Idiotic conspiracy theories are idiotic
That is not how modern capitalism works. Modern capitalism works in 5 years. CEO have figured out that they don’t need to work for the shareholders but make it seem like they do. CEO wants to get their bonus and they get their bonus if the shareholders are happy and usually the shareholders have short term interests too. So for a CEO, it is more profitable to take actions that generate more profit in short terms.
Which is why there are mass hiring and firings. Those things are a huge waste of resources but it look good on you if you can sell it right to the shareholders. You are willing and able to react quickly.
So a cure for cancer would be sold as soon as possible because whoever has the patent, would make billions (short term). Remember biotech and their COVID vaccine?
The problem becomes finding a cure and a CEO doesn’t have any interest to heavily invest in finding a cure if the cure is not “around” the corner anyway, as that wouldn’t be very short term minded of them. But as this problem exists for any illness, the ones most likely to be treatable through publicly funded Research will get the funding to make the medicine and put a patent on it.
Edit: they don’t kill you for profit. They don’t heal you for profit. For their profit, they act. You just happen to be acted on.
Because chronic diseases are difficult to cure? A solid portion, like diabetes, or cancer, are a whole host of different causes in a costume.
Anything that can be easily cured/trivially managed, or outright prevented isn’t considered a chronic disease any more. Beri-beri and Scurvy are non-issues today. Diabetes and AIDS aren’t the death sentences they used to be.
Medical research being deliberately gatekept because a cure would be unprofitable is conspiratorial thinking, and isn’t really reflective of reality.
A single dose cure for a chronic illness would be huge, and a lot of places would throw money at one if it existed, even if the cost was several orders of magnitude higher. No insurance, public health scheme, nor medical clinic would want a patient to take a constant course of medication, when they could have one, and be done. It’d be better for them, and patient quality of life. Even for the medication companies, they get to be in history books, and can get instant income, where a long term scheme might have patients dropping off for one reason or another.
I guess the sad thing is, that given the way things are, i cant blame people for thinking this way. Because be honest. Would you put it past them to not do it?
I can 100% see healthcare and pharmaceutical companies doing this for profits.
lots of chronic diseases we have today are either degenerative or genetic, so it requires new fancy tools like gene therapy to rework lots of cellular biology at very low level. small molecule drugs can manage these to some degree, but these were a thing for like 50, 70 years now so that’s why these are a thing
Thank you. You expressed everything I wanted to say.
Gatekeeping cures to illness just isn’t true.
And if someone cures it first that’s it, they win the whole pot until generics are approved.
OP in 1939* “Why isn’t there a cure for the consumption?! must be because the travelling physicians wouldn’t make any money!”
This is a moronic take.
This is wrong.
It’s applying a good observation incorrectly.
There’s enough awful greedy shit to keep us busy. No inventing more of it.
Did you confuse capitalism with morality again?
This has got to stop happening
It’s also why so many really good TV shows and series get canceled.
The money is not being invested to create an art project.
It’s being invested in hopes of a gigantic return, and the instant it seems like there will not be a gigantic return the money goes away.
That’s why you do not often see several hundred million dollar productions of original material unless it’s a passion project for a specific director or studio.
That’s why we’ve had, what is it, 10 Spider-Man movies in the last 25 years?
I get you can’t just throw money away but I feel like there should at the very least be some sort of claws and a contract that says that if your show gets canceled then you will be provided the timing and funding to either finish up the season that you are in and provide a finale or two at the very least provide a finale.
There is a film from 1995 which is literally about companies trying to prevent a cure from getting out since it would interfere with their ongoing treatments.
Tap for spoiler (the name of the film)
The film was Johnny Mnemonic .
If a disease is curable, it isn’t chronic, now is it? This is a dumb take.
Yeah, this is a common truism that angry people confuse with actual criticism.
It would, in fact, be extremely profitable to develop a cure for something chronic. If you could make and sell one pill that cures AIDS, for instance, then you would become very rich (not to mention famous).
That’s not a defense of capitalism. For-profit healthcare is a dystopian nightmare. When you consider that the AIDS cure would be too expensive for most people to buy, and only poor people would suffer from the disease, you should remember that that’s how it is now! Poor people cannot afford cures available to rich people, cures for preventable diseases, cures for treatable and manageable diseases, cures for addiction and obesity. Poor people cannot afford to stop working long enough to seek treatment for basic aliments.
So no, scientists and doctors aren’t avoiding working on cures in favor of treatment for chronic conditions. They’re just going where rhe money is. They absolutely would cure any disease if it were possible, they just wouldn’t share it with the world.
For the record PrEP exists and it is pretty effective in preventing getting HIV (the virus that causes AIDS). Yet another reason the OP is dumb. Also, HIV can be prevented from turning into AIDS now, too.
Or, chronic diseases which have been effectively cured aren’t considered chronic diseases anymore?
Yeah, we’ve cured a ton of previously chronic diseases. I don’t know what planet these people live on. We’ve even effectively cured certain cancers in our lifetimes, and more will come. It’s also just much harder to cure something than treat something.
I’m really struggling to think of any, most coming to mind are bacterial or viral, though I’m certain there are thousands of chronic human pathologies we’ve cured, some we probably don’t even remember curing because the terminology is so outdated (though sadly dropsy is still a thing, and frustratingly consumption isn’t eradicated yet …but it could be!)
Can you give me a starting point if you’ve got one on your tongue? I’d like to journey down the Wikipedia rabbit hole tonight!
Myopia (shortsightedness) is a fairly big one.
The cure’s been so ingrained that the anti-medicine/eugenics people don’t think about their own glasses when posting.
You can just go get your eyes tested, some glasses fitted, and you’re done. Repeat if it gets worse.
If you want something more permanent, you can get someone to slice open your eye, blast it a bit with a laser, and in theory, you would be completely cured, as if you never needed glasses.
Lasik is a great example, thank you!
Though I wouldn’t put glasses in the same category because it’s not a cure, it’s a medical device to correct the medical issue and it requires you to use the device for the rest of your life, if you stop using the device your symptoms immediately return, that’s not a cure. Glasses are the equivalent of insulin for diabetes. It’s treatment, not cure, without it, the disease takes full effect, but with it, yes you will be functionally cured as long as you have your glasses/insulin available, but even when functionally cured, you will always be a person with low vision/diabetes and always need ongoing treatment…until there’s a “cure”.
If my poor vision was cured by getting glasses I wouldn’t be squinting while I’m typing this in size 18 font (my glasses are in the other room and I’m too lazy to get them), and I wouldn’t suddenly be completely disabled by my lack of vision when it rains (glasses need to come with windscreen wipers! I can’t see shit in the rain)
hidradenitis suppurativa
edit: i read wrong, that’s uncured, i could imagine that along with what you mentioned, a lot are likely nutrition-based, treatments have gotten better for a lot of things, outlooks and lifespans for certain genetic conditions, but off the top of my head i can’t think of anything that has a “cure” that’s not viral or environmental
Ahh… The ol’ “What do you call alternative medicine that works?”-aroo.
Stop with your logic on the Internet!
And yes, the vast majority of the apparatus that is capitalism is evil, before anyone wants to think I’m simping for it.
Hell, most chronic disease cures are done by the evil and completely untrustworthy propaganda machine that is the government.
Would that be called profitalism?
Why be redundant? It’s still capitalism.
You get what you pay for, in a sense. How would the public respond to a one-time cure being sold for more than the total lifetime cost of treatment? Not well, but the thing is that responding like that is effectively expressing a preference for the lifelong treatment.
Are you trying to be Devil’s Advocate for an imaginary scenario? WTF
It’s not an imaginary scenario. For example, look at Sovaldi, the $84,000 hepatitis C cure. That’s less than the total cost of long-term treatment but it didn’t exactly make Gilead popular.
But does it ACTUALLY cost that much or do they charge that much because they can, like insulin?
It costs enough that it was featured at DEFCON this past year.
Four Thieves Vinegar Collective did a presentation where they made their own hep-c medication for a few hundred bucks + equipment.
Here is their website for those interested Link. But be warned, these guys very much have crossed a line in regards to IP law and general medical saftey practices. Governments do not care if your trying to make insulin or meth, they just see a mad scientist making drugs, and these nerds intend to make it a fight.
four thieves do not include any quality control, and plugging a jar to arduino does not grant you expertise needed. they rely heavily on intermediates access to which can be restricted pretty badly, and pricing of these is plain wrong because their scraper mixes up weights of amounts sold. frankly i doubt they made it at all, and any of these syntheses has great potential of killing people who try to do it. take from a dude who sits in medicinal chemistry for 30+ years now https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/anarchist-drugs-again
if you can get their procedures, i’d like to review them because the way they make these, i guarantee there will be incredible footguns included
100% but they are trying, they are mad scientists and see the same problems we all do but unlike the Adjuster they seek a different soultion to the failures of the system. These guys got prime stage space at DEFCON this past year, they are clearly having some success.
The other part is that in this regard, Im just a layperson on this subject and have enough expertise to probably recreate the set up (the printed parts and arduinos), but not to do the chemistry (Nor do I have a need to, I just read articles on their presentation and want to discuss them). You are also not the first chemistry wizard who ive seen or directly talk to about these guys that expressed that exact sentiment of how crazy/stupid this is.
The point is that people are desprate enough when dealing with the medical world in the US that there is a group trying to reverse engineer important drugs, or wacking insurance CEOs. So far these are the only two things that ive seen that are moving the needle and not in a good way.
they made juicero for backyard chemistry. for what this thing can do, all you need is thermometer, hotplate with magnetic stirrer + some standard glassware. this already avoids problems with damage to and leaching from plastics by corrosive solvents, allows for normal air-free techniques to be used (needs inert gas) and is several times cheaper. there are some weird design choices (if you are already using syringes, why not use syringe pump?? why use heat exchanger instead of putting heating element in water bath? etc etc) i’m yet to see procedures in human-readable form. there’s little emphasis on purification nevermind analytics. i guess they made daraprim only because nurdrage did multipart instructional video on it
the other big thing is that for most with chronic illnesses, the public isn’t looking, nor do they care, if i had the money, i would try anything, but i hardly leave my house and i can’t afford to work, so i’ll take whatever my insurance covers even if that ininofitself decreases my lifespan and causes me pain, hey actually, you just reminded me of a cure that “the public” doesn’t talk much about, when will euthanasia be legal? oh but that also is an abrupt end to a condition that could still be squeezed for profit, do you know your audience?
when will euthanasia be legal?
It may not be legal, but when self-administered it’s not like you can be punished for it.
bold of you to assume that i have the means to self-administer, if one doesn’t have the means are they just not worthy of peace? or do they have to risk someone going to jail for murder for assisting?
Just saying, “it’s capitalism’s fault,” is not entirely incorrect, but it is definitely oversimplifying. Chronic diseases are complex, incredibly challenging to solve, and can vary a great degree by individual.
The government gave the NIH a billion dollars to study long COVID and the result … fuck-all. Literally all they did was loosely define some things that the enormous and growing patient community already knew. No treatments, no diagnostics, nothing.
To be clear, capitalism certainly plays a substantially antagonistic role in solving chronic illness, but just throwing money at a problem doesn’t solve it either.
I’m not disagreeing with most of what you said but throwing money at a problem would have significantly higher return on investment if that money wasn’t being slurped up by the capitalist machine.
It also might work a bit better if the country as a whole hadn’t been institutionalising profit driven medical sciences for the last 100 years.
Or to use an analogy.
It’s like pointing out that “just throwing oil” at a car engine that hasn’t been serviced in 150k is a failure of oil to fix the problem.
I mean, yes, technically you have a problem, you put oil in and the problem didn’t go away, but is the problem really the oil ?
In this analogy capitalism is the oil thieves, draining your oil out of the bottom of the engine while you fill it up.
Not to mention, evolution. You can’t stop it unless you 100% eradicate the things that could evolve.
Time, money, and patience are required to understand novel pathogens, and those three things are in short supply in a “get rich quick” society.
Capitalism or not the claim would be true, chronic diseases are defined by their lack of effective cure.
Completely true. But there would be fewer of them.
It’s crazy that when my research team comes up with a therapeutic target we believe might lead to curing a disease, we get crickets from drug companies. But when we present therapeutic targets for long term treatment, we get lots of interest.
Could that be (at least partially) explained by those companies looking at a long-term treatment as the more realistic goal after being burned by proposed cures in the past? Lots of quacks out there offer a quick cure, not as many say up front that their product will need a prolonged period of use. Not saying you and yours fit that label but their bullshit tips the signal-to-noise ratio in an unfavorable direction for both relief-seekers and providers.
I don’t know your field, team’s reputation or the companies you’ve been in contact with though so of course it could be the simple greed motivation too.
“In the case of infectious diseases such as hepatitis C, curing existing patients also decreases the number of carriers able to transmit the virus to new patients,” the memo argued.
Jesus. Fucking. Christ. They’re not just arguing against curing chronic illnesses, they’re arguing against curing infectious chronic illnesses because it creates less patients to extort in the long run. That is one of the most heinous things I’ve seen put to paper.
That’s the lenient interpretation I’d hope.
But we’re not an alternative medicine group or anything. If you look into their shareholder meetings the public info seems to be that they judge whether investments are worth it by potential return on investment, and well a lifelong treatment is always going to be more profitable for them than a cure.
To be fair, and it’s still bullshit, we also look at number of patients per week per cost. Crispr for example, could be used for a huge variety of issues, but curing 100 people globally for $100M in clinical development is just not going to work.
Ok, Sherlock.
