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The Cure Culture: Our Obsession With Cures That Are 'Just Around the Corner'
citadrianne writes: Cures for major disease always seem just a few short years away. We constantly read about promising new treatments for cancer, diabetes, HIV, ALS, and more. While the prognosis for these diseases has improved over the years — sometimes greatly — we still focus doggedly on the cure. "The idea of a cure is simpler, it's more appealing as a fantasy." This article takes a look at so-called "Cure Culture" — the focus on reaching for a cure when our scientific efforts may be better expended attacking a disease in other ways. It asks, "Why are we telling our children, our friends, and our family members that we are going to cure them? ... What does it mean to be cured of a disease that is encoded within your DNA from the moment you become a zygote until the moment you are dead? ... And why are we eschewing or overlooking treatments—real, honest-to-god treatments—that can let patients lead longer, more normal lives?
Yeah, why would we want to cure anything when we can just do long term expensive debilitating treatments instead? This site has gone so far downhill so fast it is scary.
Isn't the problem the exact opposite? That we struggle to find cures when treatments are so much more profitable? That medicine is viewed as a profit generator rather than an utterly essential aspect of a modern society? This article reads like it was written by a spokesperson, and turns a blind eye to every disease that once had no cure - but now does.
It's just not as profitable as treatment. Even if you can't achieve perfection, is it not wise to at least make a feeble effort?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Cancer is so diverse, saying we have cure for cancer is like saying we have cure for viral infections.
I'm pretty sure lots of cancer types are now curable, and the number is growing.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
I haven't been obsessed with The Cure since the 90's when grunge took over.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
Mmmm, bring on that tasty chemo! Feels so good...
It means you don't have to worry about your Mom forgetting to take her pills today.
Do you not remember the soul-searching the entire medical profession has done for the past few decades over whether life-prolonging treatments were worth the added pain and suffering?
We'll still be firmly entrenched in the "I Came Up With This New Buzzword, So Buy My Book" Culture,
For earlier examples of this phenomenon, see "Religions - reasons for their existence".
Part of this is the need for people to believe there is hope, and therefore want to believe desperately that some magic bullet will come along.
But, I fear the biggest problem is the corporatization of the surrounding charities.
Things like the Pink Ribbon stuff is increasingly about for-profit marketing, and less about actually generating money for research.
So, people put lots of hype into marketing the future cure because it can be fairly lucrative. Cancer "charities" can be a big business these days, because they capitalize on fear and hope.
And much of what happens is more about PR and profits than any actual medicine.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
If you do not yearn for a cure, you may stop looking for one.
Earliest detection can lead to stopping a problem or getting rid of it with minor treatment or life style changes, so health systems are promoting "wellness" programs involving early detection/monitoring.
If we manage early detection on a large % of the population, we won't need as much "treatment" and "cures."
That would decrease the cost & need for healthcare overall and lead to a healthier population. A lot of companies are working on aspects of this.
There is no "cure culture". Medicine is all about treating the symptoms, hiding the symptoms, masking the symptoms, naming the disease after the symptoms. The doctors don't know what is wrong with you. They tell you you have "Red spots on arms and upset stomach" disease, but that is not a disease, those are just symptoms, and they won't cure you of the disease because they don't know what is wrong with you. Instead, they will put you on medicine, that will hide those symptoms...until you stop taking your medicine, and then the symptoms are right back again. My grandmother was having seizures, so they put her on anti-seizure medication. Do they know what was causing the seizures? No. Do they care? No. They just put her on medicine that she has to take for the rest of her life, and as long as she takes it every single day, she won't have seizures. This is not Medical Science.
Treating symptoms should only ever be a short term comfort solution while Medical Science looks for a cure. It should ALWAYS be all about the cure. Article is exactly wrong.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I am on treatment. Have been for years. Treatment fucking SUCKS. It takes over your life. Treatment controls what you eat, drink, what medication you take.Treatment keeps you alive and stable, but it is not the same as a cure. It's what we beg for until we get a cure.
Treatment means I get twice as tired as a normal person my age.
Treatment means I can't stay up late, get drunk, or smoke marijuana.
Treatment means keeping your blood pressure low that you need Viagrea to get an erection when you are 30.
I thank god for treatment - it keeps me alive. But it is not enough.
GIVE ME THE CURE. Some people will literally kill for a cure. If you tell someone they can cure the lung cancer their 8 year old child has just by killing a criminal in China and stealing their organs, some people will do it.
Treatment is nice - but it isn't close to a cure.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Just hopeful. As someone with RP I check out the latest blindness research being done every 6 months or year. Until then all I can do is try to take in enough vitamin A to hopefully delay things a little - and try to save money so I can either pay for a cure that doesn't exist yet or retire early because I would no longer be able to work. Being obsessed in this would be detrimental to living.
Story: New energy source based on [insert some form of unicorn fart here] may one day solve energy crisis!
Story: New memory storage based on [insert excited hand waving] may one day replace current RAM!
Story: New computing method based on [something, something, carbon, something] may one day re-instate Moore's law!
Story: New AI algorithm based on [GAs, deep multi-layer neural nets, connecting organic brains together, a little man in a box that answers the questions and pretends to be a machine] may one day give us true artificial intelligence (whatever the fuck that means).
At 57, I've been hearing this crap since I was 6. There's no magic energy source. Moore's law has been stopped by physics. HAL has yet to enter the building. There's no cure for cancer or alzheimers, and so on.
Editors and writers with liberal arts or journalism degrees who can't evaluate the research anyway *love* this kind of filler shit because it attracts the eyeballs of the sort that read popular science magazine and take it seriously. It's the science literature equivalent of Reece's Pieces (meaning no disrespect for that fine candy).
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Cause big Pharma doesn't want you to know these 10 easy ways to cure everything! :eye roll:
We are obsessed with a Cure for everything because we set the bar high with vaccines (which we now dismiss as a ploy cause by Big Pharma to keep us in need of more vaccines!) We eradicated smallpox, in the US we've cured polio (well eradicated) we've cured, well not really anything... most of our "cures" are letting disease run its course, and letting our immune system do it's thing, or stopping our immune system from doing it's thing...
My question is why are we worried about cure's when we can focus on something we've done before, Eradication. Let's eliminate polio, let's get rid of Ebola (ok animal population makes that a challenge, but not impossible if you don't' mind shooting monkeys and bats full of vaccines) instead of fixing people after the fact lets make sure they never get sick... We've managed it with incredible success over the last 100 years or so in 1st world countries through things like sewage treatment, vaccines, clean drinking water, etc.... Why don't we focus on that?
I think a big part of the issue is that science journalism (by which I mean pop science journalism) caters to our optimistic "something-will-come-along-to-save-us" mindset. Scientists are happy for the attention and might make their research seem further along than it is and/or the journalists spice it up (consciously or sub-consciously) and to a lay-person everything sounds like its just around the corner. Now there is a whole internet sub-culture around science worship that tries to show science as seemingly fun and easy and I think we're far too reliant on some breakthrough to solve our problems. The sad truth is we will have to solve most of our problems with the tools we have no, or assume some constant conservative improvement in those tools. You can't predict breakthroughs, thats why they are breakthroughs. Thorium reactors and cold fusion and nanobots and whatever other BS popular science is espousing today might happen eventually, but we're fucked if it gives us the confidence to put off doing what will most likely be the fix for our worlds problems - hard work.
Does anyone else get the feeling that the author has decided we're all obsessed with cures just so they could write their article bemoaning the fact?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I think the writer makes a good point. How do you "cure" something that is part of your DNA? To put it in perspective, how do you "cure" yourself from having brown eyes? I think the best you can hope for is to "treat" your brown eyes with differently colored contacts.
As a person with a chronic, degenerative, genetic disease (type 1 diabetes), I have become less interested in talk about cures, and more interested in improved treatment. Specifically, an inexpensive, non-invasive method of detecting glucose levels. This single thing would improve my life greater than any other thing out there.
Proverbs 21:19
Then clearly you have no condition for which there are a variety of treatments that carry their own "fine print" problems. I have one: psoriasis. It sounds annoying to most people who think of it as aggressive dandruff. The reality is that psoriasis often puts scaly lesions all over your body such that even if you're in great shape you may think twice about hitting the pool.
Treatments without insurance run as much as $350-$400 for a 1-2 month dose of medication for steroid treatments that make the patches mostly go away. Or you can opt for Humira which is non-steroidal and more convenient, but it works by attacking your immune system which is why the commercials say in friendly legal terms that you really ought to consider the wisdom of using it and traveling to locales that are friendlier to disease and fungus.
Now I can easily see some snarky ass saying #firstworldproblems to this, but it's precisely the sort of condition where there is a damn good reason for the pharmaceutical industry to keep a gene therapy cure postponed. Without insurance, it's a bitch and a half to finance full treatment for even "moderate psoriasis."
Because... mainstream media.
.3% of patients will survive", when you could instead report that "Scientists at have taken another important step toward the curing of cancer. Cancer cells injected into mice have shown a significant reduction after... etc etc".
Why would you run a story that says "Treatment of cancer type "A" has been marginally improved and an additional
Why did I call this the circle of life? Because the media jumped on the initial sickness for great sensational headlines. Then they sensationalize the research. Then they write a story about how we have a 'cure culture'. Next they'll write a story about lack of coverage of another disease in the news and start all over.
Medicine is all about treating the symptoms, hiding the symptoms, masking the symptoms, naming the disease after the symptoms.
Hogwash. That is only true when we do not understand the underlying condition. There are plenty of conditions we understand quite well and can treat the underlying cause. For those that we don't yet understand we comfort the patient as best we can until we can figure out what causes the disease. Finding out may take longer than the life of the patient sometimes.
The doctors don't know what is wrong with you.
Sometimes they do and sometimes they do not. We know a lot about a lot of diseases but we do not know everything about every disease. If you think doctors never know what is wrong with you then you don't really understand what you are talking about.
They tell you you have "Red spots on arms and upset stomach" disease, but that is not a disease, those are just symptoms, and they won't cure you of the disease because they don't know what is wrong with you. Instead, they will put you on medicine, that will hide those symptoms...until you stop taking your medicine, and then the symptoms are right back again.
That only happens when the underlying cause is unknown. Sometimes treating the symptoms is the best we can do. Frequently we can do much better. My wife happens to be a pathologist specializing in skin. She sees "red spots on arms" all the time. Sometimes the cause is known with 100% certainty. Sometimes the best she can do is to give a differential diagnosis.
My grandmother was having seizures, so they put her on anti-seizure medication. Do they know what was causing the seizures? No.
Ahh, so because doctors don't know about the root cause of that specific condition for that specific patient, you generalize that to say that they know nothing in general? That simply isn't true or fair.
Do they care? No.
If you think the doctors don't care then you don't actually know any. They care very much. It's why most of them went into the profession. They don't know how to cure everything but that doesn't mean they don't care.
Treating symptoms should only ever be a short term comfort solution while Medical Science looks for a cure.
Which is the point you seem to be missing. Sometimes finding a cure takes a long time. The human body is absurdly complicated and disease pathology even more so and there is a lot we still don't know. A cure may take several lifetimes to find. That doesn't mean we understand nothing and it doesn't mean nobody cares.
This is a hard reality for humans to accept, but there is a permanent cure for many terrible diseases.
We call it DEATH.
Am I joking? No.
We have all seen those dramatic nature shows where the lion catches the gazelle and rips it apart. The narrator of the show explains that by catching and eliminating the slower gazelle, the lion benefits the gazelle species by removing defective elements that otherwise would reproduce.
Human evolution has taken a turn for the worse. Rather than eliminating the weak elements and promoting the strong, we have reversed the evolutionary direction. We expend great resources to help the weak survive. OTOH, If a certain deadly disease was allowed to run its course, and all victims died before they could reproduce, the disease would kill itself. It would be removed from the gene pool.
If we live long enough as a species, and don't blow up the planet, we may well solve these problems without too much death and discomfort. Nature's way is not pretty to watch.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Sure! Why cure when you can treat a condition indefinitely. Profit!!
TL;DR: "I loved and lost someone close to me, and now i want you to feel bad too."
as a biomedical scientist this infuriates me. society promises a cure for everything because hope springs eternal and in this foul year of our lord 2015 we've harnessed all the worlds knowledge into a tiny device that puts us in contact with anyone, at any time, at the touch of a button. We're not defeatists. we never have been. We may not have cured your disease, but we have a fucking laundry list of ailments and once lethal diseases both genetic and viral that have all fallen in the might of our science. Diseases you no longer have to worry about because we didnt just settle for supportive therapy. but if thats a better idea, im sure there are companies lining up to build a nicer iron lung.
The scientific method is what TFA fails to understand. Its asking us to just make sure folks are comfortable while they shuffle off this mortal coil and take our defeats as final judgement. And just because a pharmaceutical company sells a supportive or analgesic medication for an ailment, doesnt mean its either safe or effective. Musinex is a worthless snake-oil with no scientifically proven effect, yet it sells millions. medicinal zinc is also wildly popular yet scientifically unverifiable. And all those medications for gout, inflammation, obesity, and nicer CPAP masks want to conveniently ignore the real problem: preventable disease through diet and exercise.
Good people go to bed earlier.
King Diamond, Megadeth, AC/DC, Black Sabbath, and Pantera are some of my favorites. The Cure was okay but they were pretty much toast by the end of the 80's don't you think?
As someone with MS I can tell you the treatment options that are out there now are worse than the disease it's self. Forget a true cure. I'd just like a treatment that wouldn't have caused liver failure.
In my mind, the "cure" mentality is linked up with a general problem with science journalism. I think there may be scientists who contribute to the problem in some way or another, and once silly ideas or bad information is out there, everyday people will spread it around, but it's primarily about journalism.
And the problem with journalism, as far as I understand, breaks down into two general causes. One cause of the problem is oversimplification-- either the journalist doesn't understand the science, or they don't expect that their audience will understand, so their explanation of the science cuts out a lot of the complications and gives a simplified explanation. That is not a problem in itself, but when you simplify, you run the risk of oversimplifying and ending up with an explanation that's actually misleading.
The other big cause of problems seems to be sensationalism. Journalists want people to read their stories and get excited about their stories. More people will be excited about a story about a "cure for cancer" than "a treatment for cancer that will meaningfully extend life in select cases." More people will be excited about a story about how "drinking coffee will kill you," than one about how "a single study indicates some adverse effects of coffee consumption, but more study is needed." More people want to read about "A new breakthrough that will make time travel possible" than how "A single scientist who's a little on the fringes is trying to develop a new variant of string theory, which if it turns out to be true, might possibly mean that time travel is theoretically possible but practically impossible and/or well beyond any technology we have. Or it might still mean that time travel is impossible. We don't know yet because the theory isn't complete."
The result is a lot of misinformation, and a lot of focus on the wrong things. One example might be a focus on "cures" when "treatments" may be more realistic. Another problem is an expectation of impending wild technological advancement. We read about someone developing a new technology for manufacturing processors or displays that will be give us super-gadgets in the next 3 years, when even if those advances materialize, they're 20 years out. Another problem is fad diets, since every study relating to diets is suddenly reported as a miracle that will allow everyone to shed all of their unwanted weight and become super healthy. Another problem is scifi concepts being reported as "just around the corner". In the next couple of years, we'll all be immortal, living with AI, time traveling, traveling faster than light, with unlimited perpetual motion machines generating all of the energy we'd like. It's always just a couple of years out, but never materializing.
Arguable the most damaging problem is that all of the other problems makes science appear to be complete bullshit. With the kind of ideas being pushed as "scientific", I almost have a hard time blaming people who disbelieve that pollution is bad, people who believe that homeopathy works, or people who are afraid of vaccinations are harmful. We're flooded with constant promises that are unfulfilled, and conflicting reports about things being "scientifically proven". One year, eggs will kill you, and the next they're a miracle cure for everything. A few years ago, we were all being told to replace fatty foods with sugar-filled substitutes, and now we're being told the opposite. If you see enough of those stories, I can understand not knowing who to trust.
Because it's easier to sell advertising on the news that "something better is coming" rather than "the same old treatment still works."
Who put this thing together? Me, that's who.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cure
Let's look at the treatments for, say, Diabetes, shall we?
Avandia - Heart Disease, Bladder cancer
Phenformin - Lactic Acidosis
Rezulin - Liver failure; killed 63 from this before pulled.
Victoza - Pancreatic cancer (wow...there's a good way to turn into a Type I Diabetic!)
The list goes on and on. Saying there's treatments is not being fully honest about the subject to be blunt. A "cure" or a near one that has less risk/side effects is desired and sought. Mainly because some of the other problems, including heart disease, actually stem from Diabetes. You don't NEED those "treatments" if you could be healed/cured of the chronic illness in question.
TFA author is fucking clueless. And I'm not settling for supportive therapy because the damn stuff for MY particular Chronic Illness is often more damaging than coping with it by exercise and strict diet control.
...in decreasing utility far as the patient is concerned. Unfortunately, as far as the medical-industrial complex is concerned, "expensive treatment for the duration of the patent" is the primary goal, with cures and vaccinations to be avoided if possible. We'll be stuck with that as long as medical research is paid for out of drug company profits. If, on the other hand, we had a "single payer" health care system, the federal government would have an incentive to fund research into cures and prevention.
diseases, but we expect someone to cure them once we contract them, except for people who only pray for divine intervention. People are weird.
People wanting to be cured of an illness, instead of having to put up with expensive, permanent, quality-of-life-diminishing medical treatments, that in most cases only temporarily mask symptoms of a greater problem.
Yes, people are so weird wanting a cure!
So what you do is you predict cures and proffer treatments.
Oh, look, that's exactly what they do.
Nah. Doctors don't care. They don't care any more than auto mechanics care that your car gets fixed. If it's fixed, great. If not, they did their damn job and get off their fucking backs. Source: doctors (sorry, physicians).
Did you know doctors don't do diagnosis any more? Remember the TV shows about doctors when they would try to figure out what kind of disease you had, possibly opening up one of those medical books on the shelf behind their desk? Yeah, they don't do that any more. They ask YOU what tests you want done. Like I fucking know? What, ask Google? Then the physician makes a derogatory comment about patients consulting Dr. Google. They're not shy at all about telling you to fuck off (sorry, referral to another doctor) or giving you the middle finger (sorry, I meant a suggestion to try "alternative medicine"). Source: my own experience at the hands of physicians. Sad but true. It does, in fact, mean they just don't care.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The way we do medicine today isn't very different than what we did 100 years ago. We find a chemical that does things, test said chemical and prey the side effect doesn't kill the patient. Surgery and our understanding of the human body is 1000x better than what we did 100 years ago but what we do is surface level treatment. You get sick and we find a way to fix said sickness. Heart has clog? Thin the blood like crazy with medicine. Stents to expand veins to keep them open and working. But that's like your engine leaks oil but instead of fixing the core of the problem lets put in thicker oil to slow the leak.
About 2/3 of deaths to people are age related. Heart disease, cancer, Diabetes, and etc are all age related diseases. And yes you can get them young but the moment you're born you're aging. What is aging? Aging is the process of the human body slowly building up damage, and there's 7 of them. People won't live past 80 or 90 if we don't fix aging first, and a lot of other diseases like Alzheimer is dependent on our ability to cure it. Cancer itself is caused by aging cells. We know the core cause of cancer is telomeres which protect the cell from damage. Most cells in your body don't extend these but cancer cells do and indefinitely and become immortal.
There's already discoveries found that help with aging and health significantly. For example back in 2003 they found a chemical called Resveratrol. This stuff is so amazing that it doubles the life of mice, which don't live for very long. They're younger and healthier for a longer time, and don't develop sicknesses easily like diabetes, especially on a western diet which is very bad for you. Resveratrol doesn't stop or reverse aging but it does significantly slow it down and you can buy it right now off online stores. It's proven to work, but everyone is trying to make a more concentrated and potent version of Resveratrol. There's compounds which are proven to extend telomeres which many people consider the holy grail of age reversal for humans and our best defense against cancer. The compounds are unfortunately only 5% effective so people who took the compounds didn't look or feel younger but their cells did look younger. Now they're trying to find compounds that are more potent and they have, but they'll kill you.
My point is that if we're to make people live healthier and better lives than we need to look into aging itself, and my prediction is that within 15 years we'll have methods to drastically slow aging. About 20-25 years from now we'll be able to stop aging but not reverse it. Within 30-40 years we can actually reverse aging mostly. I say mostly cause you may look 20-30 years old and feel 20-30 years old but you'll still have some age related issues to deal with. I'm not sure when and if we'll be able to fix Mitochondrial mutations or even DNA mutations, but it might not be a real issue. Human body is really good at repairing DNA. For now I would avoid high sugar foods, and cooked foods that have lots of carcinogens. Resveratrol works and is on sale as a vitamin. People on raw vegan diets don't age. Though that means eating uncooked food and no meat which many people probably won't do.
It's also a big problem that we don't look at aging as a disease when it causes so many and effects people of all ages, it just effects older people more so than younger.
http://www.sens.org/research/i...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I don't know what fucking shitty doctor you go to, but mine actually tries to do their damned job. Maybe you should get a new doctor.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Sometimes the cause is known 100%. For the rest of the time, there's prednisone.
It's Sturgeons Law. 90% of anything is crap.
The first doctor I saw for my current condition didn't even realize I was at death's door despite the fact that an MD that is a family friend saw it right away. He was content to be my suburban drug pusher and didn't do any sort of competent physical exam of me.
If I hadn't gone there specifically to get my blood checked, I would now be DEAD. That's how bad my condition was.
The blood test made it obvious even to Ferret Face.
Then I went to the family friend...
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Like CEOs of pharma companies or their loved ones don't get diseases for which they wish they had a cure. My takeaway from this article is be pragmatic and stop praying for a miracle and start investing in treatment as well as a cure.
It's tempting to argue that pharma companies have secretly given up on major cures because they make nore long-term money from ongloing treatments, but the major diseases are a worldwide problem and medical research is being done in numerous places not under control of Big $DEMON. A Chinese researcher who finds the cure for a major cancer has just as certain a Nobel as an American researcher.
And even in the context of American medicine, the fame attached to being a discoverer of that magnitude eclipses pecuniary interest, even if that interest is personal. Think about it: you own half the stock of a company that makes its money "managing" diabetes. If you discover a way of regrowing pancreatic islet cells, would you actually stay quiet that discovery in hopes of making more on disease management? Now consider the fact that any discovery generally means that your discipline is at a point where any umber of people could arrive at the same conclusion independently.
Did you know doctors don't do diagnosis any more?
That will come as a shock to my wife who actually is a doctor and provides diagnosis all day long.
Seriously my friend, you have NO idea what you are talking about if you truly believe that.
Remember the TV shows about doctors when they would try to figure out what kind of disease you had, possibly opening up one of those medical books on the shelf behind their desk? Yeah, they don't do that any more.
Once again you are completely, 100% wrong about this. I will be happy to introduce you to as many physicians as you can stand to meet (I know a LOT of them) who will be happy to show you what they actually do when they are stumped. They absolutely do crack open the text books on a routine basis. Furthermore, real doctors don't actually do what they show on TV shows. Shocking I know that they would do something fictional on TV.
Then the physician makes a derogatory comment about patients consulting Dr. Google.
Because a lot of patients DO self diagnose despite having absolutely no idea what they are talking about. They simply do not have enough knowledge to come up with an appropriate differential diagnosis. It is a real problem. People actually get upset when they wrongly "diagnose" their condition and then the doctor who actually went to medical school politely corrects them.
They're not shy at all about telling you to fuck off (sorry, referral to another doctor) or giving you the middle finger (sorry, I meant a suggestion to try "alternative medicine").
They only tell you to not come back (a figurative "fuck off") if you are either abusive or obviously wasting their time. Given your attitude I'm guessing the former might apply here. If they refer you to another doctor it's because they think you need to see someone more specialized in the condition. While I'm sure there are a few out there, basically no credible doctor will suggest "alternative medicine". If they do, run the other way as fast as possible.
Source: my own experience at the hands of physicians. Sad but true. It does, in fact, mean they just don't care.
If indeed any of what you say is true then you need to get a new physician immediately.
Sometimes the cause is known 100%. For the rest of the time, there's prednisone.
You don't want to use prednisone (or any other steroid) if you have a fungal infection. It can actually suppress the immune system and make the fungal infection worse while having no beneficial effect on the problem.
Better treatments are possible but all of the funding and hype on finding a cure is holding them back.
This is bullshit.
I think the major reason that the CFF is ignoring treatments is that any treatment which does not result in a cure is, by definition, an ongoing revenue stream for big pharma, and therefore big pharma has that angle covered: if they come up with a treatment that works, they have a customer for the rest of that customers life. And there is no incentive for big pharma to then work on a cure.
In fact, if you were to come up with a cure for something which represented a huge existing revenue stream, you would likely have an "accident" before you were published.
In terms of CF itself, the current state of things is that researchers have demonstrated CRISPR/Cas9-mediated repair of the CFTR locus in human intestinal stem cells -- which means, were they reimplanted in the donor, they would replicate and replace the defective intestinal cells over time.
If the technique can be successfully used in vivo (we have so far been reluctant to use CRISPR/Cas9-mediated modifcation on living humans, since it can impact germ line cells), then it represents a cure. See also:
http://www.cell.com/cell-stem-...
The full paper itself is downloadable, without charge, from that location.
As to the major question of why concentrate on a cure ... so that your children and grandchildren don't inherit the disease, of course.
That's *a* problem certainly, but it's not *the* (not that there's any singular problem in the first place), and it's a problem that's tied to Big Pharma. But the article isn't about Big Pharma. It's about Big Charity, which has a separate set of problems.
Isn't the article actually about... "You big charities concentrating on finding a cure when there are treatments for CF are really annoying the piss out of those of us who are currently making an ass-ton of money off of selling treatments".
So the *actual* problem they are addressing is the problem that big charity isn't funding their treatment research, and they are instead having to fund treatment research themselves, and that cuts into their profits. In other words, it's not enough that all of the public funding going toward the disease is spent in big pharma labs on deriving *yet more* treatments, they also want all of the privately funded research to *also* be directed at more treatments.
Yeah, I'm a little cynical, but then again, I'd personally be happy flying to Eastern Europe and subsequently living with Porcine Endogenous Retro Virus to have my Parkinson's cured, should I ever have to deal with the disease, than living with what passes for treatment in the U.S. everywhere but in clinical trials.
Nah. Doctors don't care. They don't care any more than auto mechanics care that your car gets fixed. If it's fixed, great. If not, they did their damn job and get off their fucking backs. Source: doctors (sorry, physicians).
Did you know doctors don't do diagnosis any more? Remember the TV shows about doctors when they would try to figure out what kind of disease you had, possibly opening up one of those medical books on the shelf behind their desk? Yeah, they don't do that any more. They ask YOU what tests you want done. Like I fucking know? What, ask Google? Then the physician makes a derogatory comment about patients consulting Dr. Google. They're not shy at all about telling you to fuck off (sorry, referral to another doctor) or giving you the middle finger (sorry, I meant a suggestion to try "alternative medicine"). Source: my own experience at the hands of physicians. Sad but true. It does, in fact, mean they just don't care.
Why do I keep putting diagnosis code fields in the database then? Amazingly, they get populated ! I count 3400 diagnosis codes I count for last Friday in a couple of hospitals in one Texas city. I think I can validly infer from this that doctors are making diagnoses still. BTW, maybe the diagnosis that YOU are looking for is "hypochondria".
...but with software. I expect the patch that fixes all my problems.
Actually, islet cell adenocarcinoma is detectable. You can do it with a rather simple/cheap blood test.
However, nearly no insurance carrier will pay for this blood test (I just had a friend who died from islet cell adenocarcinoma (pancreatic cancer), which was in fact treatable, but Kaiser Permanente did not cover the testing at the point she had her first symptoms.
NB: The following is NOT medical advice; consult an oncologist, if you have any of the following situations...
It was a type that would have been resistant to the standard Paclitaxel & Gemcitabine chemo combination; however, with the addition of an O6 methyl transferase inhibiter to reduce the effect of the MGMA gene on the long arm of chromosome 20 (the DNA repair mechanism), it's likely the chemo would have been able to be made effective, as a combinatoric therapy (without the inhibiter, the repair mechanism repairs the targeted cancer cells DNA as well, so the chemo -- most chemo relies on methylation of the gene sequences -- would not be able to sufficient damage the cancerous cells DNA to stop the cancer.
BTW: This is the same mechanism that causes Temozolomide insensitivity in glioblastoma multifome (a type of frequently fatal brain cancer, due to the ineffectiveness of the chemo).
So if you've got either one of those, and you have an "adventurous" oncologist, ask them if they are willing to try the chemo again, in combination with an inhibiter. Note that they will want to ramp the chemo dose, since the inhibiter will make *all* the cells more sensitive to the DNA damage (the usual dose will be too high, because the balance is between "just enough to kill some healthy and all cancer cells", and this effectively will disable the repair mechanism entirely).
--
Most pharma companies don't investigate combinatoric therapies, except as a last ditch effort to rescue a drug that's looking like it's ineffective, since doing so means cooperating with competing companies.
Human evolution has taken a turn for the worse. Rather than eliminating the weak elements and promoting the strong, we have reversed the evolutionary direction.
In your world Stephen Hawking dies in 1964 before completing his graduate thesis.
How does eugenics define "strength and weakness" in a modern society which is fundamentally defined by intelligent --- cooperative --- behavior? Brains, not brawn
We spent a weekend in November hunting deer for sport with superbly engineered guns and bows and haul the carcasses out with our FWD and ATVs.
When we want meat on the table, we raise chickens and cattle on an industrial scale.
"Disintegration is the greatest album ever!!"
-- kyle.. or was it stan?
...in the closet about all that?
Do you often find yourself playing with finger puppets which resemble people around you?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
DCA cures most cancer. Not sure why it hasn't received more attention.
The reason is that many of the 'science' articles are now just total BS. A large group of scientists have been pushed to lie, manipulate, etc any information to make themselves sound good.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
BTW, maybe the diagnosis that YOU are looking for is "hypochondria".
Oh shit! Should I see my doctor? Is it treatable?!? Am I going to die?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Why do I keep putting diagnosis code fields in the database then? Amazingly, they get populated ! I count 3400 diagnosis codes I count for last Friday in a couple of hospitals in one Texas city. I think I can validly infer from this that doctors are making diagnoses still.
Diagnosis codes are for uniform insurance *billing*. They have only cursory relationship to the actual diagnosis performed by the doctor.
If you charge for a procedure, the proper recorded diagnosis code must be recorded in the patient files which allow for insurance billing, otherwise reimbursement by the insurance company is denied.
Some doctors on cursory explanations of symptoms provided by a patient simply select from a handful of standard procedure that can be billed for (to maximize their profit) and check off the appropriate diagnostic codes that allow them to bill for that procedure. Some medical billing software systems even suggest the diagnostic code for the physician to check off to allow for such procedures depending on the insurance the patient has. The cart is generally before the horse in many medical practices in pursuit of the mighty dollar.
We just added two letters to the DNA sequence. Are you sure we should be poking about in there before we have a better understanding? This is not me being negative or dismissive. I truly do not know.
Of course we should poke.
The only way to learn is to poke.
At least as simple as computers.
For folks who pride themselves on rationality, you idiots are vastly underestimating the complexity of biological systems. It's almost like you have a model that biological entities were simple clockwork mechanism designed by a higher power or something.
Give up the irrationality and paranoia - sometimes cures are just far away. You want cures? Commit to the hard work they take to find.
That is all.
that's the most eclectic 1980's revival band name.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Yes, you are going to die. However, if you send me enough money, I'll send you a magic rock that will keep you from dying of hypochondria.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
This whole article seems more like PR for healthcare megacorps like GlaxoSmithKline that buy up small companies with cures like Human Genome Sciences to things like AIDs then shelve the research before it can hit the market because it competes with existing or in-the-pipeline treatments they already produce that have far more potential for profit. You only cure someone ones but you can literally treat someone for a lifetime.
When a cure is discovered for something, it'll be kept secret for fear of losing revenue. There's big MONEY is the "almost-cures" that don't fully work... the ones that keep people dangling on a string for years, paying and paying. We're talking about a multi trillion dollar industry here!