One more: we’re now rolling out a highly safe and effective HiB vaccine to the developing world. Around 5 years old from first clinical trials.
[QUOTE=I’m sure you would love to cure it, but if your company makes any money on treatment of this specifc disease, I find it hard to believe they are anxious to give up those profits.[/QUOTE]
Ok, so the researchers at the company are not in on this conspiracy if you accept that I would love to cure the disease. So, in other words, the company is employing thousands of researchers to work on the cures for diseases. Once these cures are found, the company quashes them. Wouldn’t it be simpler to not work on the cure for the disease in the first place.
Ok, Occam’s Razor:
All human diseases have not been cured yet because:
a) Molecular biology, genetics and immunology are complicated and take time to work out.
b) A conspiracy of millions of biotechnology employees (including myself).
No, take it back a couple of steps - when the company is making decisions on how to spend its time and resources, I believe it makes a conscious decision that a cure is not as cost-returning as a symptom treatment.
Floyd, I think you’re completely right when you say that you live in a medicated nation ( and Canada’s no better). I’ve posted here a couple of times about how I’m learning to cure my anxiety disorder, and I’ve been met with a resounding lack of interest from other anxiety sufferers. I find it hard to believe that people would rather be medicated than learn to feel better on their own, but that seems to be what people are interested in. Thinking about it, I can’t really blame them - it’s the culture we live in. Instant results and never feeling bad - that’s our goal.
Except that what I’m telling you (and I guess you can consider this anecdotal and a lie if that helps keep this conspiracy in place) is that I personally work on an autoimmune disease. I, personally have instructions to work toward molecular pathways that would allow for a cure. I, personally go to every work in progress meeting in my department and hear what everyone else is working on. So, this conspiracy of fat cats would have to include me in order to work. And it doesn’t include me, so I know, at least for myself, that your conspiracy theory is bunk. I just would love to get across to others who don’t have the same personal experience that this is bunk.
The company that cures cancer would experience an absolute windfall of money, in addition to curing a disease. There is incentive to do both. There are enough diseases to work on that if we cure one, we aren’t in danger of running out of 'em.
I have no reason to believe you’re lying, and no personal attachment to conspiracy theory. If you say your company is actively trying to find cures, good for you, and keep up the good work. Is this true for even the largest of pharmaceutical companies, though? If a cure is found for depression and anxiety, wouldn’t the makers of Paxil, Xanax, Wellbutrin and Ativan take a serious financial hit? It seems naive to think that companies making billions of dollars treating anxiety and depression would spend any of their money looking for cures for anxiety and depression. I can see that looking to big pharma for cures makes no sense. Who else is looking for cures? Researchers at smaller institutes? Government? Academics? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
I work at a large company (ie, you’ve very likely heard of it).
You want a cure for anxiety and depression? You have to understand that that is asking quite a lot. We have only the vaguest notions of what is causing these things. It is almost certainly a mixture of quite a lot of things, some biological, some environmental. If it looks like we’re only treating the symptoms, that’s because all a pill can do is hit the biological. No pill in the world is going to change your life circumstances. Even the biolgicial is remarkably complex? There is no way in hell that “depression” is caused by one gene or one protein even in a single person, no less the population at large.
When you look at the diseases that have been cured, the vast majority are cured by either antiobiotics or vaccines. In other words, things that we don’t really need to understand on a molecular level how they work. Antibiotics are like shotguns; they disrupt entire bacterial systems. Vaccines are similar in that we don’t have to understand how they work, merely that the vaccine is similar enough to the disease, yet non-pathogenic. HIV would be a hell of a lot easier to cure if it didn’t have that damned reverse transcriptase screwing everything up by inducing mutations in the virus at a rate that makes vaccines and/or therapeutics maddeningly difficult to come up with.
I think people who are not involved in scientific research severely underestimate the time it takes to do these things. It isn’t like the movies. If I had a great idea tonight about how to cure cancer, I would not be able to go into my lab tomorrow and mix a few things together before exclaiming, “Eureka! I have cured cancer!” It would take years to get anywhere. And, in the end, it’s unlikely that my idea would work. Plus “cancer” is not caused by any one thing either. Even if we are just talking about one type of cancer, like breast, there are many genetic mutations that can be involved, many molecular targets and many immune responses. Cancer is unlikely to ever be cured. It is more likely that tumors expressing certain molecular targets will be able to be treated one at a time.
Finally, treating the symptoms is not a bad thing. First of all, some diseases ARE symptoms as much as we know about them right now. Vioxx was mentioned earlier. Cox-2 inhibition was a GREAT idea, and I’m certain when the story is writtin they will be useful in some people. But we can’t “cure” pain. We can only treat it. And when we do treat it, we are only treating the symptom. We shouldn’t be faulted for that.
Fiveyearlurker, I really hope you pony up the dough to become a permanent member around here.
So, when you signing up to help us fight ignorance, Fiveyearlurker? Cause you’re doing great here. (No sarcasm intended. Your posts are very informative.)
I agree with you completely about curing anxiety and depression - it is very complex, and probably not going to be cured by a chemical, since (unlike most of the medical community) I don’t believe it is caused by a simple serotonin imbalance. How about diabetes - the cause of this disease is known (loss of insulin production by Beta cells in Islets of Langerhans, although why they stop working, I don’t believe is known yet), treatment is known, efficacious, and profitable. Are people actually working on a cure for diabetes, or are they working on better, longer lasting, more stable insulin injections for rest of the patient’s life?
Diabetes is a good example of what I’ve been trying to get at, and you hit the nail on the head. Yeah, loss of beta cells causes diabetes. So, based on what is currently known about the disease, we’ve “cured” it. We can suplement insulin and replace the beta cells.
But, what the hell causes diabetics to lose beta cell production of insulin, and what the ultimate cause of diabetes, is a WIDE open area of research, with thousands of people working in it. I’m actually working in a different autoimmune disease partially because how crowded diabetes is. Based on what we currently know about diabetes it would be impossible to “cure” it. We don’t even know what causes it. Latent infection? Presentation of self antigens? Until I know the answer to that, I wouldn’t even begin to look to cure it.
As an aside, as much as I don’t want to admit it, diabetes might be a good example of the treatment hindering the cure. Though, not on the nefarious conspiracy theory level, since insulin is very effective, and not terribly expensive, diabetes might not get the attention that other diseases get. Not because we don’t want to cure it, but, personally, I’d rather work on a disease where there isn’t any treatment.
The molecular basis of disease is in its absolute infancy. When I look at papers from only ten years ago, I always laugh at the primitive techniques they had to use to do certain experiments that I would be able to do in an hour with current technology. I mean, in the same time they could do Northern blot analysis to look at the gene expression of one gene, I can do microarray to look at the gene expression of damn near every gene. When we understand diseases on a molecular level, we can cure them with inhibitors or antibodies that are effective and absolutely specific.
Thanks for the ego boost about joining on. I’ll think about it, but in general, I just like to read the posts:
Post 1: Evolution isn’t real
Post 2 - 94: Yes it is.
Post 95: You can’t prove creationism ISN"T real.
Post 96: George Bush is dumb.
Post 97-156: The burden of proof is on you.
Post 157: John Kerry eats babies…
As an another aside, is it creepy to know that I read these posts every day? I know ALL Of you guys, but I just lurk among you…
Fiveyearlurker, I’d just like to add my voice to Scout’s and Featherlou’s and hope that you sign up to become a permanent member, some really good posts from you here (and from others as well).
I’m in the pharma field myself but on the government/buyer side.