These statements, and the article as a whole, give the impression that Mr. Thomas believes there is a cure for smallpox and polio. But there isn’t. Cite in the spoiler box:
I put the cites here because the smallpox article contains an extremely disturbing picture of a pox victim some may prefer to avoid.
We have vaccines for both those diseases, but no cure; that is, we can greatly lessen the chances of catching them, but we cannot effect a complete recovery in either case.
Is it fair to criticize Mr. Thomas for implying otherwise in his article? To me, they bespeak a critical research failure on his part, not to mention sloppy thinking; and even if I were inclined to agree with the rest of his argument, his sloppiness there would cause me to doubt him. But I’m not sure that’s fair?
Please not that I try not to ask rhetorical questions; I’d actually like to address the issue of his sloppy thinking, and I am not certain I am being fair in this criticism. Thoughts?
I suppose in the narrowest sense of the term, you are correct, but it seems like a nitpick to me.
I can’t get your link to load, so I can’t comment on whether or not this is germane to his article.
ETA - I accessed the article, and Thomas seems to be arguing in favor of more spending on research and less on treatment of diseases. So I still think it is a nitpick, and not particularly relevant to the merits of the article.
I suspect it’s not a matter of sloppy thinking as much as imprecise language. He used “cure” in the sense of “something that makes a disease not a problem,” which is a reasonable if nontechnical use. If he was a medical writer I would be concerned, but this is a mass-market editorial produced for a non-medical audience, and I think in that case we can give a little slack.
Given the prevalence of anti-vax nonsense I think it’s important to be precise about the terminology here. We can’t cure these diseases. We can prevent them. That’s just as good for the most part, but it’s not the same thing.
That was all you had issues with in the opinion piece?
Yeah, it’s not like anyone is funding research for any of those.
Just now? Before now the other people on earth never suffered the same as Americans?
He seems to be promoting the notion that curing disease is cheaper than treating it, problem is he doesn’t understand that there are options like prevention (vaccines as mentioned for polio) and he doesn’t acknowledge that cures don’t grow on trees. If we euthanize people who get sick it’s way cheaper than treating them, but I doubt that’s a solution many would support.
No. As I wrote in the OP, I had multiple problems, the biggest of which was the notion that it’s accetapable to go for long-term solutions even if that means ignoring short-term suffering. Someone whose HMO has denied him coverage for his cancer because it is a pre-existing condition cannot wait ten years for a cure.
I brought up cure ≠ vaccine issue because it seems emblematic of the sloppy thinking that permeates the article, but I’m not sure if I’m being fair in that particular assessment.
It is fair to call Cal Thomas both stupid and disingenuous in general.
When I was living in a small town for several years in the mid-1990s, he was one of the few op-ed columnists published in the local paper, so I read his column because there really wasn’t much else to read. Yes, he is both stupid and a lying sack of shit.
To be clear, I am asking about the particular statement mentioned in the OP – the claim that there are cures for tuberculosis and smallpox. I’m trying to decide whether I am being too nitpicky about that – and, more broadly, how great a misstatement must be to be discrediting of an argument.
So he seems to also be in favor of preventative care which would include vaccines.
That said he still is an idiot. Its not as if cancer researches haven’t stopped to think, “Hmmm maybe we should try curing this thing.” Scientists are working their collective buts off trying to find cures for the diseases he mentions. The problem is that they are hard to cure. In some cases we have found cures, for example breast cancer is cured in the vast majority of cases. In other cases we can kill 99% of the cancer cells, but the 1% which remain have mutated so they are resistant, and so 6 months later the cancer is back. With our new understanding of the human genome there are many new targeted therapies that can attack the specific genetic pathways of cancer cells and may revolutionize cancer treatment and radically increase the number of curable cancers.
His complaints about the FDA are also totally off base. It sounds like he wants the pharmaceutical market filled with the grandsons of laetrile. Before we bring drugs to market its important to know if they work, or if they kill you before the cancer does.
I agree. If one wanted to do some handwaving, one might argue that while the polio and small pox vaccines did not cure those diseases on an individual basis, they did cure the population of those diseases over time.
Agreed. I found it particularly charming when he argued about five years ago that we needed to curb illegal immigration because the damned furriners would give us all tuberculosis.
I think you are being fair. Preventing disease and curing disease are two different things. Prevention can involve vaccines, mechanical or chemical barriers, behavioural changes, etc. some of which may not have anything to do with medicine at all.
Agreed. It’s also worth mentioning wiki says the following about smallpox:
about TB:
Also note the wiki page on “cures” states the following:
So the initial statement that we “cannot effect a complete recovery”, is not true AFAICT. Several professionals in the medical community seem to to use the word as the op-ed did, so I think it would be wrong to call him on it.
Skald is eminently fair. I think the level of sloppy thinking shown in the confusion of cure and prevention indicates that Thomas is unqualified to have an opinion here.
Cure versus prevention is not the big problem. If we had a cure for some disease that could be cheaply applied before the disease harmed the person having it, we’d have something almost as good as prevention. This may not always be possible, since the disease might cause damage silently first.
Now for the stupidity. He seems to be implying that health care reform won’t cure anyone. However, we must have both prevention and the means of getting the prevention to people. If the reform means that more people get vaccines, it is indeed helping in prevention and thus making cures not necessary. Most insurance programs I know of today pay 100% for prevention, so it is not like his “insight” that prevention is better than treatment is anything new.
Second is his childish hope that throwing money at something will fix it - something I’ve always thought liberals were accused of. Jenner was not part of a major research program when he discovered the smallpox vaccine. There was more on polio, but nothing nearly as big as the war on Cancer. In any case, you get diminishing returns. Not every doctor who is excellent at treating patients would be excellent at doing research. He gives no evidence that increasing research funding levels by a significant amount would do much good - or that there are well qualified researchers to get the money. I’m sure there are plenty of idiots whose grant proposals always get rejected who’d take it.
In any case, the fame that would go to someone who could develop either a cure or vaccine for Alzheimer’s - and the money any drug maker would get from it - are more than enough to drive all the research that makes sense.
I believe that I read in a review of the new book on cancer that a problem with the War on Cancer was that knowledge of genetics was not yet advanced enough to really understand how cancer cells worked. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case here also.
I’m sure all the problems we have with health care can somehow be blamed on the Clinton administration. At least that’s how I remember the few times I read Cal Thomas back in the 90s.
Skald, I think the your specific point is a nitpick, whether or not the rest of Thomas’s argument is flawed. He clearly means it the way Blalron suggests–i.e., attacking a disease to find a means of effectively rendering it “gone,” something that no longer needs to be treated, a bygone tragedy that (for the most part) no longer requires hospital wards and lives lost or catastrophically altered. He is describing solutions that eliminate the need to treat diseases. Call it something other than a “cure,” but that’s his point–“Why are we fixated on treating illnesses, when we could be eliminating the need to treat them at all? Wouldn’t that be better?”
Now, this may be faulty logic for any number of other reasons. But if I saw someone on a TV show’s panel, for example, disputing this column’s thesis by attacking the “cure” word, I would probably roll my eyes and wonder if the “attacker” really had a point.
The bigger problem, I think, is in drawing a distinction between “cure” and “treatment”. Cancer, for instance, can be cured sometimes: You can start with a patient with cancer, and turn them into a person without cancer. The way this is done is by treatment which is particularly successful. Now, that treatment won’t always lead to a cure, but even in the cases where it doesn’t, it usually increases longevity and/or quality of life. And it’s usually a very long, drawn-out process.
Then, too, a “cure” as a concept doesn’t even make sense with regards to many medical conditions. Will we ever have a cure, or vaccination, or whatever, for broken bones? Of course not. But if your kid falls out of a tree and breaks his leg, you’re still going to need to go the hospital.
I see what you’re saying Skald, but I side with those saying that the nit you are picking is small potatoes indeed (to mix metaphors). I think he meant “cure” in the sense of “we made it so it’s not a big problem for our society anymore,” which is true enough.