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.
And if someone cures it first that's it, they win the whole pot until generics are approved.
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
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.
Thank you. You expressed everything I wanted to say.
Gatekeeping cures to illness just isn't true.
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.
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!
Ahh... The ol' "What do you call alternative medicine that works?"-aroo.
Tiring ass conspiracy theorists.
are they wrong though?
if you're a person who mostly cares about profits which one do you accept
research 1: we're on our way to cure [rare illness]! we just need funding to find and develop the proper formula, we need x million for the budget, and the drug itself is not likely to be expensive and will be one time use/short therapy
research 2: we're going to tackle [not really common but not quite rare illness], we need x million for the budget, we probably won't cure it but a weekly dose of the drug will help those affected
now think like the only thing that matters is your profits, research 1 will cure people, and sure you could make the cheap drug cost $100000 but the researches could turn against you and release their research to the public losing you profit. and even if they don't you'll need to balance the price to turn in some profit in as short amount of time as possible. if the illness is rare that means there isn't many people who are affected, and those people are not likely to be rich - why bother
research 2 on the other hand is an easy investment, people will need that drug forever so you can set the price low enough for most to be able to barely afford and get your sweet sweet money back with profits fast
remember you don't become a billionaire being charitable, you become a billionaire by cutting corners and milking as much money out of those below you as possible
are they wrong though?
Yes.
TLDR yes, they are wrong.
-
Prisoner's dilemma. As a pharmaceutical company, you know theoretically a cure for a given chronic illness exists. What you don't know is if your competitor is close to having one. If they are, it would render your pathetic non-curative regimes obsolete and you'd lose billions and be decades behind. Shareholders would be calling for blood, and if you're the CEO or board exec you'd lose your head. So you work on developing the drug because even if its possibly less profitable, its still in your best interest to do the research.
-
Most people doing this kind of research are universities, which are publicly funded and would gain more profit from a curative drug than they would from letting big pharma continue using non-curative regimens.
-
Government has strong interest in developing cures because chronic illness is a massive drain on the economy costing billions of dollars, with significant public health costs that eat into government budgets that politicians would much rather spend on things like weapons or parking meters that accept credit cards.
-
This ignores the very nature of pharmaceutical research and development.
Pharmaceutical companies aren't really research institutes, because research and development is terribly expensive. The primary research of just about any major drug innovation is typically first pioneered by Universities who are publicly funded.
A Pharmaceutical company's version of research and development is taking the primary research done by universities and developing them into a drug that is patent protected.
There is a ton of rat fucking in pharmaceutical companies that lead people to this type of conspiratorial thought, but most of it is pertaining to patent law, not dictating what a bunch of grad students are doing their research over.
Most chronic illnesses are the result of accumulated damage and dysfunction that are diffuse throughout the body. Something like MS has done damage to millions of nerves by the time it gets diagnosed, and the body is not particularly good at healing nerve damage to begin with.
Chronic illnesses almost always require chronic treatment because of the nature and extent of the damage.
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 conspiring to avoid working on cures in favor of treatment for chronic conditions. They're just going where the 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.
If you could make and sell one pill that cures depression, you would get killed by the people making antidepressant that you have to take daily.
But count on a worldist to suck the corpodick
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.
Of the 10k or so identified chronic diseases, about 95% of them are genetic
Given that we, as humanity, have just barely started ( in research time. From 1987 to 2024, that's almost 40 years of research, and development, basically nothing on one of, if not the toughest field in the world, and we are still doing breakthroughs on it)
In fact this research has been the cause of improving the quality of life for people with these diseases as care for the patients during test reveals more data.
Also remember, low understanding of the technology, particularly AI which is extremely helpful in these types of researches and past eugenics fears have marred the general zeitgeist for years, which may also cause early adoption to be difficult.
I mean come on, people are still scared about genetically modified food.
And also, another one thing to remember is that a lot, like 80% of these diseases, have an inherent risk for the life of the patient, which slows the research as this limits the amount of data you can get.
So, we are not yet at the point of cracking the genetic makeup of a disease, chugging it into a bioreactor, and whipping billions of potential enhanced cures adapted for the specific body chemical makeup, but we are getting there.
So yeah there is no conspiracy.
Billions of dollars have been spent only on cancer research, imagine for the rest of diseases. If a government had cancer cure done for X type of cancer, they'd deploy that shit like Doritos locos at the mall and ensure themselves indefinite reelections forever.
It's just really, really, RIDICULOUSLY difficult.
But, we are humans, difficult for us, is an old friend
I've grown up fascinated with several diseases and was eager to study them and find treatments that would better and prolong the life of the patients. By the time I was done with university my disease pet peeves were already very well managed. Take cystic fibrosis, a disease that was still considered a childhood disease when I was born in the 90s. With trikafta and other treatments CF patients now climb mount everest and whatnot. They have kids, back in school I learned that the few cases who made it to adulthood were infertile because of their viscous mucus. Like, I would love to work on an mRNA based gene therapy for it, but it seems almost unnecessary, given how manageable the disease has become.
I also agree and want to stress what you are saying about the acceptance of gene therapy/ GMOs in general. I am in Germany and people here are insanely against GMOs of any kind. Manipulating the human genome is so far off the rails for the vast majority, I mean there is still so much hate against GMOs in food, we are nowhere near trying to use gene therapy on a broad scale. Let alone that to actually cure a genetic disease, you would have to undergo the gene therapy while you're still a zygote. This is simply illegal here. Our research opportunities are severely limited on genetic manipulation.
This.
Yes, yes, there are conspiracies here and there, but these days we can't have any reason anymore, everything must have an evil genius behind it.
This is just another case of "it's not that easy"
This is such a lie. This only works if you assume no other people will ever develop one of those illnesses. Even if all acquired illnesses are ever eradicated, big pharma companies will still make bank off hygiene products, makeup, and Aspirin. Pharma companies don't just sell treatments and cures. Duh.
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.
Idiotic conspiracy theories are idiotic
Idiotic coincidence theories are idiotic
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.
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.
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
citation needed
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.
So, it's like if you lose the ability to walk, a wheelchair is the treatment, while spinal reconstruction would be the cure?
That just shows we’re nowhere near the technological advancement needed to develop actual cures—we’re still at the wheelchair stage for most illnesses.
Most of the answers to why a specific drug works are "we dunno but we tried it, compared it to people who didn't get the drug and these guys got better". Medicine is crawling right now and I would love to see it run.
Even going so far to use male mice for experimenting exclusively due to fluctuations of female hormones during cycle (which fuck up statistics)... In some cases leading to less effective medication for women than men.
Guesswork at best...
How's this a meme?
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, Twitter X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
It's just a catchier name than microblog posts.
It' a meme in the same way that anti-vax is a meme.
To your downvoter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
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.
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.
Viagra doesn't treat a lack of libido, it treats a lack of blood flow to the relevant anatomy. And it was discovered by accident - a drug meant to treat high blood pressure and angina that was more effective at doing something else to blood flow. In other words it's not that men use viagra to have the desire, but rather to get the equipment to play along. Lack of libido in men is often a symptom of low testosterone, so they check for that and prescribe testosterone if that's the issue but that's really the entire toolbox on that front.
Lack of libido in women is a much harder problem to solve, and the first attempt at it that ever made it to market barely worked, had to be taken daily, and went horribly wrong if you consume any alcohol at all. There's a second that hit market a few years later that's supposedly more effective and isn't a daily regimen but is also an injection, has significant potential side effects and can't be mixed with naltrexone (a drug used to treat opioid addiction) because it will cause naltrexone not to work.
Compare to contraception, where there are tons of options available to women and basically all insurance is legally required to cover at least one brand of each type, including barrier methods, with a prescription. The options available to men are condoms or being surgically sterilized, and there's no requirement to cover either at all.
It's harder to get contraceptives for men approved because it doesn't prevent a medical condition for the user and so the bar for what is acceptable as a side effect is really low. You may have seen news stories about a male pill and men chickening out over the side effects (what wimps!) but the problem wasn't men backing out of the study, but that the acceptable side effects for a treatment that prevents a different person from developing a condition are so restrictive that they killed the study because it was already never going to be approved.
There is another male contraceptive that's been in development in India since the 80s, and as of 2022 has still not been approved - RISUG. Phase 3 clinical trials for RISUG were published more than twenty years ago. There's a variation of RISUG that's in development in the US called Vasalgel, and it's been in development here for over a decade. RISUG and Vasalgel are long term reversible contraceptives - think like an IUD - that consist of an injection in each of the vas deferens and lasts up to a decade, but can be removed earlier if needed by another set of injections in the vas deferens. Should it get approved in the US, there's no legal requirement that any insurance cover it, let alone without copay because the ACA specifically only requires coverage for contraceptive options for women.
Thank you for bringing some reality to the table.
Still relevant comic.
What is this disinformation on Lemmy? There are so many counterexamples to this:
- If a patient doesn't find a cure, they'll go to a different doctor and sometimes leave their country to seek help (like when Americans go down to Mexico for treatment). Wouldn't it make more sense for them to fix you so you return when something else happens? Who ever goes to the doctor to stay sick?
- People will always be sick of one thing or another because not all illnesses are transmittable diseases so there's no shortage of customers if you cure them. Delivering babies and cosmetic surgeries don't even require you to be sick for the doctors to turn a good profit. Sometimes people fall and break a bone. Do you really think your doctor will keep your bone broken for profit? When has that ever happened without repercussions for the doctors?
- Most illnesses are self-limiting, meaning you will cure yourself over time and your doctor knows this and will be frank with you if you ask and they'll say "Yeah, but you can take this to alleviate your pain" and you can simply refuse. But thank god you went in anyway because now you know your stomach pain was food poisoning and not appendicitis which may need surgery because the symptoms overlap as is the case with many diseases.
- You can sue your doctor for malpractice and win because they're accountable to a board of ethics. They can lose their license and face jail time for making you suffer by knowing the cure and withholding it from you.
- Evolution will always find something to break, like new mutations to ancient viruses that led to covid/aids and inherited diseases like sickle cell disease. New diseases will always emerge because our world is always changing.
- There is no shortage of new people being born. It's a numbers game: Your case won't be any more profitable when they have 10 other people coming in that same day with whatever illness you have. They need to get people out the door to accommodate more people.
- Not all diseases can be cured, like cancer. And even if cancer is cured, you can't stop it from happening at the molecular level so you always have more customers needing treatment. (And no, sharks aren't immune to cancer, and yes research has made many cancers curable when detected early, and experimental cures are actively offered to the moribund.)
- There are plenty of examples of cures and total eradication, like smallpox and polio. Are doctors making less money because they're gone? Absolutely not.
- Most people who go into medicine are thoughtful, smart, compassionate individuals who want to help people and gladly take the Hippocratic Oath voluntarily. Don't confuse business practices by big corporations with your poor doctor who's just trying to get through the day.
And the list goes on. The image makes no sense.
https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/opioids/collections/ny-opioid-litigation-documents/
McKinsley have slides showing they accounted for projected OD numbers as lost customers.
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
The original “this doesn’t need to be a subscription”
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.
Did you confuse capitalism with morality again?
This has got to stop happening
Ah yes that's why incredibly breakthroughs in medical science have completely stopped happening!
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 .
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
Now let me preface this by saying "I hate Trump"
One of the few things that I have hope for with the proposed cuts to the FDA is that is wont cost as much money to research possible treatments/drugs/cures so the lower profitability drugs and treatments might actually get a look in. Not saying the drugs companies arent predatory AF but spending hundreds of millions to make tens of millions is just bad business.
Ok, Sherlock.
A cure for a chronic illness could be plenty profitable if we had a free market.
Like, people can make money actually repairing cars. Even though a car that leaks oil could be a constant revenue center for someone selling oil, someone else can actually make a profit fixing oil leaks.
The fact that selling a continuous stream of oil to someone with a leaky engine does not automatically imply that fixing the leak isn’t profitable.
This sort of “X is more profitable so Y doesn’t happen” thing only actually causes Y to not happen when the market isn’t free.
If one company — via government-enforced monopoly — controls motor oil sales and oil leak fixing, then that one company can nix the permanent repair market in order to maximize profits from selling motor oil. But that’s not a free market.
It’s the fact our medical market is so tightly, centrally controlled that makes less-profitable things like preventing diabetes impossible. That kind of niche elimination is a property of a centrally-controlled market, not a property of an actually free market.
We have a free market for clothes. That means: (a) anyone who can sew cloth together can sell clothes, (b) anyone who can acquire clothes for cheap and sell them slightly higher can sell clothes, (c) anyone with money can buy clothes at any time from anyone. I can buy clothes from my neighbor if I want. I can donate old clothes to Goodwill and others can buy them cheaper than new. I can own 500 pairs of jeans if I feel like it, or wear nothing but sweatpants simply because I feel like it.
Imagine if you needed a prescription from a clothing consultant before you could buy a jacket, or a shirt. That’s not capitalism. That’s not a free market.
Just because money is exchanged for healthcare in the USA does not mean we have a free market for healthcare. We do have a market in healthcare; we do not have a free market in healthcare.
If we had a free market for healthcare, I’d be able to buy chemistry equipment and make whatever anti-cancer drugs people need and undercut other manufacturers. I’d be able to just go pay a hundred bucks to use an MRI machine or an x-ray machine, without needing to pay money to see a doctor first and get their okay for the scan. I’d be able to just go buy wellbutrin for $15 instead of paying my psychiatrist $100 every two weeks to check in and see if it’s still working.
We do not have anything even remotely resembling a free market for healthcare. We really, really need one though.
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.
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?
