This argument has always seemed pretty silly to me. Why, if this is how the market for medical services worked, would medical services cure any problem, when they could find ways to milk those problems for recurring revenue? Why aren't malaria or stomach ulcers "chronic manageable illnesses", rather than curable ones?
Consider Hepatitis C. Chronic infection puts the patient at risk for cirrhosis and eventual liver failure, and the treatment for that is a liver transplant.
A couple of years ago Telepravir (Schering/Merck) and Boceprevir (Vertex/J&J) came to market. The price for a course of treatment has nothing to do with the cost of development and everything with the cost of a liver transplant, it's slightly less than that.
Even before prices for HCV drugs went down due to competition, they offered a cure for a life threatening disease for less than $100K in the US with minimal side effects, typically in 8 weeks, and with 95% effectiveness. The agent is a small pill taken twice a day. Price is scaled to personal income in country of treatment.
That's more like 1/10 of the monetary cost of a transplant, which is a scarce and rationed treatment.
You didn't make it, but you hear far too often that drugs for management of chronic conditions are more profitable than cures for acute conditions, and that's what determines what goes into the development pipeline.
The truth is more complex than that. The reason that you don't see investment in antibiotics is that the low-hanging fruit is picked and you cannot use the new compounds unless as a treatment of last resort, and sales would be far too low to be profitable. They will be needed, though, in the medium term. The financing model in pharma is broken and there is no change on the horizon in that department.
It's a very cynical argument, I'll give you that, and I'm certainly biased by wasting a bunch of time & money on x-rays and drugs and acupuncture. A slight more realistic explanation may involve liability - twisting and stretching someone who complains of back pain may be hard to teach / accredit at scale in a way that doesn't sometimes end disastrously, and MDs prescribing meds eliminates those cases of extreme liability.
Not sure about Malaria or stomach ulcers, but likely because those who developed the drugs were not acting to maximize their economic interests? Malaria seems like a relatively well understood parasite, whereas "back pain" could really be a symptom of nobody-really-knows-what.
> This argument has always seemed pretty silly to me. Why, if this is how the market for medical services worked, would medical services cure any problem, when they could find ways to milk those problems for recurring revenue? Why aren't malaria or stomach ulcers "chronic manageable illnesses", rather than curable ones?
Yeah, surely if you were the first company to work out how to cure e.g. back pain or cancer you'd make an insane amount of money so you wouldn't keep it under wraps. Who exactly would stop you going to market with it? It's a silly conspiracy theory in my opinion.
It's funny that we have billions poured into cancer research yet we still can't find that cure.
I guess we need another cure cancer walkathon with pink ribbons cause those smart scientists almost have that cure...
Perhaps there is a cure (or at least the causes are well-known), but it's being withheld from the public. Why would we ever want to fix problems that employ so many people & give them nice houses & yachts?
Actually, cancer treatment has made huge progress in the last decade or so. Melanoma, in particular, has gone from a virtual death sentence to being one of the more treatable forms.
The idea that we haven't found "the cure" to cancer is silly because cancer isn't one disease, it's many, down to the point of everyone's cancer being genetically different, and in fact different cancer cells being genetically different within an individual.
Cancer is all statistics. You slowly accumulate mutations in your tissues over your life time and if you accumulate enough mutations (especially in oncogenes[1]) you will get cancer. The only way to avoid it is to die of something else first.
Yeah, a log/log plot of incidence of cancer against age shows that about 6 mutations are needed in a cell to result in cancer. A decent cancer needs invasiveness, metastases, vascularization and evasion of the immune system. The last two are especially important and that's where current research is directed.
I'm not going to argue against the complexity of cancer, just as the effects of a complex system is more complicated compared to the inputs (i.e. a fractal).
What is not emphasized is nutrition, environmental toxins, bioaccumulative effects of "safe" compounds that we interact with daily (plastics, chemicals, hormonal (estrogen) mimickers, Electromagnetic pollution, Stress, side effects of drugs) & their effects throwing monkey wrenches into biological processes & causing these mutations.
We can study the effects & create drugs to combat the effects or we can address the causes. One strategy is more profitable, has a more defensible market position, & creates a more dependent consumer base than the other.
This will be my last post as I've already done enough damage to my HN karma on this topic. It's a pretty obvious argument if one takes an honest look at motivations of the different parties. It's all too easy to get bogged down & distracted by the details at the tail end of the system; when it's the inputs that really matter.
The issue is a multi-domain systemic issue that we are trying to solve in a single domain (pharmaceutical drugs/medical procedures). A Belief system is a great tool to handle the complexities of life & choosing an effective Belief System is a tool that will help one achieve optimal results. Our culture has atomized existence into domains & degenerated holistic belief systems to our detriment.
I'm talking about the broad concept of Electromagnetic Pollution, including effects known & unknown. I'm not convinced of the "proof" that Electromagnetic pollution does not cause cancer, as there are secondary effects (i.e. Melatonin).
Putting cell phones next to you head is not a good idea. We aren't going to hear about the effects from the "scientific consensus" until there's a market solution though.
Sunlight is good for you & will reduce cancer.
Perhaps you should research Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity Syndrome. Many of the former engineers from Ericsson have this disease. Perhaps you can visit a United States National Radio Quiet Zone & see if you feel different...
Indeed, and it is surely for the same reason that there isn't yet a pill I can take to make me 7'5" tall.
But of course we're left with the same conundrum: why has the modern pharmaceutical industry cured any disease? Every time they do, they kill another cash cow.
