Weirdly, they administered sildanefil vaginally. You’ll need a pharmacist and a laboritory to create sildenafil vaginal suppositories, so a bit above grad school level.

Still something that any pharmacy can do for a low price. They only need to grind up regular sildanefil pills and put the powder into vaginal suppositories.

Our pharmacy did something similar for anal suppositories for our baby when there were covid-related shortages for ibuprofen suppositories.

I wonder if actually helpful PMS medication would cannibalize e.g. pain medication sales. Generic viagra is super cheap, and in the study they used just one dose. So if that’s the actual dosage required in the end, that could cost the pharmaceuticals industry money.

Similar to with vas occlusive contraception. It’s really easy, simple, dirt cheap, lasts long, is reversible, non-hormonal, no side effects male contraception. It’s basically the perfect contraception and it’s the only reversible long-term contraception that men can use.

But it was dropped because it would pretty much annihilate the female contraceptive industry, which makes a huge amount of money each year.

Quote from the Wiki article on RISUG, the form of Vas-occlusive contraception that came closest to getting to market:

Despite this, pharmaceutical companies are reluctant to lose market share of a thriving global market for female contraceptives and condoms which bring billions of dollars of revenue each year. Initially, RISUG attracted some interest from pharmaceutical companies. However, considering that RISUG is an inexpensive, one-time procedure, manufacturers retracted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_inhibition_of_sperm_under_guidance

Probably something like that… Sucks.

And it’s kinda stupid too. PMS is well known to not be conductive to female libido, and female libido is conductive to Viagra sales. So why not sell it to women too (=more sales) which might increase the occasions to sell it to men as well.

However, the trial ended prematurely as investigators did not meet their sample size, so the funding was discontinued.

How? Why? This kind of study should be trivially easy to complete. The medication is already on the market, generics are super cheap, administration is super simple and non-invasive and I’d guess there are plenty of women suffering from PMS. That sounds like the kind of study that a grad student could pull off on a DIY budget.

According to Google, generics are ~€0.50 per dose and they administered a single dose per patient. Let’s say placebos cost the same as the generics, then the cost for these 25 participants was less than €15.

Heroin was developed as a painkiller and cough remedy.

Nowadays it’s only sold for the fun side effects.

Do I read this right? That comic is from 2011?

In my last job we called that “optimizing”, after a colleague (who usually only did frontent work) used the opportunity when everyone else was on vacation to implement a few show-stopping bugs in the backend and put “optimized backend code” in the commit message. He did the same thing a few months later during the next vacation period, which really solidified the joke.