Science Tuesday: Curing the Symptom/Curing with the Symptom

To follow up on an earlier post, I was complaining about the modern desire to ignore oversimplify systems, favoring quick fixes (hookworm-based pills) over an acknowledgement of the complexity of its dynamics. This week's New York Times Magazine's cover story was on "Pill Popping Pets," animals who are prescribed mood-regulating drugs. This article did make a good case for treating the (inbred) dogs that suffer from compulsive, self-harming behaviors. Plus, it included this quote:

Eli Lilly brought to market its own drug Reconcile last year. The only difference between it and Prozac is that Reconcile is chewable and tastes like beef.

More worrying is that fundamentally, these people are medicating their dogs for being dogs, whether the dogs are restless from being stuck in an appartment all day or are so attached to their owners that they panic when their owners leave. The most objectively egregious example are pet owners who demand diet pills for their pets. Just feed them less! For the most part, pet prescriptions are another easy-out solution that avoids acknowledging the real problem by focusing on the symptoms.

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Then again, someone's found an awesome way to use symptoms to find cures (hat tip to Ars Technica for the story. By using data mining techniques on side effects of FDA approved drugs, scientists are finding the target mechanism of drugs and clarifying protein pathways. Unfortunately, some symptoms were just not helpful. According to Ars Technica, "so many drugs were reported to cause dizziness that it was nearly useless for the analysis."