Medicines and Vaccines Part 1: The Pharmaceutical Pipeline

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I often hear people express concern that pharmaceutical companies (Big Pharma) are making a killing on medications and vaccines and fear that we can’t trust them because of it. I also feel a lot of discomfort with pharmaceutical companies skyrocketing the prices for products like daraprim and epi pens. Drugs are really, really, really expensive to make and somebody has to foot the cost for developing them, but we also have people dying because they can’t afford the basic medications they need to live. There has to be a better way, but it’s hard to know what to think when the process is so mysterious. This piece is the first in a 3 part series on how medicines and vaccines are made and what they do. We won’t be able to cover every aspect of it because 1. that’s the stuff of dissertations and 2. I honestly don’t know all of it, but we’ll go through an overview of how the very basics.

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A Tale of Two Cities: What's Happening in Cascadia?

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I've always been fascinated how the United States, despite being so advanced and spending so much on healthcare, can still rank so lowly in health outcomes. When I talk to friends and family in the UK, Canada, or Ireland about our healthcare, they're often baffled at how our system runs. "You send the ambulance away? But why?" "Because it costs $500 and I can drive myself for much less." My son's birth was uncomplicated and I delivered him myself in the hospital's bathroom, but received a $35,000 bill for the trouble. One of my cousins delivered her baby a couple of weeks later in Northern Ireland, received excellent care, and never saw a bill for the process because healthcare there doesn't have a fee-at-point-of-service model. She didn't have to get "pre-authorization" to birth her baby because that isn't a thing. Her health insurance company didn't say her unborn child couldn't be insured because he didn't have a birthday yet because that is absolutely ludicrous. 

We know that health and healthcare are different (though related) things, but what are the outcomes of such different social policy landscapes on the health of the people that live there? Do government social policies really make for better health? Let's discuss! 

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Vaccine Hesitancy: A Case for Compassion

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The purpose of writing this isn’t to shame parents who are vaccine hesitant or vaccine resistant or even to convince you with data. The purpose isn't to make anyone feel like they don't love their children enough or somehow aren't smart enough to be parents. Or, honestly, to make you think that I think those things. The point of writing this is to speak to the parents who are frustrated and frightened by the declining immunisation rates in places like Vashon Island in Washington State, who are worried when they see a notice come home that there’s been an outbreak of a vaccine-preventable disease in their child’s school. It’s scary for parents whose children are potentially exposed and school exclusions, while effective, can cause frustration in affected communities. 

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Health: More than Healthcare

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Exploring the ways that our social connections, the community we live in, and economics influence our health

When we think of our health, our first thought is usually of going to see a physician (or other medical provider) and having tests like an MRI done, but access to medical care only makes up a small proportion of our overall health. Our health is shaped much more by the social determinants around us–the air we breathe; the water we drink; the amount of education we have; the safety and accessibility of our housing, nutrition, and public transportation. Together those factors build a framework that we call “The Social Determinants of Health.”

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