Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
It kind of reminds me of the mindset that says people shouldn't live in single family dwellings and should instead live in high density developments. Or, don't own your own car, take public transportation. Or stay home for vacation. Or etc. etc.
It's the mind set that says, "You want A, but you SHOULD be satisfied with B".
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
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...
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.
Exactly. Why ruin a chance for profit. Diabetes is the drug company's wet dream. cannot be cured, requires constant medication but takes a while to finally kill you (enough time to really make some money).
people want cures, not treatment, because a cure means the problem is *gone*. Asides from not having to deal with the disease anymore, they don't have to worry about the side effects of the "treatment" (there are always side effects, and the treatments are never full solutions - both the side effects and the disease itself continue to impact one's day-to-day life). Who the heck would want that? Much, much better to actually get rid of the disease completely.
As for "imprinted in the genes from birth to death" that is malarkey. Most of the genes in every person's makeup are never actually *expressed*, so the idea that because the potential for something is in one's genes means it cannot be suppressed is just silly. In addition, modern research has demonstrated that one's genes change over the course of one's life (there has been research on identical twins and longitudinal studies on individuals that demonstrate genetic drift over time). Genes are *not* constant.
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.
Always told to us, of course, by people who themselves live in mansions, travel via private jet, and are driven around in armoured SUVs.
...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.
And guess what: they are not all living miserable live because of that. At least in Europe, their day to day lives are nicer then they are in the US. Not having to get in a car and get stuck in traffic is a GOOD THING. If you don't feel that way, I suggest that you move to LA and get a job that is a three hour commute one way. On a good day.
Why is Snark Required?