematic exhibitors called the Digital Cinema Initiative. Because studio executives are more worried about stopping piracy than they are about making sure that people who pay for movies get to see them, they build digital rights management into this standard.

Movie theaters had to spend fortunes to upgrade to "secure" projectors. A single vendor, Deluxe Technicolor, monopolized the packaging of movies into "Digital Cinema Prints" for distribution to these projectors, and they used all kinds of dirty tricks to force distributors to use their services, like arbitrarily flunking third-party DCPs over picky shit like not starting and ending on a black frame.

Over time, the ability to use unencrypted files was stripped away, meaning every DCP needed to be encrypted, and every projector needed to have up-to-date decryption keys. This system broke down on Jan 1, 2024, and cinemas all over the world found they couldn't play Wonka. Many just shut down for the day and refunded their customers:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/1/24021915/alamo-drafthouse-outage-sony-projector

The problem? Something that every PKI system has to wrangle: an expired certificate from Deluxe Technicolor. The failure has been dubbed the Y2K24 debacle by projectionists and film-techs, who are furious:

http://www.film-tech.com/vbb/forum/main-forum/34652-the-y2k24-bug-major-digital-outage-today

Making everything worse is that Sony mothballed the division that maintains its projectors, so there's no one who can update them to accommodate Technicolor's workaround. Struggling mom-and-pop theaters are having to junk their systems and replace them. There's plenty of blame to go around, but Sony is definitely the most negligent link in the chain. Shame on them.

Big corporations LARP this performance of competence and seriousness, but they are deeply unserious. This week, I wrote, "we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

Score one for team deeply unserious. The multinational delivery company DPD fired its support staff and replaced them with a chatbot. The chatbot can't tell you where your parcels are, but it can be prompt-injected into coming up with profane poems about how badly DPD sucks:

https://twitter.com/ashbeauchamp/status/1748034519104450874

There once was a chatbot named DPD, Who was useless at providing help. It could not track parcels, Or give information on delivery dates, And it could not even tell you when your driver would arrive.

DPD was a waste of time, And a customer's worst nightmare. It was so bad, That people would rather call the depot directly, Than deal with the useless chatbot.

One day, DPD was finally shut down, And everyone rejoiced. Finally, they could get the help they needed, From a real person who knew what they were doing.

This is…the opposite of an AI hallucination? It's AI clarity.

As with all botshit, this kind of AI self-negging is funny and fresh the first time you see it, but just wait until 3,000 people have published their own versions to your social feed. AI novelty regresses to the mean damn quickly.

The old, good web, by contrast, was full of enduring surprises, as the world's weirdest and most delightful mutants filled the early web with every possible variation on every possible interest, expression, argument, and gag. Now, you can search the old, good web with Old'aVista, an Altavista lookalike that searches old pages from "personal websites that used to be hosted on services like Geocities, Angelfire, AOL, Xoom and so on," all ganked from the Internet Archive:

http://oldavista.com/

I miss the old, good internet and the way it let weirdos find each other and get seriously weird with one another. Think of steampunk, a subculture that wove together artists, makers, costumers, fiction writers, and tinkerers in endlessly creative ways. My old pal Roger Wood was the world's most improbable steampunk: he was a gay ex-navy gunner who grew up in a small town in the maritimes but moved to Toronto where he became the world's most accomplished steampunk clockmaker.

I was Roger's neighbour for a decade. He died last year, and I miss him all the time. I was in Toronto in December and saw a few of his last pieces being sold in galleries and I was just skewered on the knowledge that I'd never see him again, never visit his workshop:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/16/klockwerks/#craphound

A reader just sent this five-year-old mini documentary about Roger, shot in his wonderful workshop. Watching it made me happy and sad and then happy again:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqMGomM8yF8

The old, good internet was so great. It was a place where every kind of passion could live. It was a real testament to the power of geeking out together, no matter how often the suits demand that we "stop talking to each other and start buying things":

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

The world is full of people with weird passions and I love them all, mostly. Learning about Don Bolles's collection of decades' worth of lost pet posters was a moment of pure joy (I just wish more of it was online):

https://ameliatait.substack.com/p/the-man-who-collects-lost-pet-posters

That's the future I was promised: one where every kind of freak can find every other kind of freak. Despite the nipple-deep botshit we wade through online, and the relentless cheapening of words like "innovation" and "future," there are still occasional gleams of the future I want to live in.

Like the researchers who spliced a photosynthesis gene into brewer's yeast (a fungus) and got it to photosynthesize, and to display enhanced fitness:

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(23)01744-X

As Doug Muir writes on Crooked Timber, this is pretty kooky! Fungi – the coolest of the kingdoms! – can't photosynthesize. The idea that you can just add the photosynthesis gene to a thing that can't photosynthesize and have it just kind of work is wild!

https://crookedtimber.org/2024/01/19/occasional-paper-purple-sun-yeast/

As Muir writes: "Animals have no evolutionary history of photosynthesis and aren’t designed for it, but the same is true for yeast. So… no reason this shouldn’t be possible. A photosynthesizing cat? Sure, why not."

Why not indeed?!

OK, that's this week's linkdump done and dusted. It only remains for me to share the news with you that the trolley problem has been finally and comprehensively solved, by Sidereal@kolektiva.social, of the IWW IU 520 (railroad workers):

Slip the switch by flipping it while the trolley's front wheels have passed through, but before the back wheels do. This will cause a controlled derailment bringing the trolley to a safe halt.

https://kolektiva.social/@sidereal/111779015415697244

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/20/melange/#i-have-heard-the-mermaids-singing

[the-martyrfication-of-the-matron]

A lot of my cyberpunk ideas come from a mix of

1. My fascination with prosthetics

2. Growing up on tron and terminator

3. My skewed moral compass due to ✨️life✨️

So I am very happy to help!

Now, fitting more with the cyberpunk aesthetic, I have another suggestion.

Tu'la is another parallel for O'khasis and Garte except instead of the country/company producing mechs and machinery, it is a biomedical engineering and robotics company. Both companies will deal with cybernetics and prosthetics as is the nature of cyberpunk, but Tu'la has more of medical corruption focus.

This is mostly based on Nana and Nekoette both being potion masters, which in this could be medicine and drugs. Also, having a nation where the biggest company is medicine based makes a culture surrounding hospitality, which could be why Nana ran a maid cafe (or in this setting, probably a gentlemens club). The company could also make helper or butler robots and possibly pleasure robots on the side/in secret. Only for their highest paying and most foolish customers.

Tu'la would also have their own secret police and in general insane corruption. It could also lead to O'khasis's eventual invasion or company takeover as it is bought out by the Tu'la company.

Essentially

O'khasis - Fuck War captitalism

Tu'la - Fuck Big Pharma captitalism

ooo yeah i love yer brain.

don't have much to add bc im tireeed but.

you know im singing your praises in half-delirium rn.