Tiring ass conspiracy theorists.
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
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.
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.
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.
Idiotic conspiracy theories are idiotic
Idiotic coincidence theories are idiotic
Did you confuse capitalism with morality again?
This has got to stop happening
Or, chronic diseases which have been effectively cured aren’t considered chronic diseases anymore?
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.
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.
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.
The original “this doesn’t need to be a subscription”
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’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.
