Posted by psychobot5000 on August 27, 2006, at 19:56:20
In reply to Re: Dopaminergic-based pharmacotherapies for Depressio » psychobot5000, posted by blueberry on August 27, 2006, at 18:29:44
I agree with almost all of what is said. Odd that depressive patients have to leach off of the Parkinson's disease drug pipeline to get dopaminergic medications.
Still, given how little academic attention seems to be given to dopaminergics--largely because of lawsuits, addiction and etc--I would have liked to see what those researchers were saying about treatments available. What comparisons are made? What evidence is there for dopaminergic targets? What might be in the pipeline in the future?
As for the general situation on pharm development and marketing, it seems to me that the profit motive and patent laws are an inadequate stimulus for bringing the best drugs to market. There should be laws passed to provide a profit motive for those willing to investigat saint-john's wort, and older, safer medictions like tianeptine, whose patent is to old, but which may have advantages over other medications.
Or national governments could subsidize research on such non-patent-protected substances as seem best, so patients don't suffer from the lack of them.
Legal liabilities also should probably altered subtly, so as not to prevent drug development as much. Not an easy thing to do, I suppose, but I think it ought to be tried. Well, I suppose these are difficult problems.
Pbot
poster:psychobot5000
thread:680536
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20060825/msgs/680643.html