Month: January 2024

Not satisfied with inventing a diabetes drug that makes healthy women lose a little weight, the pharma companies are now looking for a drug that mimics the benefits of exercise.

Various approaches are being pursued.  One hormone that has shown promise is irisin.

“In 2012, scientists discovered a hormone called irisin that is released by muscles during exercise – a messenger chemical that communicates with various parts of the body. In November 2023, Wrann and her colleagues demonstrated that irisin can reach the brain and clear the toxic amyloid plaques involved in Alzheimer’s disease, a big breakthrough in understanding how exercise helps shield the brain from dementia.”

It is also believed to modulate bone growth and density and prevent loss of muscle mass.

But of course, why take a careful, reasonable subject for pharmaceutical investigation when instead you can just go Vlad the Impaler on it.

“Because scientists are still unsure which exercise hormones are the most beneficial, the ExPlas trial is taking a broad approach. Injecting blood plasma from people who exercise regularly is a simple way of transferring all these potentially beneficial hormones to patients. “The Norwegian idea is to take the plasma as the drug and give it to those who need it,” says Wrann.”

Well, sure.  Let’s drain the blood out of the young and use it to keep the centenarians alive forever.  I can just see it.  Nancy Pelosi spends some fraction of her hundreds of millions of dollars of ill-gotten insider trading gains to have the blood of virgins pumped into her.  While she’s at it why not give her a skin transplant from some poor young woman who “accidentally” dies while participating in a beauty contest on Jeffrey Epstein’s Fantasy Island now under new CIA-mediated management.

I think we’ve reached terminal stupid.  And I say this as one of the dumbest people I know.  All these physiological and metabolic studies keep demonstrating that doing natural things like getting enough sleep and exercising moderately or even just taking a walk produce all these incredible benefits that surpass by orders of magnitude the benefits of all these pharmaceuticals and without the side effects.  They pump people, even children, with psycho-active drugs to combat the depression that is caused by the horrible lifestyles we’ve created but don’t care that the drugs make people zombies.

We sit around watching tiny screens and don’t talk to each other or walk with each other and certainly don’t go out and play sports or even get together for a meal.  At least going to the gym or your basement and doing some calisthenics and going for a walk in a park three times a week won’t have the side effect of increasing your desire to commit suicide.

The FDA is a rogue government agency.  Instead of policing the pharma companies it is their co-conspirator.  A new agency needs to be created with the mandate to review the drug safety and efficacy records for the last fifty years and eliminate all of the really harmful medicines that exist.  And while they’re at it they could contract out studies with teaching hospitals to test out non-pharmaceutical regimens for various medical conditions.  And they could concentrate on the effects of diet and exercise on human beings.  The AMA should also be forced to police its membership who should spend some reasonable amount of their busy day convincing their patients to get off their fat butts and stagger around the office park at lunch hour instead of going down to Taco Bell for another three thousand calorie lunch.

Now I’m twice as guilty as the next guy.  But I at least admit it’s my own damn fault.  And I have it from the highest sources in the pharma industry that many of the miracle drugs that are supposed to counteract the ravages of our diet and exercise malpractice do more harm than good.

If the smart boys in the labs ever did figure out a pill that kept us young and fit forever without horrific side effects, I’d be the first one in line to get my dose.  But they won’t.  That’s not how the universe works.  Things like the endocrine and immune systems in our bodies are so much more complex than what we’ve so far deciphered and each component mediates so many separate responses that the tinkering that biologists and pharmacologists do is closer to voodoo than science.  Maybe after artificial intelligence has had a century to stew in human biology, we might see some progress.  But all of us will be long gone.  So, get out the weights and put down the chimichanga and forget about the magic bullet.

The baby boomers want to be young and cool forever.  Their time is running out.  What they should be doing is figuring out how to exit with at least a little bit of class.