My prediction:
1) reducing chronic inflammation by, for example, exercise or eating better food, is proven to have good health effects
2) pharmaceutical companies try to make that into a pill
3) dang, the benefits of the pill are not nearly as big as if you exercise and eat better food, and not nearly as big as our early trials of the drug indicated they would be
4) we must need a different kind of pill
statins have been shown to increase all cause mortality in more cases than decreasing it... giving them to most of the population is a horrible idea... our bodies need cholesterol, they produce more than we will ever consume and it's fucking ridiculous as a general marker. HDL:Triglyceride ratio is better, but still highly hackable.
Bottom line: pharma sells pills to make money; they don't make money off of healthy people who don't take their pills. So long as we link the health industry to making profit, we are prioritizing profits over health.
Making a profit on pills is just one motivation in a very complex system of competing motivations, incentives and regulations that shape what "we" prioritise.
I think drawing conclusions from one specific motivation in isolation is too simplistic. Many other profit interests benefit greatly from a healthy population that doesn't spend all its money on useless pills.
And motivations other than profit, both personal and political, are very powerful as well.
I don't think there is much evidence that eliminating the profit motivation leads to better results in general -- on the contrary. But there is a lot of evidence from Europe that health systems with public buyer cartels can achieve the same or better health outcomes far cheaper than in the US.
Although some say that sky high US drug prices effectively subsidise those European outcomes.
> pharma sells pills to make money; they don't make money off of healthy people who don't take their pills
But insurance companies do.
American healthcare is a complex system of highly-incentivized agents. Zooming in on a single component as a synecdoche is like trying to reason how a car works by extrapolating from a fuel injector.
That's not entirely true, a lot of the research comes from passionate students trying to make the world a better place with no intention of keeping you sick.
Additionally almost every industry is profit motivated, we wouldn't have the brightest people going into medicine unless it paid well. Ironically it doesn't actually pay well enough
It’s a very limited view on any industry to think that profits and greater good cannot coexist. You say the pharma industry just makes pills so they can extract profits. The researchers at those companies who dedicate their lives in persuit of treatments for the benefits of patient would say we only make money so we can make new treatments.
That’s just semantics in the end. But it’s foolish to think that just because some endeavor is profitable is must be immoral.
That is a truism, right? Currently in the US we have private pharmaceutical companies driven by a profit motive, so profits are what drives their innovation.
Setup a different system, and other motivations will drive their innovation, right?
Unless your claim is that innovation can only EVER be driven by profit?
I think the issue with that response is that [curiosity, desire, necessity] are all just specific versions of "observed value" which you are then applying to oneself. Sure, you'll have a lot of innovation if everyone is trying to satisfy their own curiosity, desire, or necessity. But you'll drive far more innovation if you have individuals who are also concerned with satisfying those needs for other people. And the easiest proxy for "someone else desires or needs this" is pricing mechanisms. Luckily, the internet / better communication methods are making it much easier to determine what is valuable to others without pricing mechanisms, but I would argue that profit motive is still the most effective method.
Yeah, I mostly agree.
Profit motive is not a terrible method on average.
I just get a bit worked up when I encounter any variant of “a corporations only duty is to create shareholder value”. :)
Curiosity does not provide funding in the quantities needed. Nor does it allocate resources towards maximizing the benefit to the maximum number of people.
But neither does profit motive. Is facebook maximizing the benefit of their users?
It’s more like maximizing benefits to the minimum amount of people at the expense of the maximum number of people.
Sure it does. Developing a cure for 100 people will generated far less profits than a cure for 100,000 people.
It's why you see cars get better every year and constant attempts to appeal to the widest customer base possible. (That didn't happen with Soviet built cars, which tended to never improve.)
As for advertising platforms, the customers are the advertisers.
But in the first paragraph, the side effect is that developing a not-quite-cure treatment for 50,000 people is more profitable than both the others.
As for the last paragraph, this is perhaps the essence of the problem. The motive is profit, so we only care about the advertisers. But the users are real people too, and they are getting screwed.
Yes but it also skews the incentives. The cure for diabetes has little meaning to pharmas. They want to keep people alive but paying for rest of their lives. That's how money shape commercial research
> The cure for diabetes has little meaning to pharmas
1. ABC develops an effective treatment for diabetes, but you have to take it for life.
2. DEF develops a cure for diabetes.
Which one do you think is going to make more money? The only way ABC can make money is if a cure cannot be developed, or ABC somehow convinced the government to ban DEF's cure.
Your theory reminds me of the 1970s when everyone was sure that 100 mpg carburetors existed but the oil companies bought up all the patents for it so they could sell more gas.
> The cure for diabetes has little meaning to pharmas
Unless you're the first to cure. The income, grants, and knowledge drain in your favor? People will continue to get diabetes and a treatment will cure it.
It was profit-seeking Bayer that found a way to make aspirin in an industrial process and put it in wide use.
"In 1897, scientists at the drug and dye firm Bayer began investigating acetylsalicylic acid as a less-irritating replacement for standard common salicylate medicines, and identified a new way to synthesize it.[2]:69–75 By 1899, Bayer had dubbed this drug Aspirin and was selling it around the world."
Sometimes you’re in the conditions you’re in because of mental or emotional issues, and require the assistance of a mental health professional to get back on track (for example, overeating from emotional trauma leading to obesity and inactivity).
Well, I would argue that actually you can, but it is extremely difficult and we aren't at that level technologically yet. Currently, the best solution for many health conditions is to optimize sleep, diet, and exercise. We will probably be uploaded into machines before a pill can replace any one of those functions.
> "It has been suggested that heat stress induces adaptive hormesis mechanisms similar to exercise, and there are reports of cellular effects induced by whole-body hyperthermia in conjunction with oncology-related interventions"
I wonder if the key is simply raising the temperature of the blood. My understanding is that processes like Regenokine extract your blood, elevate its temperature (which causes it to produce natural anti-inflammatory compounds?) and then inject it back into your body. Perhaps sauna (and exercise?) are doing the same, but to a lesser degree. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autologous_conditioned_serum
The Japanese Ibudilast pill is a super interesting anti inflammatory pill that has very interesting research behind it . I recommend taking a look at it if ur interested is this sort of thing
It's still an interesting compound because of it's role in regulating processes within mTOR, however getting the Resveratrol to where you need it (bioavailability) is an almost insurmountable problem.
What is your reaction when social conservatives say that there's no need for contraception or STD vaccines, because you can just not have sex unless you're prepared to accept the responsibilities of pregnancy and raising a child?
There’s a theme of people avoiding responsibility or consequences by using a product. Best I can tell, GP feels that this illegitimate, and this poster feels it is legitimate to use a device or product to avoid health effects.
Sorry about the downvotes you're getting, I think it's a legitimate question.
Well, if I thought that having sex for purposes other than procreation was illegitimate, I might buy that. I have the impression that some social conservatives believe that. However, I don't think that.
Also, we don't see as much industry effort to push contraception, as we do from the big pharmaceutical industries. Also, we don't see a problem of contraception not actually working; it can fail to work, of course, but most people who use contraception actually get the intended results. I believe it is far more common when Big Pharma tries to put into pill form something that could be obtained from good food or good exercise, that it does not work nearly as well.
As much as I distrust the foundation of the comment that you are responding to, this statement is factually incorrect. All you need to do to understand why this is the case is look at current medication. It's all pretty bad, and the only reason you'd take it is because the alternative is even worse.
