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of chronic human pathologies we’ve cured, some we probably don’t even remember curing because the terminology is so outdated (though sadly dropsy is still a thing, and frustratingly consumption isn’t eradicated yet …but it could be!)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!
hidradenitis suppurativa
edit: i read wrong, that’s uncured, i could imagine that along with what you mentioned, a lot are likely nutrition-based, treatments have gotten better for a lot of things, outlooks and lifespans for certain genetic conditions, but off the top of my head i can’t think of anything that has a “cure” that’s not viral or environmental
Myopia (shortsightedness) is a fairly big one.
The cure’s been so ingrained that the anti-medicine/eugenics people don’t think about their own glasses when posting.
You can just go get your eyes tested, some glasses fitted, and you’re done. Repeat if it gets worse.
If you want something more permanent, you can get someone to slice open your eye, blast it a bit with a laser, and in theory, you would be completely cured, as if you never needed glasses.
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.
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
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
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.
TLDR yes, they are wrong.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
ah it seems i’ve misread the initial post and replied to this under the assumption it said “rare illnesses have no cures”
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.
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.
That’s the lenient interpretation I’d hope.
But we’re not an alternative medicine group or anything. If you look into their shareholder meetings the public info seems to be that they judge whether investments are worth it by potential return on investment, and well a lifelong treatment is always going to be more profitable for them than a cure.