Quality control is a major problem of parallel markets.
Ever needed to source something that is either unavailable or unaffordable on the official, controlled market?
Given the price gouging and availability control of meds, this device is a good step in the right direction, even if as limited in performance/capabilities as it is.
Thought. Could this thingy be useful for quantitative colorimetry analysis? Extract the pill, react it with something that produces colored molecules with the active ingredient, measure the absorbance? (Assuming hacking the thing to transmitting light instead of reflection?)
Couldnāt be any worse than the old Spekol with wobbly monochromator we had at schoolā¦
Penis pills, not really. Dodgy drugs? Hell yeah.
Especially in the dodgier corners of Ye Olde Global Marketplace; various sorts of fakes, under-strength tablets, mislabeled or adulterated product, etc. are wildly common(often outnumbering the real thing). This both has a tendency to kill patients, since they donāt actually get the drugs prescribed, and encourage resistance among pathogens(since they often do get a trace dose of the right drug; but not an adequate one).
(Though, in defense of Viagraās āGlobal Goodā cred, if anything can encourage people to stop killing every endangered animal with some dick-shaped structure and grinding it up for ātraditional medicineā that claims to restore vitality and let you get it up; it would be a relatively cheap, comparatively easy to synthesize, drug that actually does help you get it up.)
Donāt underestimate the effects of good sex on overall well-being.
Can be, inter alia, a pretty good antidepressant.
The tricky bit(in the mid-long term, if we assume that the sensors themselves are a doable engineering problem that will be refined and cost optimized) is how to deal with pills where structure is important(most commonly various delayed-release ones that depend on the inactive ingredients breaking down at a predictable rate to deliver the active ingredients over time; or to protect the active ingredients until they make it through the stomach acid, or what have you); without making the test destructive or too easy to game.
A good destructive test is better than no test at all; but the people with the lousiest access to well controlled supply chains are also the people who will feel the cost of each sample destructively tested most acutely, and greater confidence in a given batch that may be a mixture of real and fake requires more samples.
One might have a specially designed ātest channelā that you could drill/laser through to get a cross section of the pill without destroying it; but then the classier counterfeiters would presumably start filling the test channel with real product while bulking/faking the rest.
I know that crushing/splitting and similar crude mechanical operations tend to screw up delayed release capsule designs(leading to the occasional tragic incident when some patient canāt swallow pills and their well-meaning caregivers crush and mix with applesause or yogurt; and then learn that drug levels have been spiking and plummeting multiple times per day); but I wonder if they would tolerate a single narrow test-channel that is cut to obtain a representative sample and then filled with a food-grade wax or similar inert ingredient?
That would make it impossible for the counterfeiter to know where the test-channel sample will come from; but, if the channel is narrow enough, might also damage little enough of the active ingredient for it to be an effectively nondestructive test.
Iām hardly against them being available; Iām just inclined to the opinion that the degree to which better erections will make you feel better is insignificant compared to the degree to which various ghastly diseases will make you feel worse; not because sex isnāt fun; but because there are many, many, truly terrible ways to suffer and die.
Depends, Iād say.
If it is enteric-coated tablets, we have a problem; damage the coating and the content gets destroyed in stomach instead of being absorbed later. You can likely get away with partial damage and then sealing it with a drop of beeswax.
If the delayed release depends on the surface area of the pill, a small hole drilled into the tablet will not increase the surface that much. (Crushing has much more significant effect here.) Same for filing off some of the edge.
Some forms are microencapsulated and wonāt care about mechanical shape.
Iād say drill a blind hole and extract couple milligrams. Then when in doubt fill the hole with wax or other inert substance.
Not all scenarios here are promiscuous and high-risk.
Oh, sorry, I didnāt make that clear: Iām not suggesting that sex=disease, zOMG(indeed, thatās mostly an engineering problem); I was thinking in terms of @ensoās āClearly a technology problem that we need to solve for the good of mankindā: as āproblems dragging down the good of mankindā go, I think that better treatments for assorted ghastly diseases(most of them not STIs at all) are higher priority than better treatments for erectile dysfunction; because, say, dying of bone cancer is vastly more unpleasant than erectile problems are.
The idea was not āfacilitating sex is bad because diseaseā but āas health problems go, erectile dysfunction is far, far, less ghastly than a wide variety of others, which makes treatments for those higher priorityā(though, of course, since we already have the treatment for erectile dysfunction; while treatments for some of the hard cases are either unavailable, seriously imperfect, or wildly costly, being low priority doesnāt mean that production is a bad value for money. My understanding is that, at least once you are off patent, itās not a terribly expensive compound; and if a drug is cheap enough and has a good enough safety profile, itās a great idea for even the most minor of things.)
While true, ED is where the money are.
Nothing wrong on exploiting that for design of drug analysis gadgets that then can be used in much wider contexts.
Potentially, such gadgets, once sophisticated enough, can be used in clandestine or semiclandestine labs for making sure that the synthesis of the desired material was successful. And then weāre back to my concept of microreactors and framework for arbitrary stuff synthesis - which can be used not only for illicit psychoactive substances but also for medical drugs that are too expensive or too unavailable in the given location.
The analytical instrumentation is of utmost importance here. A visible-light spectrometer is a low-capability thingy but still a good step in the right direction, a first one of a long march.
Viagra? Meh. Now, if it can detect whether my date is a jerkā¦ Now that would be a true marvel of technology!
Well, if it turns out this one isnāt a complete scam, Iād say itās automatically better than Scio, Tellspec, and Healbe, the last three attempts at this sort of product.
Which, I might add, is yet to be shown. And frankly, thanks to every other similar product being a complete and utter scam, Iād say the wise money is to lean in that direction until conclusively(and preferably, independently) proven otherwise.
First they came for our boner pills, and I did not speak up because I was not a boner pillā¦
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