My pharma professors liked to say that if Aspirin was discovered today, it would never pass the bar for human trials, because after all these years the mechanism of action isn’t properly understood.
That’s the best argument for alternative medicines that I’ve heard, and it’s also something to consider when we think about how insanely high the bar is for compounds that are approved as medicines.
I wonder if thats because we know very little about how the brain actually works in regards to how the brain create thoughts. It’s so very much a mystery in many ways where thoughts are created
Let’s just assume dose-response is linear. So, go find what concentration of chemical X (medicine, food additive, cosmetic, whatever) kills 50% of the bacteria/rodent/etc population. Draw a line from there down to 0% dead at 0 concentration.
Now decide what % of deaths is acceptable, given the benefit of chemical X. Use the line we just drew and that tells you what the regulations should set for max concentration under as-directed usage.
This ignores facts like
response curves are very often literally curves, sometimes with more than 1 minimum
response curves (and lines!) often depend heavily on all sorts of other chemicals’ presence in the environment, in varying mixtures & amounts
It’s a combinatorial explosion we can never meaningfully test against. We do what we can, with the tools that we have.
Almost every signal response, and certainly in chemistry, is an S curve. A small span of that curve may be approximately linear, but you absolutely can not approximate the slope of that linear span by just the mid point.
Usually herbs found by ethnographers.
Aspirin, for example, IIRC discovered by a scientist investigating traditional therapeutics (tree bark)
My pharma professors liked to say that if Aspirin was discovered today, it would never pass the bar for human trials, because after all these years the mechanism of action isn’t properly understood.
That’s the best argument for alternative medicines that I’ve heard, and it’s also something to consider when we think about how insanely high the bar is for compounds that are approved as medicines.
That wasn’t a blocker with antidepressants, for better or worse.
I wonder if thats because we know very little about how the brain actually works in regards to how the brain create thoughts. It’s so very much a mystery in many ways where thoughts are created
Most medications are poorly understood (at best!) lol, it’s trial and error all the way down.
With some exceptions like the RNA messenger covid vaccine…
Oh God LD50 is the craziest thing ever.
Here’s how it works:
Let’s just assume dose-response is linear. So, go find what concentration of chemical X (medicine, food additive, cosmetic, whatever) kills 50% of the bacteria/rodent/etc population. Draw a line from there down to 0% dead at 0 concentration.
Now decide what % of deaths is acceptable, given the benefit of chemical X. Use the line we just drew and that tells you what the regulations should set for max concentration under as-directed usage.
This ignores facts like
It’s a combinatorial explosion we can never meaningfully test against. We do what we can, with the tools that we have.
Almost every signal response, and certainly in chemistry, is an S curve. A small span of that curve may be approximately linear, but you absolutely can not approximate the slope of that linear span by just the mid point.