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.
And if someone cures it first that’s it, they win the whole pot until generics are approved.
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
Thank you. You expressed everything I wanted to say.
Gatekeeping cures to illness just isn’t true.
I guess the sad thing is, that given the way things are, i cant blame people for thinking this way. Because be honest. Would you put it past them to not do it?
I can 100% see healthcare and pharmaceutical companies doing this for profits.
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.
This is wrong.
It’s applying a good observation incorrectly.
There’s enough awful greedy shit to keep us busy. No inventing more of it.
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.
Idiotic conspiracy theories are idiotic
Idiotic coincidence theories are idiotic
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!
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.
Lasik is a great example, thank you!
Though I wouldn’t put glasses in the same category because it’s not a cure, it’s a medical device to correct the medical issue and it requires you to use the device for the rest of your life, if you stop using the device your symptoms immediately return, that’s not a cure. Glasses are the equivalent of insulin for diabetes. It’s treatment, not cure, without it, the disease takes full effect, but with it, yes you will be functionally cured as long as you have your glasses/insulin available, but even when functionally cured, you will always be a person with low vision/diabetes and always need ongoing treatment…until there’s a “cure”.
If my poor vision was cured by getting glasses I wouldn’t be squinting while I’m typing this in size 18 font (my glasses are in the other room and I’m too lazy to get them), and I wouldn’t suddenly be completely disabled by my lack of vision when it rains (glasses need to come with windscreen wipers! I can’t see shit in the rain)
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
There’s surgical interventions that cure a lot of things, like certain kinds of blindness, or pretty much anything that requires a transplant.
With two prospective diabetes cures moving towards human trials, I hope there will be a more compelling answer in 10 years or so, but that’s TBD.
Ahh… The ol’ “What do you call alternative medicine that works?”-aroo.
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.
To be fair, and it’s still bullshit, we also look at number of patients per week per cost. Crispr for example, could be used for a huge variety of issues, but curing 100 people globally for $100M in clinical development is just not going to work.
Crispr is the exception:
- it’s massively expensive
- it can cure multiple illnesses and perform loads of other functions
Most proposals for cures are a fairly simple (and cheap) therapeutic target that will only work for one condition or even just a subset of cases within that condition.
“In the case of infectious diseases such as hepatitis C, curing existing patients also decreases the number of carriers able to transmit the virus to new patients,” the memo argued.
Jesus. Fucking. Christ. They’re not just arguing against curing chronic illnesses, they’re arguing against curing infectious chronic illnesses because it creates less patients to extort in the long run. That is one of the most heinous things I’ve seen put to paper.
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
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.
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are they wrong though?
Yes.
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”
Quite the contrary, there are some rare illnesses that are unique in that they do have actual cures now. For example, the Sickle Cell gene therapy is the first gene-editing treatment to be approved for human use and completely cures the individual patient of Sickle Cell disease.
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.
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.
Not to mention, evolution. You can’t stop it unless you 100% eradicate the things that could evolve.
Time, money, and patience are required to understand novel pathogens, and those three things are in short supply in a “get rich quick” society.
I’m not disagreeing with most of what you said but throwing money at a problem would have significantly higher return on investment if that money wasn’t being slurped up by the capitalist machine.
It also might work a bit better if the country as a whole hadn’t been institutionalising profit driven medical sciences for the last 100 years.
Or to use an analogy.
It’s like pointing out that “just throwing oil” at a car engine that hasn’t been serviced in 150k is a failure of oil to fix the problem.
I mean, yes, technically you have a problem, you put oil in and the problem didn’t go away, but is the problem really the oil ?
In this analogy capitalism is the oil thieves, draining your oil out of the bottom of the engine while you fill it up.
This is such a lie. This only works if you assume no other people will ever develop one of those illnesses. Even if all acquired illnesses are ever eradicated, big pharma companies will still make bank off hygiene products, makeup, and Aspirin. Pharma companies don’t just sell treatments and cures. Duh.
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.
For the record PrEP exists and it is pretty effective in preventing getting HIV (the virus that causes AIDS). Yet another reason the OP is dumb. Also, HIV can be prevented from turning into AIDS now, too.
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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
Of the 10k or so identified chronic diseases, about 95% of them are genetic
Given that we, as humanity, have just barely started ( in research time. From 1987 to 2024, that’s almost 40 years of research, and development, basically nothing on one of, if not the toughest field in the world, and we are still doing breakthroughs on it)
In fact this research has been the cause of improving the quality of life for people with these diseases as care for the patients during test reveals more data.
Also remember, low understanding of the technology, particularly AI which is extremely helpful in these types of researches and past eugenics fears have marred the general zeitgeist for years, which may also cause early adoption to be difficult.
I mean come on, people are still scared about genetically modified food.
And also, another one thing to remember is that a lot, like 80% of these diseases, have an inherent risk for the life of the patient, which slows the research as this limits the amount of data you can get.
So, we are not yet at the point of cracking the genetic makeup of a disease, chugging it into a bioreactor, and whipping billions of potential enhanced cures adapted for the specific body chemical makeup, but we are getting there.
So yeah there is no conspiracy.
Billions of dollars have been spent only on cancer research, imagine for the rest of diseases. If a government had cancer cure done for X type of cancer, they’d deploy that shit like Doritos locos at the mall and ensure themselves indefinite reelections forever.
It’s just really, really, RIDICULOUSLY difficult.
But, we are humans, difficult for us, is an old friend
I’ve grown up fascinated with several diseases and was eager to study them and find treatments that would better and prolong the life of the patients. By the time I was done with university my disease pet peeves were already very well managed. Take cystic fibrosis, a disease that was still considered a childhood disease when I was born in the 90s. With trikafta and other treatments CF patients now climb mount everest and whatnot. They have kids, back in school I learned that the few cases who made it to adulthood were infertile because of their viscous mucus. Like, I would love to work on an mRNA based gene therapy for it, but it seems almost unnecessary, given how manageable the disease has become.
I also agree and want to stress what you are saying about the acceptance of gene therapy/ GMOs in general. I am in Germany and people here are insanely against GMOs of any kind. Manipulating the human genome is so far off the rails for the vast majority, I mean there is still so much hate against GMOs in food, we are nowhere near trying to use gene therapy on a broad scale. Let alone that to actually cure a genetic disease, you would have to undergo the gene therapy while you’re still a zygote. This is simply illegal here. Our research opportunities are severely limited on genetic manipulation.
This.
Yes, yes, there are conspiracies here and there, but these days we can’t have any reason anymore, everything must have an evil genius behind it.
This is just another case of “it’s not that easy”
citation needed
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.
Most of the answers to why a specific drug works are “we dunno but we tried it, compared it to people who didn’t get the drug and these guys got better”. Medicine is crawling right now and I would love to see it run.
Even going so far to use male mice for experimenting exclusively due to fluctuations of female hormones during cycle (which fuck up statistics)… In some cases leading to less effective medication for women than men.
Guesswork at best…
