--- Alberto Monteiro <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Gautam Mukunda wrote: > And I have a suspicion as to _why_. > > Every other science has progressed geometrically > over the past > 50 years. If Medicine had advanced the way computers > have, we > would have a life expectancy of 500 years [except > that once every > 42 days our bodies would burn, and we would have to > be rebuild > from the clone backup :-)]
I was about to make that joke... First, I don't think every other science _has_ progressed geometrically over the past 50 years. I'm not sure that theoretical physics, for example, is all that far advanced today over where it was in 1960, say - Dan M. can confirm or deny that statement. But the reason for that is because biology doesn't have the theoretical foundations that physics and chemistry do. It doesn't have anything to do with the pharmacos, it's just that this stuff is harder. We don't have a theoretical model of any high degree of usefulness for the brain or the liver, for example. We still don't understand how proteins interact. We only sequenced the human genome a few years ago, and we've barely begun figuring out what proteins are expressed by it, much less how those proteins will interact with each other. That puts biology in about the place physics was...before Newton. So _of course_ medical science hasn't advanced geometrically yet. > I am not blaming them for _not_ doing this. I am > blaming > everybody else that allows them to control medical > research. But they don't. They're pretty good at it, but I doubt that even half of the US's research spending is from the pharmacos. What they do control is _development_, but they control it because they're the only people who are any good at it. Medical research is still heavily the province of governments and universities, so if we're not finding "cures", it's because _they_ haven't found them. > Did they? What about the new superbacterias that > resist every > antibiotic? What about them? There are almost no cases of such bacteria actually doing much outside the laboratory. As it is, we got 50 years of virtual freedom from bacterial diseases, which was pretty good, and we can still knock them back much more often than 999 times out of 1000. The reason that those "superbacteria" aren't killing many people yet is, again, because of the fecundity of the pharmacos, developing not just one antibiotic (penicillin), but everything from amoxicillin to cipro, so we have many different ways to attack a bug. Not enough, and we need to develop more, but the ones we have are because of private industry efforts. > No, I am not. But there is no _cure_, just expensive > drugs > to turn cancer into a chronical disease. Alberto, I don't understand what you mean by this. One of my aunt's had breast cancer a few years ago - she had surgery, took chemo for a while, and now she's not. It's past the five year point, so statistically her likelihood of a recurrence is (IIRC) about the same as that for a person who has never had cancer. She's not taking any drugs right now. If that's not a cure, what is? Cancer isn't a bacteria, we can't kill it with a single pill. It's hard to do. What's amazing is how far we've come. > Who extract huge profits from drugs that keep cancer > patients bound to them _forever_. Except they don't. To pick an example, one of my best friends in high school had pediatric cancer as an infact - something in his eye, I think. He wasn't on any drugs. He had been "cured", for all practical purposes? Now, if a pharmaco could create a drug that could turn every cancer into a chronic condition - what a blessing that would be! If only we were somehow able to do that. But we can't. The record so far is pretty good, though. Not good enough, but it gets better every day. I would not be stunned to see most cancers treated exactly that way - turned into chronic conditions - in my lifetime. I _expect_ to see heart disease treated that way in my lifetime (if the results from the Phase II clinical trials on Pfizer's HDL enhancing drug end up being as good as some people hope, that result might actually be in sight.) > Ok, but then it's still 0 x 0 :-) Yeah, but the record of people trying to run a 2 minute mile is also pretty bad. We don't tell runners to stop running because of it, or call them incompetent for failing to do it. > Do you think you are so much smarter than any > advisor > that has ever counseled the drug companies? Don't > you think > any other intelligent consultant could duplicate > your reasoning > that it's a bad idea to research a drug that cures > disease X > instead of a drug that keeps a X-patient forced > _forever_ to buy > drugs that will extend his life? I was a very average consultant, so I'm sure plenty of other consultants have made this calculation. Here's the thing, though. If pharmaco A has a drug that converts a life-threatening condition into a chronic one...then pharmacos B, C, D, E, and F have an incentive to develop that one pill cure you're talking about. That's where the money will be. If they haven't developed those drugs, it's probably because they _can't_, not because they don't want to. Now where your criticism might be right is if you said then pharmacos have an incentive to focus their research on chronic problems instead of acute ones. There's absolutely truth to that. But if you look at the major killers in the developed world, they tend to be chronic issues (lifestyle issues most often). So what else can you do given current technology? The developing world is very different, of course. So I guess if the developed world wanted to deal with those diseases we might be able to cure by your definition, the best way to do it would be for massive government spending to create a market for these drugs, so that the pharmacos would have an incentive to develop drugs to do that. But that's a tax issue - the developed world has to be willing to spend that kind of money. It's not a criticism of pharma that they don't do that kind of research, because no one else is willing to spend the money to do it either, and they're the only people who _could_ if the money was there. > Capitalism has no compassion :-/ > > Alberto Monteiro Absolutely true. Pharmacos do, though. Merck, for example, spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing a drug for river blindness...and then gave it away for free. That's pretty compassionate. Beyond that, though, it's true that capitalism has no compassion. What capitalism has a surfeit of, though, is competence and innovation. Now, if I ever got cancer I would like to be treated by compassionate doctors. But if I had to choose between compassionate inept doctors, and brilliant uncompassionate ones, I wouldn't even have to think twice. People who are _good_ at their jobs are much preferable to people who care about their jobs but can't do them. Private sector health companies might not be compassionate, but they're very good, and they're the only things that are. ===== Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Freedom is not free" http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com _______________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Win 1 of 4,000 free domain names from Yahoo! Enter now. http://promotions.yahoo.com/goldrush _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
