Off Label Medications

If you looked into daily lists of biggest NASDAQ loosers provided by platforms like Marketwatch dot com or even yahoo finance you will see ever day mostly pharmaceutical companies that succumbed after a year or two or three of great expectations. Little pharmas with weird names created usually with one purpose only, around one patent, for developing one drug with an even weirder name or one method of therapy or both, with known or unknown promising CEOs that gather capital that ranges into the hundreds of millions (each), that is spent mostly for the creation of facilities, offices and labs. And then after one year or two, the news come. The clinical trial phase "did not show signs of intolerable side effects", "one out of three patients went into remission" etc. and then those companies become yellow bricks in the road paved with good intentions.

I was hopping for a nicer name for the vast category of existing medicines that are potential candidates for treating different diseases that those intended. This article instead has a longer, even harder to conceptualize name. Would cross disease medications sound better for you?

I remember long time ago when internet was much younger and thinner and new data was not already superseding older one, in so many directions, i ran into an article that was stating that antidepressant drugs were discovered by chance, by giving antihistamines to patients before surgery and noticing the sedation effect. When i did the search for that article today, i found that antidepressants and other psycho drugs were discovered by chance by administering anti TBC drugs. Whatever.

It is said that so called first generation of anti-histamines indeed had sedating effects, but starting with cetirizine (Zyrtec), loratadine (Claritin), the sedation effect was supposedly dismissed, which i think is not true, because in both me and Angela Zyrtec has a strong sedation effect that lasts for days. At least until like in the case of antidepressants "your body gets used to".

Lately i was concerned with T gondii (toxoplasmosis) parasite. When talking about this infection agent everybody agrees with to several things. Most overlooked, endemic, "vast majority of cases are subclinical", treatment was abandoned decades ago mostly because is almost asymptomatic in most infected but also because of side effects (toxicity) of "classic" or recommended treatment available then and still now.

Coming from our pets, cats and dogs which are actually domesticated prey animals, that are adapted to live with it as symbiont, infecting the older and immune compromised prey during the so called "marking of the territory", inducing behavioral modification of prey, making it happier and much easier to catch, but also, by example, from beef, where it may be destroyed by a proper cooking.

Why and how the most overlooked parasite modifies the behavior of the infected. By releasing dopamine, the reward chemical, one of the most crucial neurotransmitters that some of the anti-psycho medication go for. (Who would go searching for medical help during the initial phase and also the medium term telling the doctor: Doctor, this morning i felt too good for no reason just because my dog leaked my face!).

To cut it short. Some miners of the vast landfill of existing, some forgotten medicines, identified a number of "compounds" that are good candidates for non-toxic treatment of T gondii (not indigo, bad google). Wondering how many others are still out there. But is it a coincidence the fact  that some are anti-depressant and some anti-histamine?

Could it be that T gondii, the insidious, feel (extraordinarily) good parasite, may be responsible for a much greater array of diseases, some of them mental, and those compounds used for their original, intended, known purposes actually kill or suppress the "subclinical" parasite which is the root cause of those most chronic diseases?