Dear clients and friends: Given your interest in health and medicine, we would like to share with you our collection of the most interesting perspectives on our industry's trends and developments. We are happy to share them with you — and hope you share your thoughts with us.

1. Mansplaining Birth Control

 The FDA’s recent hearing on over-the-counter birth control offers another example of the agency’s distrust of women, argues Alex Tabarrok. Writing on Marginal Revolution, Tabarrok expresses disappointment, but not surprise:

The FDA isn’t worried that women won’t take the pill at the same time every day. They are worried that women who get the pill without a prescriptionwon’t take it at the same time every day. I guess in the FDA’s view women need some mansplaining to take birth control or at least some doctorplaining…If I didn’t know the FDA’s long history of opposing personal testing, I would think this simply bizarre, but not trusting people with their own health decisions is practically in the FDA’s DNA.

2. Incentivized to Gum Up

Is it time to ditch the regulatory review paradigm – in medicine and beyond? Writing on the blog Roots of Progress, Jason Crawford makes a persuasive case that we should. His argument boils down to a single conclusion: regulators are incentivized to overreach. Why?

The problem with regulatory agencies is not that the people working there are evil—they are not. The problem is the incentive structure.

Regulators are blamed for anything that goes wrong. They are not blamed for slowing down or preventing growth and progress. They are not credited when they approve things that lead to growth and progress.

All of the incentives point in a single direction: towards more stringent regulations.

3. The US-China Pharma Boom

The US and China’s diplomatic relationship may be souring, but their pharmaceutical trade is booming. It’s not just cheap Chinese generics:

The drivers of US-China trade are shifting in the wake of the US-China trade war and the Covid-19 pandemic…Pharmaceutical products have emerged as one of the largest winners. The trade is broadly balanced—the US imported $10.2B while exporting $9.3B to China—and is driven by advanced medicines such as cancer treatments and antibiotics. Since 2017, Chinese imports have increased by nearly 2700%, meaning US companies now control more than 65% of this $7.9B import market.

But the author also worries about what this reliance might mean “if the bilateral relationship substantially deteriorates.”

4. “Would You Drink a Vial of Virus?”

As antimicrobial resistance (AMR) grows, MIT Technology Review proposes that the answer might be… viruses. “Bacteriophages—or phages for short—are microscopic viruses even smaller than our gut microbes…[As] antibiotics fail us, interest in phage therapy is on the rise.” Just consider one incredible case:

In 2010, Lilli Holst, an undergraduate student at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, took part in a project designed to encourage students to find phages. She decided to look in her parents’ compost bin, among other places. A scraping from the underside of a rotting eggplant turned out to contain a phage that was entirely new to science. She called it Muddy.

When, almost a decade later, a teenager in London came down with an aggressive, multi-drug-resistant infection following a double lung transplant, doctors gave her a 1% chance of survival. In a last-ditch attempt to save her life, doctors injected her with Muddy, along with two other genetically engineered phages. She began to recover within days and left the hospital a few months later.

5. Ping Pong Against Parkinson’s

 “It’s a ritual and a liberation,” says one ping pong enthusiast who lives with Parkinson’s. This short documentary video profiles a group of people in Germany who play table tennis to manage the physical and mental burdens of Parkinson’s.

The documentary poses a moving question: can ping pong slow down the disease, or does it simply help manage its symptoms? There’s not enough data to support the former, but the ping pongers are convinced the game creates a “workout for the brain” that fights disease progression.