Thread: Economy Vs Cures.

Have you ever wondered if some lab or scientist has already found the cure for diseases. I believe so, I think it is posible that we have cures for MS, AIDS, Diabetes and cancer. But wait if we had the antidote..wow now we have huge economic issue. Well lets see the stock in pharmacology would eventually crash. This crash will only snowball threw out to the employees and so on. Hospitals, Doctors, Nurses and the entire staff would suffer. So the question who really should suffer the sick or the economy?

My Thoughts
BlueTorrent



Good Health to all.

I brought this question up to a friend of mine a few years ago, she was doing an internship in nuclear medicine. My statement was it's not that they can't cure cancer, they just don't want to, but right now, as long as they catch it at the right time, and as long as the body is strong enough they are able to halt the disease. The halting isn't a cure it still requires people to continue to take medication often for the rest of their lives. She agreed with me on this point, and she found it depressing. I think no where is this more self evident than in finding the cure for HIV. The progression of the disease can be completely halted, with people living full lives as if they didn't have, but since they are never cured they have to take an intensive regiment of drugs for the rest of their natural lives. I read about a group in Vancouver that have in the three or four people they gave a program of some sort of acid they were not able to detect the disease at all, and these patients were able to stop taking drugs. This was in New Scientist, which went on in the article to state that the cost of the treatment was about $20 and that since the acid compound was so old it was not patentable. Since this was the case no drug company was willing to fund or even acknowledge a widespread testing of it. There was simply no profit in it.

It's my beliefs that medicine should be publicly funded, maybe it's the canadian in me, but everyone has a right to lead full and healthy lives regardless of socio-economic status. Its one of the only two businesses I believe the government should be involved in, the other being education of course. Health is something everyone has to deal with. The economy should be allowed to suffer in the case of health care.

You're right. There's a big problem with private drugs companies run for profit, which is of course that they are more interested in making money than helping people. Take the situation in Africa for example where many people die of AIDS because cheap cloned medications are prevented from being sold so that the companies who own the patents can continue to sell them at grossly inflated prices.