People reading two abstracts on PubMed and deciding they can manage their own hormonal pathways is terrifying. The regulatory state is slow and bureaucratic, yes, and its got its own problems, but it was built on a graveyard of people who took unverified compounds. When (not if) a bad batch kills a few dozen people in a telegram buying group, the crackdown will be draconian.
I'm partial to the idea that we should think of these people as heroic. No way in hell I'd ever do anything like this, but people choosing to do this to their own bodies and essentially absorbing all of the risk is arguably valuable.
Certainly more important than other definitely dangerous activities like wingsuits and motorcycles.
An alternate way to view the same situation is that the regulatory state being slow and bureaucratic is the cause of those ills. The more you over-regulate and make the official pathways too expensive by adding a million tiny costs, the less unreasonable it seems to abandon the official channel entirely.
Yes and the fact that you have people looking for a cure to their ills will always draw unscrupulous parties to their money. The entire supplements industry is sort of a prototype for this with outrageous marketing often targeting vulnerable groups. I’d argue the professional marketing of unregulated substances makes the supplements industry a lot larger than it might organically be.
PCPs don’t have the capacity to follow all medical research either. They depend on a network of institutions and regulation to do their work. How do you propose to scale that without the bureaucracy?
I'm not in favour of getting rid of the bureaucracy, some of it is necessary, but we're way past the benefit.
I think most regulation is a concave quadratic function of regulations vs benefit.
At zero regulation it can be very bad, but there also must be a point at which something is so smothered in regulation that doing anything is impossible. So there must be a maxima somewhere between the two points.
All I think is that the current state of drug regulation quite a long way to the right of that maxima, that doesn't mean I think we should remove it all to zero, or that some other things aren't to the left of it and need more regulation!
Probably most disagreements over this sort of thing are just people who disagree about which side of the maxima we're on.
I agreee with the caution. I am not endocrinologist enough to
guess what may happen and when. Because of the level of variably in all that is being experimented with, my guess is there may be a slower burn rather than explosion of odd toxicities. It does feel like stuff will happen.
