It seems to be related to some advertising push from a partner named Alfonso that is gathering information cross-platform anything that appears on your screen and pushing advertising to you during playback.
Hopefully not, but that’s what it looks like from early reading.
Well it’s just like the health industry really. Why sell you a cure, when they can sell you a prescription for life.
“Prescription for life” is rarely actually the situation. I assure you, they’d much rather garnish your wages for life in exchange for curing your cancer than bankrupt you on chemo until you die. Vaccines are encouraged despite reducing your odds of needing lifelong treatments as is quitting smoking and getting exercise.
No they’re greedy and will have their money, but they’ll do it with shit like evergreening patents or just taking all your money or developing a new medicine with less than sufficient research to verify its efficacy or safety.
Sorry, I see “patient for life” rhetoric routinely used against the disabled and trans people who have medication we rely on that isn’t even particularly profitable as it’s long been in the public domain
Wait are you trying to say that pharmaceutical companies spend as much or more time working on tours for diseases as they do on treating symptoms? I think I disagree with you although I don’t have any data. I can’t remember outside of vaccines the last time I heard of anything getting cured.
I have to admit I don’t really understand your point, but it sounds a lot bigger than this thread. I don’t know if you’ve posted before but maybe you should organize what you’re trying to say and make it a post so other people can interact with it and it can get more visibility than just this comment on an unrelated topic.
It sounds like you might have a lot to say on this.
Making a top level post on lemmy correcting common misinformation in a field that’s highly politicized and not an area I have professional level expertise in sounds like a thoroughly unpleasant experience. I just wanted to correct it where I saw it
I didn’t really understand the correcting misinformation part of your comment though. Are you saying that big pharma DOES work on cures as a goal, or that ongoing prescriptions are not part of a plan that they have to make money? I guess that’s why I’m thinking a post might be an order because it doesn’t seem like you’re able to get enough information in a comment.
At least for someone like me, who isn’t really very intuitive and also isn’t particularly smart, so I benefit a lot from the ongoing discussion that comes from replies to a post more than I do from a single comment from someone.
I particularly didn’t understand this sentence:
Why would you assure me of that? Maybe if you could expand on it and ELI5, I might be able to get what you’re saying a little better.
For your last bit, the reason I assure that is because a cure for cancer would allow for them to charge significantly more over the long run than current treatments as the person would live longer and be better able to maintain their income and insurance (chemo is physically extremely rough on the body).
Novel cures are difficult. This is because the low hanging fruit are largely plucked. Bacteria are really only a threat when not caught or when they develop antibiotic resistance thanks to the efforts of mid 20th century research. Fungi that infect humans are rare and we have effective in body fungicides. Animal parasites are largely handled by antiparasitics and changes to infrastructure and hygiene. And plant infections are so rare idk if they’re a thing. This leaves viruses and nonpathogenic diseases.
Viruses are caught by antivirals sometimes but they’re a real pain as they don’t really have enough biology to attack via deluging a system with something to kill it without harming you. This means you sometimes get stuff that works like hiv retrovirals which were the results of decades of nonprofit research. Or you get vaccines.
This is actually why smallpox had a vaccine but the black death doesn’t. Black death is a bacteria and you can treat it with antibiotics. Tuberculosis and leprosy similarly just have a cure and while they may leave you with permanent damage, that’s damage they did before the cure. The great plagues of mankind were systemically destroyed or defanged last century.
And that leaves endogenic (originating from within) diseases. You have stuff like cancer, which might be easiest to think of as a yourself infection. Cancer is any one of a staggering number of genetic mutations causing anything from a pigmentation cell to a neuron getting a few switches flipped and now it reproduces without responding to self destruct signals and begins spreading. We’ve begun curing cancer by cancer, but it’s difficult and since there are so many cancers that are all different many of these cures are pretty niche medicines. That’s where curing really is these days.
Because the rest is crap like organ system issues. In such instances there’s not really a switch to flip or a thing to kill to make the problem go away forever. If you don’t produce insulin what you need is insulin you didn’t produce. Same goes for all sorts of other hormones and enzymes. And stuff like multiple sclerosis, well that’s something researchers are still trying to understand better for even diagnostic purposes.
When it comes to conspiracies ask yourself who the most honest person who might have to knowingly advance the conspiracy is, how many of that person is there, and why did they keep their mouth shut. Medical researchers would have to knowingly advance that, and a lot of them.
Well that was a very interesting read.
As to conspiracies, I was not advancing one. I was simply stating what seemed like a very obvious financial move on the part of a for-profit organization. Why sell you something if I can rent it.
Medical researchers are victims of funding and not in control of that at all. Those decisions are made a level higher. And they’re made on the basis of profit, not human wellness in general.
At least that’s what my thinking tells me but, I have NO basis in fact and it sounds like you know a lot more about these things than I do.