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by stagas·5y ago·view on hn ↗
I agree with the supervision part but imagine you're a doctor, you have these meds at your disposal and someone comes to you suffering with what you assess to be a condition that you know a certain med is 90% effective. Wouldn't you give it to them and simply risk that they might be in the 10% that it doesn't work or maybe the 0.1% that it'd cause a bad effect? Should we eliminate medication because it isn't 100% effective for everyone and sometimes has adverse effects?
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If medication A is 80% effective, 10% useless and 10% major side-effecty, and medication B is 5% effective (half of the A-useless people), 90% useless and 5% “causes headaches”, which do you try first?
That's why there is a profession, to make these kinds of judgements. But what is the alternative? People that are going for medication don't usually have many choices. If it wasn't too taboo and there wasn't so much misinformation around this then people wouldn't have to end up in situations where you just need to take something asap because you've been catatonic for the past 4 months and/or you're having paranoia and delusions and your life is going to hell. These are real life struggles, we can't be theoretical and aim for the ideal. Science improves and it's certainly better than it was in the past.