Damn, I was hoping that revival of this thread meant that conman Trudeau was up on new charges of bilking poor saps who believe that They Don’t Want You To Know.
Frankly there is a heck of a lot more money in “treating” illness, than in “curing” illness.
Unless a competing pharmaceutical company comes up with (and patents) a cure. Then no one will buy your treatment, because they will all be buying your competitor’s cure. At that point, there is a heck of a lot more money in curing the illness than in treating it.
Close; Night on Mispec Moor.
That assumes that they don’t all have an under the table or unspoken agreement to not research a cure. Companies are not ideologically committed to some sort of platonic idea of free market competition; if they can make more money by cooperating and fixing prices (and get away with it), they will.
Or they research it, patent it, and then use the patent to deny any other company from using the same cure. As an aside, that sort of patent and deny tactic is one reason I think copyright law needs a use-it-or-lose-it provision; copyright law is supposed to encourage innovation and technological progress, not stifle it.
So let’s review who They are and why They Don’t Want You To Know.
They are drug companies, including all the executives, researchers and lab staff who have combined to not only deny cheap, highly effective cures to you but to themselves, their loved ones and friends.
They are non-pharmaceutical company-based researchers who similarly Don’t Want You To Know, and also wish to deny natural cures to themselves, family and friends.
They are physicians who prefer to sicken and die along with their loved ones and friends (not to mention the patients about whom they have only sinister motives) rather than inform you about the fabulous cures already available or being suppressed by Them.
And of course there’s Big Corporate Media, all the members of which would rather suffer from cancer and various chronic diseases (along with family and friends) than acknowledge all the terrific cures they Don’t Want Us To Know About.
We could cure cancer, AIDS, heart disease, arthritis and all other chronic ailments right now (it’s so very simple!) except all the parties involved are so greedy, heartless and stupid that they prefer we all suffer and die rather than promote the Truth.
Glad to clear that up.
Buying a curing drug is a one shot deal. Big bucks in keeping you on a treatment drug for life.
Not by any huge amount; the difference in life expectancy between the best nation (Japan) and the US is a little of 4 years. And there are factors loosely or unrelated to a country’s medical and food systems that have a notable impact of life expectancy, like homicide or auto accidents, that vary widely between nations. For example, the US has an unusually large amount of the above two kinds of deaths, due to a variety of factors; if you excluded deaths from traffic accidents and homicides, the US would have the longest life expectancy in the world.
No, it’s just the upper executives in charge of the pharmaceutical companies who matter. The rest of those people are employees who’ll do what they are told if they don’t want to be fired, or outsiders powerless to do anything. It only takes a few people to decide that some cure is sat on or just not researched. And if they aren’t sick from that particular disease they aren’t likely to care if other people suffer or die from the lack of a cure, not if their suffering and death makes a profit.
I doubt that many if any of those cures are “natural”, however.
I used to use a drug called (in Canada, at least) isordil. It was a long acting form of nitroglycerin and I took it (sublingually) before starting out on my daily walk, which started near a hill (actually an overpass) that always induced angina. It was generic, cheap, and effective. Sometime early in the millennium they simply stopped making it. In favor of sprays that are much more awkward to carry and use (and–needless to add–a good deal more expensive). Fortunately for me, at some point, the angina has disappeared.
OK, this is an anecdote. But rather more than an anecdote is the review of three books about psychoactive drugs that I read last night in NY Review of Books. The author is Marcia Angell, formerly editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the most highly respected medical journals in the world. Actually, she discussed only two of the books; a second installment will review the third and perhaps morph into a general discussion. The first of these books was based on a retrospective review of all the studies that were submitted to the FDA for the approval of several of these drugs. Although they all showed the drugs effective and more effective than doing nothing, they were only slightly more effective, in double blind tests, than placebos. Moreover they cast doubt on even that degree of effectiveness because many of the subjects deduced, from side effects, that they were getting the real drugs. So it is not obvious that they are doing anything, but they work when the patient expects them to work. Moreover they are not benign. She discussed prozac in particular. It inhibits the disappearance of the neurotransmitter serotonin at synapses after they have fired. Eventually, the body adjusts to the higher concentration of serotonin at the synapses by having the transmitting neuron release less serotonin and having the receiving neuron requiring a higher concentration to respond. So if you stop it, you are worse shape than if you had never started. The same is even truer of antipsychotics. They cause a condition called, IIRC (it wasn’t named in the article) tardive dyskinesia which looks like parkinson’s (and actually is, I guess since they are both the result of suppression of a different neurotransmitter.
What she didn’t discuss is whether your body will readjust if you are gradually weaned off of them, but I assume it will. Fascinating article.
Now are the drug companies aware of this. I assume that after all this time they are. Are the doctors? Probably not. In my experience, doctors really do care for their patients, but if they are misinformed they may think they are doing the right thing when they aren’t. And anyone who thinks the drug companies can suppress a miraculous cure for cancer, well I have a bridge to sell them.
Patents only last for 22 years, and to get a patent you have to make your invention public. This is where all the generic drugs you hear about come from–they are drugs that were patented, but now that the patent has run out everyone is free to make copies of that drug and sell them.
But I stand by what I said 7 years ago.
Pharmaceutical companies in the United States are not the only organizations in the world that provide health care. There happen to be all sorts of other health organizations in the world.
We can stipulate that American pharmaceutical companies are as evil and short-sighted as you like. Why would the British National Health Service try to supress natural cures? They have no financial incentive to hide cures for chronic diseases, rather the opposite. How about in France? Or Germany? Or Japan? Or Australia? Or Belgium? All these countries have universal health care. In fact, every first world country except the United States has universal health care. So I can understand why an American Pharmaceutical company might supress a cure for a disease because they make a lot of money treating the disease, but what’s the incentive for a national health service to do the same thing?
And don’t forget, the United States also has a massive government created health infrastructure, that’s actually as large as most other countries with universal health care, the only difference is that our massive system only covers a fraction of the population, not everyone. And there are gigantic not-for-profit health care organizations out there. It’s true that American pharmaceutical companies aren’t spending a lot of time trying to find a cure of AIDS. So? That doesn’t mean no one is doing that research, just that a few big American pharma companies aren’t. Neither are Microsoft, or General Motors, or Newscorp, or Sony. Pharma companies research drugs to make money. If there are diseases that aren’t profitable to cure, that’s what public health is for.
They don’t have one. Which is a major reason medical research hasn’t ground to a standstill.
Is there a question anywhere here?
Agreed, and that’s why we have anti-trust and anti-collusion laws and price-fixing laws, and associated penalties. What you’re proposing is a conspiracy on par with the lunar landing hoax, i.e. one with huge numbers of people who have all remained completely silent over numerous decades. Moreover, a conspiracy that involves every single pharmaceutical company out there. It’s unstable: if nineteen pharmaceutical companies are all putting out drugs to treat some disease - fighting each other for market share - and a twentieth company opts to develop/patent/market a cure, that company will rake in big bucks, and the other nineteen companies won’t rake in a damn thing.
Until the patent expires. and then the cure is public knowledge. Are you aware of any disease cures that have been patented (and then deliberately not marketed) in the manner you describe?
Right. So even if there’s a simple well-known cure for cancer/whatever that that Big Pharma doesn’t want you to know about, why doesn’t the Japanese national health service tell everyone in Japan about it? And then, when everyone in Japan knows about it, we’d find out about it to, because we now have the technology to communicate with people in far-away Japan even though it’s on the other side of the world?
Are paranoia and gullibility timeless?
Yes.
That’s the Latin name for St. John’s Wort.
Quoth Der Trihs:
You don’t know very many scientists, do you? Trying to get us to do as we’re told is like herding cats. Especially since the folks running the companies probably don’t have a clue what the folks in the labs are actually doing, and there’s a very fine line between something that treats an illness indefinitely and something that cures it. Anything the management could do to suppress cures would also have the effect of suppressing everything else, too, at which point the pharmaceutical company would no longer have anything at all to sell. This is supposed to be something the greedy executives would do? What are they, gnomes?
[post=5434641]So it seems[/post]. 
There is nothing more annoying than the “Big Pharma” conspiracy theorists. Relatively sane people who rightfully sneer at 9/11 Truthers, Birthers, moon-landing hoaxers, Area-51/Roswell alien believers, and other idiotic beliefs seem to go bugfuck when it comes to believing that there’s an international, multi-decade, multi-corporation collusion to allow people to remain sick in order to sell unnecessary and ineffective pills.
Wrong, because pharmaceutical companies actually do a lot of the research needed to create new drugs.