Microblog Memes

Stop with your logic on the Internet!

And yes, the vast majority of the apparatus that is capitalism is evil, before anyone wants to think I'm simping for it.

Hell, most chronic disease cures are done by the evil and completely untrustworthy propaganda machine that is the government.

Yeah, we've cured a ton of previously chronic diseases. I don't know what planet these people live on. We've even effectively cured certain cancers in our lifetimes, and more will come. It's also just much harder to cure something than treat something.

Ahh... The ol' "What do you call alternative medicine that works?"-aroo.

Completely true. But there would be fewer of them.

It’s crazy that when my research team comes up with a therapeutic target we believe might lead to curing a disease, we get crickets from drug companies. But when we present therapeutic targets for long term treatment, we get lots of interest.

Not to mention, evolution. You can't stop it unless you 100% eradicate the things that could evolve.

Time, money, and patience are required to understand novel pathogens, and those three things are in short supply in a "get rich quick" society.

And if someone cures it first that's it, they win the whole pot until generics are approved.

lots of chronic diseases we have today are either degenerative or genetic, so it requires new fancy tools like gene therapy to rework lots of cellular biology at very low level. small molecule drugs can manage these to some degree, but these were a thing for like 50, 70 years now so that's why these are a thing

Thank you. You expressed everything I wanted to say.

Gatekeeping cures to illness just isn't true.

Yeah, this is a common truism that angry people confuse with actual criticism.

It would, in fact, be extremely profitable to develop a cure for something chronic. If you could make and sell one pill that cures AIDS, for instance, then you would become very rich (not to mention famous).

That's not a defense of capitalism. For-profit healthcare is a dystopian nightmare. When you consider that the AIDS cure would be too expensive for most people to buy, and only poor people would suffer from the disease, you should remember that that's how it is now! Poor people cannot afford cures available to rich people, cures for preventable diseases, cures for treatable and manageable diseases, cures for addiction and obesity. Poor people cannot afford to stop working long enough to seek treatment for basic aliments.

So no, scientists and doctors aren't conspiring to avoid working on cures in favor of treatment for chronic conditions. They're just going where the money is. They absolutely would cure any disease if it were possible, they just wouldn't share it with the world.

This.

Yes, yes, there are conspiracies here and there, but these days we can't have any reason anymore, everything must have an evil genius behind it.

This is just another case of "it's not that easy"

Most of the answers to why a specific drug works are "we dunno but we tried it, compared it to people who didn't get the drug and these guys got better". Medicine is crawling right now and I would love to see it run.

On a somewhat less severe side of things, lack of libido in women is still considered a jokey non-issue by most doctors but viagra has been on the market for decades for men.

Viagra doesn't treat a lack of libido, it treats a lack of blood flow to the relevant anatomy. And it was discovered by accident - a drug meant to treat high blood pressure and angina that was more effective at doing something else to blood flow. In other words it's not that men use viagra to have the desire, but rather to get the equipment to play along. Lack of libido in men is often a symptom of low testosterone, so they check for that and prescribe testosterone if that's the issue but that's really the entire toolbox on that front.

Lack of libido in women is a much harder problem to solve, and the first attempt at it that ever made it to market barely worked, had to be taken daily, and went horribly wrong if you consume any alcohol at all. There's a second that hit market a few years later that's supposedly more effective and isn't a daily regimen but is also an injection, has significant potential side effects and can't be mixed with naltrexone (a drug used to treat opioid addiction) because it will cause naltrexone not to work.

Compare to contraception, where there are tons of options available to women and basically all insurance is legally required to cover at least one brand of each type, including barrier methods, with a prescription. The options available to men are condoms or being surgically sterilized, and there's no requirement to cover either at all.

It's harder to get contraceptives for men approved because it doesn't prevent a medical condition for the user and so the bar for what is acceptable as a side effect is really low. You may have seen news stories about a male pill and men chickening out over the side effects (what wimps!) but the problem wasn't men backing out of the study, but that the acceptable side effects for a treatment that prevents a different person from developing a condition are so restrictive that they killed the study because it was already never going to be approved.

There is another male contraceptive that's been in development in India since the 80s, and as of 2022 has still not been approved - RISUG. Phase 3 clinical trials for RISUG were published more than twenty years ago. There's a variation of RISUG that's in development in the US called Vasalgel, and it's been in development here for over a decade. RISUG and Vasalgel are long term reversible contraceptives - think like an IUD - that consist of an injection in each of the vas deferens and lasts up to a decade, but can be removed earlier if needed by another set of injections in the vas deferens. Should it get approved in the US, there's no legal requirement that any insurance cover it, let alone without copay because the ACA specifically only requires coverage for contraceptive options for women.

What is this disinformation on Lemmy? There are so many counterexamples to this:

• If a patient doesn't find a cure, they'll go to a different doctor and sometimes leave their country to seek help (like when Americans go down to Mexico for treatment). Wouldn't it make more sense for them to fix you so you return when something else happens? Who ever goes to the doctor to stay sick?
• People will always be sick of one thing or another because not all illnesses are transmittable diseases so there's no shortage of customers if you cure them. Delivering babies and cosmetic surgeries don't even require you to be sick for the doctors to turn a good profit. Sometimes people fall and break a bone. Do you really think your doctor will keep your bone broken for profit? When has that ever happened without repercussions for the doctors?
• Most illnesses are self-limiting, meaning you will cure yourself over time and your doctor knows this and will be frank with you if you ask and they'll say "Yeah, but you can take this to alleviate your pain" and you can simply refuse. But thank god you went in anyway because now you know your stomach pain was food poisoning and not appendicitis which may need surgery because the symptoms overlap as is the case with many diseases.
• You can sue your doctor for malpractice and win because they're accountable to a board of ethics. They can lose their license and face jail time for making you suffer by knowing the cure and withholding it from you.
• Evolution will always find something to break, like new mutations to ancient viruses that led to covid/aids and inherited diseases like sickle cell disease. New diseases will always emerge because our world is always changing.
• There is no shortage of new people being born. It's a numbers game: Your case won't be any more profitable when they have 10 other people coming in that same day with whatever illness you have. They need to get people out the door to accommodate more people.
• Not all diseases can be cured, like cancer. And even if cancer is cured, you can't stop it from happening at the molecular level so you always have more customers needing treatment. (And no, sharks aren't immune to cancer, and yes research has made many cancers curable when detected early, and experimental cures are actively offered to the moribund.)
• There are plenty of examples of cures and total eradication, like smallpox and polio. Are doctors making less money because they're gone? Absolutely not.
• Most people who go into medicine are thoughtful, smart, compassionate individuals who want to help people and gladly take the Hippocratic Oath voluntarily. Don't confuse business practices by big corporations with your poor doctor who's just trying to get through the day.

And the list goes on. The image makes no sense.

A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, Twitter X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.

It's just a catchier name than microblog posts.

It' a meme in the same way that anti-vax is a meme.