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this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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Some statistics:
The prognosis for a disease with a treatment that's regular enough to be more profitable than a cure over time, but doesn't cure the underlying disease (or send it into remission), is typically measured in months. For glioblastoma in particular, that average is 12-18 months.
You're not talking about bilking people out of treatment for decades, you're talking about getting maybe a year. Even the most misanthropic pharmaceutical executive (and let's be honest, they all are) would look at that calculation and say "nah, if we can cure it, we can charge way more and people will pay it. People will pay just about anything for a cure."
This is why cancer remission rates have gone up by 30% or more in the past fifty years. It's just way more lucrative to cure a disease than to try to keep people alive, but not cured. That tightrope is just too thin for them to walk reliably and make any profit.
Plus, if you're the first pharma company to release a straight up cure, your market valuation is going to go through the roof.
It's such a bizarre claim. A close friend of mine had testicular cancer in his 30s. He had chemo and surgery and there has been no reappearance of cancer over 10 years later. He isn't on pharmaceuticals for life. The cancer is essentially cured. Based on this conspiracy theory, chemotherapy would have been suppressed.
Awesome! That's so great for him. And yes, chemo (and surgery and radiation) are more and more becoming silver bullets that either solve the problem "immediately," or don't work and transition directly into palliative care.
There's a lot of sketchy stuff in pharmaceuticals, so it's kind of odd to me that this one thing that's patently untrue if you just think about it for a minute is what's caught on.
yeah, this theory that they "wanna keep us sick so we keep buying symptomatic treatments" ignores the fact that while the industry as a whole might lose a little bit, the company that gets to patent THE CURE FOR FUCKING BRAIN CANCER and then charge whatever they want for it is going to make an assload of money. It starts with the assumption that pharma CEOs are evil, but it doesn't follow through with that assumption. Instead it ends up in a place where pharma CEOs are happy to split a couple billion dollars a year amongst themselves when a cure, should they find it, will end in them getting trillions are for themselves. Everyone knows they want to make as much money as possible, and they're proudly open about that fact. So it rationally follows that they'd pursue a cure and make much, much, much, much more money all for themselves than suppressing a cure and making less money total split over many heads.
Exactly right. By all means, go after Big Pharma for the price-fixing, the collusion with insurance companies, the lobbying, the anti-competitive practices, the insufficient research dollars, the monopolistic practices (I could go on)--don't waste your time on this nothingburger.