Or, chronic diseases which have been effectively cured aren’t considered chronic diseases anymore?
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.
Ahh… The ol’ “What do you call alternative medicine that works?”-aroo.
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of chronic human pathologies we’ve cured, some we probably don’t even remember curing because the terminology is so outdated (though sadly dropsy is still a thing, and frustratingly consumption isn’t eradicated yet …but it could be!)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!
Still relevant comic.
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.
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.
Or they’re illnesses and conditions primarily affecting women.
Chronic fatigue has only since covid (when men started reporting constant excessive tiredness) been started to be treated like a real thing by doctors. And it’s still barely considered by most doctors.
Endometriosis is another ‘chronic’ womens condition that has only very recently started being researched properly and taken seriously. And again, it’s still incredibly hard to get taken seriously and helped if you suffer from it.
See also the massive discrepancy between autism and adhd diagnosis in men and women, and with bpd diagnosis between women and men.
On a somewhat less severe side of things, lack of libido in women is still considered a jokey non-issue by most doctors but viagra has been on the market for decades for men.
There’s a lot more but I’m too tired to keep writing this.
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.
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.
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.
The original “this doesn’t need to be a subscription”
Making cure when everyone else makes a treatment means that you can undercut everyone and eat their lunch so incentives are there
part of the problem is that developing treatments is easier and can rely on more conservative, safer assumptions while cures require more early stage risky research
besides chronic diseases that do have cures aren’t considered chronic anymore. the rest are problems with insurance that doesn’t want to cover single expensive cure over cheaper but recurrent treatment that might add up to more
How’s this a meme?
There’s a lot of work/investment into curative cell and gene therapies that are very promising! Some have already received FDA approval with high success rates of curing some childhood cancers and sickle cell disease
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 clause 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.
It’s an entirely efficient way to allocate resources if the goal is “shareholder enrichment”.
Ladies and gentlemen, the evergreen Christopher Julius Rock: https://youtu.be/fzzqayKwWeY
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 .
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.
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?
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?
Would that be called profitalism?
Why be redundant? It’s still capitalism.
