Good article. Takes me back to earlier comments, here. We already possess excellent diagnostic techniques and excellent techniques for choosing those things which will well and truly heal. All of the older medicine traditions have those capabilities to one extent or another. TCM, Ayurveda, Ecclectic, Homeopathic, Naturopathy, Chiropractic, Energy medicine, all of the various Tribal medicine systems. We humans have gotten out of balance and figured out why and what to do about it for a very long time. We already know. We don’t need the labs. We need to go back to that learning along with the ethics and morals and proper stewardship of our planet that would preserve those remedies that grow and exist just about everywhere on this earth. Which I’m busy preserving in my little corner in our deep woods. For the most part we have all we need already. It’s a bit nuts for us to keep looking beyond what we have. Then again, what we already have isn’t going to make anyone wealthy or powerful and I guess, that’s the rub, isn’t it?
Lovely, heartening comment, Forest, as ever. For all the talk about real-world evidence of a therapy working, it is clinicians and people like you that trust their natural instincts who hold the key to the future…nice comment :O)
The "system" has been BROKEN from its inception with the adoption of the allopathic model of medicine which was a paradigm based on fraudulent science, lies and deception; real science was usurped by "follow the science" which meant money, profit, control and power before human health; we were duped into believing and following the charlatans such as Fauci and Baric and today's countless other frauds both inside and outside of Big Pharma; whereas the forgotten geniuses of medical research such as Antoine Bechamp and Florence Nightingale largely remain forgotten and buried in the forgotten history of medical science.
Craig Venter. “We simply don’t have enough genes for this idea of biological determinism to work.”
Now isn't that a turn around?
He said this before.
Geneticist Craig Venter is a pioneer in the field of synthetic biology. In 2010 the media hailed his team’s success in creating “the first self replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer.”
I believe so - we know that computers are garbage in, garbage out, they’ve learnt the hard way - CRISP/R and all gene therapy is a busted flush, me thinks…
I am 78, from India, have worked and lived in different places and was consulting thus different doctors, but I can recall that interaction with them 30, 40 years ago gave a different feeling. Even some 15 years ago, it was a 60 plus old school GP who perfectly resolved the issue between a herpes infection and some inexplicable lower back pain of my wife, educating us that the back pain was a reflective response of her infection in the legs, while a much younger UK trained ortho was looking at as only a ortho issue without much success. Like in all walks of interactive life, doctors of the younger generation are generally restless, businesslike and often ignore to put the patient at ease first. They are also not recognising that the 50s to 90s was a golden period in new medicines ( then),hundreds of them, that have stood the test of time even now, and continue to be a gold mine for multiple indications. For example, how many of them follow experienced presentations like yours and AMD, we don’t know. There are still good doctors you would find, scientifically disposed, but even if it is not broken as yet, the situation now is less confidence inspiring. On the issue of safe, effective, affordable medicines for the 21st century, I do not belong to the line of international doctors like you or the names you were mentioning, I am not even a doctor, but as one with medicinal chemistry interest, I have been relentlessly writing in the many fora on the value and power of existing repurposed medicines, many from the era I mentioned earlier, and their capacity to carry the 21st century needs, atleast for the next 30-40 years. Please the spread the awareness about repurposed medicines through the international medical community through all the means you and your associates have. The world desperately needs all the Big Bang efforts on repurposed medicines. The big Pharma may be on the opposite side of the divide now and as such have no stakes in repurposed medicines and are seemingly the adverseries on this score. But the enormous effort needed to put repurposed medicines to the fore requires their back up and their enormous resources. It is in our interest to find a business model for them where their promotion of repurposed medicines would be reasonably rewarding for them financially as against the present situation. We need them more than they need us.
Completely agree with all you are saying! I have a 300 page book coming out in the New Year published Wiley in New Jersey. It describes a completely new paradigm, where discovery research is abandoned, as it does nothing to find a new drug. The development process is just two stages - prototyping in hospitals, with clinicians working with drug development experts. There is no patent award until a feasible manufacturing method has been established, with the supply chain defined too. Repurposing drugs will be the first target, as there will be significant safety data available, and efficacy confirmed by multiple clinicians with expertise in the indication under consideration.
More on that in the New Year - thanks for a great comment 🙏
We need not abandon drug research, but it must become the preserve now of public funded research labs and medical schools. It cannot be solely left to the big Pharma hell bent only on monetising whatever is possible, not quality research and development. It was drug research in the past decades that has given us a golden collection of drugs for repurposing now, in which the big Pharma was a different kind of partner then.
In your design of a new paradigm for drugs, you seem to be missing a key facet of repurposing. Lots of run up research to be done that will pave the way for repurposing protocols. Metabolism (chemistry and biology) of drugs versus the biology of disease progression ( various stages) to decide on diseases where the drugs can intervene off label. The premise here is that sets of even ostensibly unrelated diseases could share part pathways, opening the scope of for the off label intervention. By design or default lot of useful knowledge and experience have built up, giving us the confidence on repurposing drugs. But plenty more remains to be unravelled. Where such firm knowledge/experience is available and widely becomes known in the fraternity, clinicians can take over to design and establish the protocols. Yes, some research minded clinicians could become creators of such knowledge/experience as part of their practice. With Covid experience in mind, we must realise that single drug repurposing may not fully measure up. Like minded, complementing combinations will be needed and these have to be established. And in examples like cancer, repurposed drugs may provide a powerful add on role to a label, often patent protected drug. As I see it, repurposing will have to be a long term, continuously on going effort to make it really a world scale good, but achieved bit by bit, step by step. That is why it has to be massively planned and organised international effort, like my pet dream project “Ivermectin for the World”. My prayers would always be for the success of such efforts.
It’s going to take at least a generation of change, probably more - that how long it has taken to get where things are today…the time to start is now :O)
I should say that I worked with Dr Tess Lawrie in 2021 on repurposing IVM in the UK. I had a source in Bulgaria that had been producing it for animal health for over 20 years, and they were fully GMP compliant, as I had previously audited the site - it turned out MHRA was never going to license it for COVID, so it ended. What you might be missing is that the supply chain safety is part of the approval process - if you don’t understand the chemistry, manufacturing and controls element (CMC), then you can’t repurpose a drug for a different indication - hope that makes sense? 🤔
Did MHRA deny approval for Covid use, because it was a veterinary grade material ? If he was also licensed manufacturer for human use also, MHRA should not have had any objection ? I don’t know what is the approval/prescribing system in the UK, but in the USA, FDA was not approving IVM then and therefore no doctor would prescribe it. In India, IVM was liberally and effectively used early in Delta itself, massively in a region prophylactically and there was no such issue. People knew it was a regular, safe anti parasitic drug and also had known about its use as anti viral and there was no problem in repurposing straightaway. The effort was partly led by the government itself and partly by thousands of private doctors. No need for a central approval directive for the case of a known, safe drug. After 4 years, USA too relented on Ivermectin. I am sure as more and more experience emerges worldwide, first from more free countries, more regimented countries in the West too would relax. I agree, right now, there is an issue in those countries about ready repurposing. If, for example, there is a published research that anti histamines can be effective in Alzemeirs and if the recommendation is a month long course, even without the so called double blind trials, a doctor in India is free to prescribe Levocetrizine for a start to his Alzemeirs patient after ascertaining the patient has no allergy to the drug. The drug has established safety for normal consumption. That is all is needed. But right now, this is not possible in the UK or USA, but things will change. There are dozens of approved manufacturers of Levocetrizine here and there is no supply chain issue in this repurposing here.
Good article. Takes me back to earlier comments, here. We already possess excellent diagnostic techniques and excellent techniques for choosing those things which will well and truly heal. All of the older medicine traditions have those capabilities to one extent or another. TCM, Ayurveda, Ecclectic, Homeopathic, Naturopathy, Chiropractic, Energy medicine, all of the various Tribal medicine systems. We humans have gotten out of balance and figured out why and what to do about it for a very long time. We already know. We don’t need the labs. We need to go back to that learning along with the ethics and morals and proper stewardship of our planet that would preserve those remedies that grow and exist just about everywhere on this earth. Which I’m busy preserving in my little corner in our deep woods. For the most part we have all we need already. It’s a bit nuts for us to keep looking beyond what we have. Then again, what we already have isn’t going to make anyone wealthy or powerful and I guess, that’s the rub, isn’t it?
Lovely, heartening comment, Forest, as ever. For all the talk about real-world evidence of a therapy working, it is clinicians and people like you that trust their natural instincts who hold the key to the future…nice comment :O)
The "system" has been BROKEN from its inception with the adoption of the allopathic model of medicine which was a paradigm based on fraudulent science, lies and deception; real science was usurped by "follow the science" which meant money, profit, control and power before human health; we were duped into believing and following the charlatans such as Fauci and Baric and today's countless other frauds both inside and outside of Big Pharma; whereas the forgotten geniuses of medical research such as Antoine Bechamp and Florence Nightingale largely remain forgotten and buried in the forgotten history of medical science.
to say also, I share a lot about the penicillin example: https://open.substack.com/pub/hedleyrees/p/the-myth-that-is-penicillinyou-need-1df?r=xoehy&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web - it wasn't broken then (1928 - 1945), I'd suggest. However, Big Pharma positioned only the accidental finding of Fleming as 'the science', ignoring the pivotal work of process chemists at Oxford University and Andrew Moyer at USDA in detailing the manufacturing process
Follow the science Fauci kept saying, but his brand of science was follow the $$$$$. Time for a new paradigm….
Craig Venter. “We simply don’t have enough genes for this idea of biological determinism to work.”
Now isn't that a turn around?
He said this before.
Geneticist Craig Venter is a pioneer in the field of synthetic biology. In 2010 the media hailed his team’s success in creating “the first self replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer.”
Do you think they have woken-up?
I believe so - we know that computers are garbage in, garbage out, they’ve learnt the hard way - CRISP/R and all gene therapy is a busted flush, me thinks…
One billion prescriptions is 105 per GP per working day. That’s staggering.
Pure waste and side effects Alan 😩
I am 78, from India, have worked and lived in different places and was consulting thus different doctors, but I can recall that interaction with them 30, 40 years ago gave a different feeling. Even some 15 years ago, it was a 60 plus old school GP who perfectly resolved the issue between a herpes infection and some inexplicable lower back pain of my wife, educating us that the back pain was a reflective response of her infection in the legs, while a much younger UK trained ortho was looking at as only a ortho issue without much success. Like in all walks of interactive life, doctors of the younger generation are generally restless, businesslike and often ignore to put the patient at ease first. They are also not recognising that the 50s to 90s was a golden period in new medicines ( then),hundreds of them, that have stood the test of time even now, and continue to be a gold mine for multiple indications. For example, how many of them follow experienced presentations like yours and AMD, we don’t know. There are still good doctors you would find, scientifically disposed, but even if it is not broken as yet, the situation now is less confidence inspiring. On the issue of safe, effective, affordable medicines for the 21st century, I do not belong to the line of international doctors like you or the names you were mentioning, I am not even a doctor, but as one with medicinal chemistry interest, I have been relentlessly writing in the many fora on the value and power of existing repurposed medicines, many from the era I mentioned earlier, and their capacity to carry the 21st century needs, atleast for the next 30-40 years. Please the spread the awareness about repurposed medicines through the international medical community through all the means you and your associates have. The world desperately needs all the Big Bang efforts on repurposed medicines. The big Pharma may be on the opposite side of the divide now and as such have no stakes in repurposed medicines and are seemingly the adverseries on this score. But the enormous effort needed to put repurposed medicines to the fore requires their back up and their enormous resources. It is in our interest to find a business model for them where their promotion of repurposed medicines would be reasonably rewarding for them financially as against the present situation. We need them more than they need us.
Completely agree with all you are saying! I have a 300 page book coming out in the New Year published Wiley in New Jersey. It describes a completely new paradigm, where discovery research is abandoned, as it does nothing to find a new drug. The development process is just two stages - prototyping in hospitals, with clinicians working with drug development experts. There is no patent award until a feasible manufacturing method has been established, with the supply chain defined too. Repurposing drugs will be the first target, as there will be significant safety data available, and efficacy confirmed by multiple clinicians with expertise in the indication under consideration.
More on that in the New Year - thanks for a great comment 🙏
We need not abandon drug research, but it must become the preserve now of public funded research labs and medical schools. It cannot be solely left to the big Pharma hell bent only on monetising whatever is possible, not quality research and development. It was drug research in the past decades that has given us a golden collection of drugs for repurposing now, in which the big Pharma was a different kind of partner then.
In your design of a new paradigm for drugs, you seem to be missing a key facet of repurposing. Lots of run up research to be done that will pave the way for repurposing protocols. Metabolism (chemistry and biology) of drugs versus the biology of disease progression ( various stages) to decide on diseases where the drugs can intervene off label. The premise here is that sets of even ostensibly unrelated diseases could share part pathways, opening the scope of for the off label intervention. By design or default lot of useful knowledge and experience have built up, giving us the confidence on repurposing drugs. But plenty more remains to be unravelled. Where such firm knowledge/experience is available and widely becomes known in the fraternity, clinicians can take over to design and establish the protocols. Yes, some research minded clinicians could become creators of such knowledge/experience as part of their practice. With Covid experience in mind, we must realise that single drug repurposing may not fully measure up. Like minded, complementing combinations will be needed and these have to be established. And in examples like cancer, repurposed drugs may provide a powerful add on role to a label, often patent protected drug. As I see it, repurposing will have to be a long term, continuously on going effort to make it really a world scale good, but achieved bit by bit, step by step. That is why it has to be massively planned and organised international effort, like my pet dream project “Ivermectin for the World”. My prayers would always be for the success of such efforts.
It’s going to take at least a generation of change, probably more - that how long it has taken to get where things are today…the time to start is now :O)
Exactly. Some momentum and impetus already there. Time to begin to sustain them. Let us hope for the best.
I should say that I worked with Dr Tess Lawrie in 2021 on repurposing IVM in the UK. I had a source in Bulgaria that had been producing it for animal health for over 20 years, and they were fully GMP compliant, as I had previously audited the site - it turned out MHRA was never going to license it for COVID, so it ended. What you might be missing is that the supply chain safety is part of the approval process - if you don’t understand the chemistry, manufacturing and controls element (CMC), then you can’t repurpose a drug for a different indication - hope that makes sense? 🤔
Did MHRA deny approval for Covid use, because it was a veterinary grade material ? If he was also licensed manufacturer for human use also, MHRA should not have had any objection ? I don’t know what is the approval/prescribing system in the UK, but in the USA, FDA was not approving IVM then and therefore no doctor would prescribe it. In India, IVM was liberally and effectively used early in Delta itself, massively in a region prophylactically and there was no such issue. People knew it was a regular, safe anti parasitic drug and also had known about its use as anti viral and there was no problem in repurposing straightaway. The effort was partly led by the government itself and partly by thousands of private doctors. No need for a central approval directive for the case of a known, safe drug. After 4 years, USA too relented on Ivermectin. I am sure as more and more experience emerges worldwide, first from more free countries, more regimented countries in the West too would relax. I agree, right now, there is an issue in those countries about ready repurposing. If, for example, there is a published research that anti histamines can be effective in Alzemeirs and if the recommendation is a month long course, even without the so called double blind trials, a doctor in India is free to prescribe Levocetrizine for a start to his Alzemeirs patient after ascertaining the patient has no allergy to the drug. The drug has established safety for normal consumption. That is all is needed. But right now, this is not possible in the UK or USA, but things will change. There are dozens of approved manufacturers of Levocetrizine here and there is no supply chain issue in this repurposing here.