I’m ashamed to admit that the first seed of this idea was planted in my head my convict/author Kevin Trudeau during one of his infomercials. Does the world of corporate medicine dedicate almost all of their research money to finding new drugs (or new uses for current drugs) in the area of long term treatment of diseases and conditions? It would stand to reason that it is more profitable to sell a person a pill they must take every day for the rest of their life than it is to sell a single shot that could be administered in a simple doctor appointment.
Not if your competitor is selling the cure it isn’t…
This goes hand-in-hand with the old medical conspiracy theory that it’s in mainstream medicine’s best economic interest to make you sick and keep you sick. The implication being that there are real cures out there that are being suppressed, because if the public ever found out about them the medical industry would lose money.
Not surprisingly, you’ll find that the strongest advocates for this “evil mainstream medicine” theory are also the ones that sell alternative cures. Wonder of wonders, they rarely mention their own profit motive. Alternative medicine is a multi-billion dollar industry. The herbal supplement industry alone pulled down $20 billion in revenue in 2004. (Source: http://www.themedica.com/industry-overview.html )
Here’s an interesting article that may shed some light on your question. (“How Much Money Did Jonas Salk Potentially Forfeit By Not Patenting The Polio Vaccine”?) If you can keep R&D under about $25 billion, there’s probably some money to be made.
I don’t think cures can be shut out because of competitors who want to keep selling the daily pill. What is a problem is that companies are more eager to invest in research on the daily pill – but only if they think a cure isn’t about to happen.
There’s a lot of drug companies in the world. You think RussPharm wouldn’t want to cure cancer?
And not all drug research is funded by drug companies anyway. Much of it is just random pure research.
It’s easy to accuse biotech companies of colluding to withhold cures because there’s no money in it, but this is a little disingenuous when one considers complex disease processes.
Apart from vaccines and antibiotics, I’m having trouble thinking of major life-threatening diseases that allow a patient to take one dose of something and, -presto-, the person is cured. Other dopers have far more expertise than I do, so they will likely think of some diseases like that. Vaccine manufacturers have been struggling lately but I don’t think antibiotic manufacturers are going out of business anytime soon.
Psychiatric drugs for things like depression or schizophrenia aren’t amenable to a one-dose cure because of their etiologies. Likewise for cancer and heart disease - how would a one-dose drug work for those diseases? Treatment for these diseases are often multimodality, meaning that you need a combination of drugs and surgery to “cure” the disease.
In cancer, you may be 99% disease free, but you also want to continue to stay on certain drugs for a while, just to make sure that any hidden cancer cells don’t strike back. Would you consider that as a greedy maneuver by a biotech company, or just good clinical practice to protect the patient from cancer recurrence? Likewise for depression: it takes a while to change brain chemistry based on our current understanding. We also know that after going off drugs, the same depression symptoms can come back. Is that the fault of the drug or the greedy drug company?
Like **aNewLeaf **said, institutions like academic hospitals and laboratories also try to treat diseases with new cures because of their research interests and because they’re not 100% driven by a profit motive.
bleach - pretty much nailed it. You may have a disease with specific symptoms, but many causes, and the cause may be your exposure to something or a combination of exposures to a lot of different things both internal to your genes (breast cancer - in some cases is heritary) and/or external and environmental (lung cancer - in some cases is caused by smoking).
Having worked in biotech reseach for many years, I can tell you that notion of ‘hiding’ a cure to make more money treating symptoms is ridiculous, and has never been backed up by any evidence. Even in the case where something is delayed due to the FDA requesting additional data in clinical trials, it is because they want to make sure the drug is safe and effective first. They are not colluding to keep drugs off the street. Even with the best of intentions, some drugs can have unforeseen side effects, especially when combined with other drugs, and there are always a battalion of lawyers standing at the ready to run huge class action lawsuits when that occurs. This is one of many reasons all that extra testing has to take place.
They have universal health care in Germany and the UK and Japan and Canada and France. And they have scientists and doctors there.
It’s a lot more profitable for the German government to make a pill to cure cancer than it is to tax everyone in the country to treat everyone’s cancer forever. So why don’t German doctors cure cancer? There are doctors in Germany who die of cancer and have loved ones die of cancer, you’d think if they knew a cure they’d break the cartel’s silence if only to save their own lives.
Perhaps they just pretend to die - and live on the same island where the survivors from the missing planes from September 11th are living out the rest of their days.
Actually, antibiotic research is one area where there is a major problem - there have been few new antibiotics approved for in recent years, and many pharmaceutical companies have shut down antibiotic development programs. The problem is that any new antibiotics will not be a new penicillin - it will be a drug of last resort for highly resistant strains of bacteria. So the market is small compared with the development cost. It will take a streamlined lower-cost process to trigger new developments in this area.
Global spending on diseases of poverty like tropical diseases is low. There is no money in treating these conditions, the people who have them earn less than $2/day.
Antibiotic resistance is growing because we aren’t creating new antibiotics. A reason for that is antibiotics are drugs you take for a short time, then stop. They aren’t a lifestyle drug you take for life like drugs for CVD, diabetes, arthritis, etc.
Globally, spending on an HIV vaccine is $750 million a year. Thats not a whole lot of money seeing how the global pharma industry is 300-400 billion a year.
On the other hand, as others have said, most wealthy countries have integrated universal health care systems. From the perspective of private industry there is no money in a cure (unless the cure can be marketed for thousands of dollars per person) but from the POV of an integrated health system there is motive to find cures. A cure for Alzheimers will save europe and America far more money than drugs to manage it. So the public sector has motivation to find cures. But the private sector really doesn’t seem to, their motive is on management via lifetime medication.
So I don’t think anyone hides cures, but diseases that only affect globally poor people or medications that are only taken once (esp if medications already exist that mostly do the same thing for a few bucks like antibiotics) do not have that much incentive from a financial POV to private industry. To the public sector there is a motivation to fund R&D into cures for lifestyle diseases though. But the trendline is for R&D to move more towards the private sector and away from public the last few decades at least in the US.
Let me just point out that dentists shot themselves in the foot by advocating fluoridation–but they went ahead and did it anyway. There are enough good-hearted people to make the scenario impossible. Don’t forget that drug company executives and their family members die of cancer too.
There’s a really, really obvious solution to this problem. Probably not politically feasible in the US, but the rest of us could step up to the plate with some juicy chunks of public money to be awarded to successful developers of new antibiotics that are effective against otherwise-resistant bacteria.
Thanks very much for correcting my statement, si.
This doesn’t fit neatly with alternative health practitioners’ narratives but there are tens of thousands of people like **Yarster **who work in biotech who care about curing diseases and care about patients. They would like nothing better than to cure a disease with their scientific talents. Earning fat salaries is not their primary motivation. Of course, there are greed bags in the industry too, but those also exist among people who peddle alternative cures.
This is partly done in the US through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) under the NIH (taxpayer funded). They do their own research as well as put up public money for researchers in the form of competitive grants. I think what you’re proposing is more of a grass roots idea though?
I recall reading in the 1980’s about a vaccine to eliminate cavities being just around the corner… :dubious:
However, yes, this falls into the same category as the 100mpg carburetor - don’t you think the Soviet Union or China (or Japan, importing all their oil) would use the device no matter how hard big oil suppressed it?
Same thing with cures. If there were a 10-pill regimen that killed any cancer, or a vaccine for the common cold or high blood pressure or prevent strokes (or a once-a-year Viagra shot) someone would promote it for the glory and Nobel prize, some country tired of spending a fortune on the alternative would be using it.
A lot of modern medicine is not a crapshoot (some is…) The research is done that understands a lot of basic mechanisms for diseases and body chemistry. Eventually, it would become obvious enough what should work that nobody could really hide it.
(IIRC the genius of Dr. Banting was not in “discovering” insulin, but in showing - against the opinion of skeptic experts - that insulin recovered and purified from livestock then could be injected into humans to do the approximate equivalent job as the now destroyed islets; basically that there was nothing magical about human vs. animal biochemistry.)
And another experimental procedure in the early 2000s, which also promised to end cavities with a single treatment: bacterial replacement therapy. From what my dentist told me, it didn’t pan out: The old, destructive bacteria always moved back in and displaced the harmless bacteria. We’d have to eradicate the lactic-acid-producing cavity bacterial from the Earth altogether for this treatment to have a chance of working.
Even if you replace the acid producing bacteria, there is still acid from food. Enamel starts to degrade below 5.5, and soda has a pH of around 2-3. Virtually all beverages other than water and milk have acidic pH. So dentists wouldn’t go out of business.
Long story short : there’s a book on this subject titled “the 800 million dollar pill”.
This book actually looks at the hard numbers and financials of the pharmaceutical industry. To summarize, one key point is that
a. Most useful new drug candidates actually come from publicly funded research
b. The pharmaceutical companies spend most of their R&D efforts on drugs that aid minor ailments (such as heartburn, ED, etc). Often, an effective and profitable drug already exists, but the patent is set to expire.
The simple truth is that the profit motive does not lead to pharmaceutical companies efficiently spending the incredible sums they rake in as a result of legally granted monopolies on efforts that benefit the society that grants them these monopolies.
This has serious consequences, one notable one is that there are very few new antibiotics being researched. It isn’t as if there aren’t thousands, perhaps millions of small molecules that could act like an antibiotic yet to be discovered, but there’s no interest in the R&D because it is not profitable. (despite tens of thousands of people dying every year because there are now bacteria that have evolved resistance to all the antibiotics currently in use)
Now, with that said, they don’t deliberately skip on cures per say, but it is completely true that a drug candidate that seems to cure a fatal illness that only affects a few people will be passed up by the industry.