And again. G
David de Bhál wrote:
What you forget is that the only systems capable of developing drugs under
modern conditions in the west are the large drug conglomerates which spend
enormous amounts of money on research some fruitful and most fruitless. It
takes about one billion US$ to take a drug to market and if the patents only
last a limited time then you are buggered as a corporation which are there
to make money not do good.
The alternative is what you see in parts of Asia, all over Africa and is
what prevailed in the USSR and all its satellites as well as China until it
opened up its economy. Furthermore, large syndicates exist in these
countries to market placebos to the unsuspecting public who need them most.
Moreover, the very witch doctors tell the patients that the western drugs
will kill them.
What really puzzles me is that I can go to any pharmacy in Bombay or Bangkok
and pay 80 rupees or 80 baht for 5 grams of Ciprofloxacin when the
equivalent price is $80 in Australia if I pay for it and $45 if the
government pays for it (when I call Authorities and spin a little yarn)
remembering that the chemist gets their cut in those countries.
So where is the corruption? One is Open Source Drugs and the other - you get
what you pay for. With open source you have to be able to use it and there
are no guarantees. If you buy Medical Director and you follow all the
procedures and do what they tell you, you can then sue Andrew Magennis or Ed
Bateman if you loose or corrupt all your data. If they don't live up to
their side of the bargain then you have the Trade Practices Act.
The "Intellectual property" and its protection along with the exorbitant
prices of drugs is what keeps the Australian equitable healthcare system as
it is and the situation in Ethiopia as IT is. You do not see people on all
fours on the road or walking on crutches with your leg with a dislocated hip
slug over your shoulder.
You also have to remember that Ed Bateman has more money than Tim Churches
(I presume because if Tim had that much he would have 'done the right thing'
and paid an army of code cutters to do what this list is trying to agree on)
and give it away. We could all hold our breaths for Ed to give it away and
if he did you would not want it. Now I will not go to who is paying Ed
except to say that for every $1 the doctors pay him, the Drug Barons or the
Freedom of Information (open access equivalent) Federal Government is
contributing about $4.
If you pay peanuts you get monkeys. If you pay nothing that is exactly what
you get.
The most important thing is to realise that it is time to "give it away"
before people get the idea that it is a real possibility and that anything
meaningful will come out of this.
One of the more successful privateers says "never mind the boxing, pour the
concrete". That would be more relevant here than the discussion. If you
could actually 'spec' the ideal EHR then you would have neither the time to
cut it nor the money to pay someone else to cut it for you.
David de Bhál
www.v-practice.com
________________________________
"Sadly, a natural arrogance often attends the ability to heal and cure"
John Irving
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Behalf Of Tim Churches
Sent: Sunday, September 24, 2006 8:18 AM
To: General Practice Computing Group Talk
Subject: Re: [GPCG_TALK] 5 important things
Richard Hosking wrote:
It is an interesting idea that medical knowledge should be "open source".
Certainly clinical medicine is "open", though some areas of medicine
are increasingly proprietary, such as pharmaceuticals and the
processes underlying pathology.
Yes, very unfortunate trends. At the very least, the intellectual property
protection regimes for health-related technologies need to be reformed, so
that drug companies can, for example, only get patents on important new
drugs for 5 years instead of 14 years as they can now.
The human genome has been patented.
No it hasn't been. It is freely available - you can download and explore the
whole lot of you like. Certain genes contained within the human genome have
been patented, but not the whole thing. And even then, those patents are
often limited in scope to specific applications of those genes and those are
often US-only patents (patents are not world-wide, they need to be applied
for and secured in each country for them to have an effect in that country).
I suppose in
the old days if you were a witch doctor, it didnt make commercial
sense to open your knowledge to everyone..
Indeed.
Tim C
Keeping medicines from the bloodstreams of the sick; food from the bellies
of the hungry; books from the hands of the uneducated; technology from the
underdeveloped; and putting advocates of freedom in prisons. Intellectual
property is to the 21st century what the slave trade was to the 16th.
Tim Churches wrote:
Horst Herb wrote:
Yes I do. This is why I charge >= $200/hour, yet the farmhand I
employ to fix my fences only gets $20/hour, or the lady doing the
ironing only $18/hour
I'm a bit shocked that Horst doesn't do his own ironing...
Ironing is a bit of a mystery to me
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