that's cool — if it removes the plaque in your brain i wonder if it can also help people with plaque in the arteries? here's what little i found on the drug: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bexarotene
Let me start by pointing out your fallacious arguments.
You make an argument from ignorance, i.e. you don't know why something hasn't yet been cured so you argue therefore it must be for nefarious reasons. You don't get to say: "I don't know x therefore y.
Next, instead of offering evidence as I asked you try to shift the burden of proof on to me. That somehow I have to disprove your evidence-free assertion. Wrong!
The lack of any cures would not be 'proof' of anything in and of itself. One possible reason could be that your accusation of wrong-doing is true. However there is a big difference between possibilty and probability. I say that the reasons are because of the monumental difficulty of the task.
In the beginning of scientific medicine the least intractable illnesses were cured first, leaving the more difficult ones still to be tackled.
On what evidence do you base the idea that it would be simple to cure cancer, or alzheimers, or Parkinson's diisease, or all the other conditions we still have to tackle?
Leprosy, diphteria, smallpox and polio were cured because that was comparatively simple once antibiotics and vaccines were developed.
Cancer is way more complicated to cure. For one thing the label covers many different types which don't respond to the same treatments. If you think it could be easily done it just shows your ignorance of what those diseases involve. Your own cells mutate leaving it very difficult to kill the malignant cells while not damaging the healthy. Having said that, the survival rate from many cancers is improving all the time.
At the moment we are seeing people getting their sight back through stem cell treatments. So certain types of blindness are being cured. f**king blind people are getting to see.
The same with deafness as there are promising cures in guinea pigs. We just have to be sure of their safety in humans.
Gene therapies promise to be very potent but you don't go messing with peoples genetics without being reasonably sure you don't cause greater harm.
A man was cured of HIV, but the treatment involved irradiating his own bone marrow before he could be given a transplant from someone with natural immunity. It is too drastic a treatment to use on everyone and was only tried in him because he had to have the transplant anyway for his lymphoma, but it has opened new avenues to develop gene therapies that might accomplish the same thing without the danger.
Again with HIV, the difficulty is the vius targets a person's own immune system, using the very thing our bodies fight off disease with to infect us.
They had despaired of finding a cure for a long time because of how well the virus has evolved - over millions of years in primates before crossing into humans - to avoid the bodies defences. Yet people seem to think it would somehow be a simple matter to cure. Why on Earth should it be simple?
There are millions of people who would be dead today if not for anti-retrovirals. I know people who work on HIV and they are certainly not avoiding finding a cure. They are still human beings who realise that the person who finds the cure will go down in history. It would be the achievement of a lifetime.
Without evidence to back it up, the accusation that Pharmaceutical companies already have these cures and refuse to use them is not much more respectable than crackpot ideas like the British Royal family being shape-shifting, blood-drinking reptilians.
Bingo. That's the big conflict of interest. There should be an award for any cure to a disease. The government AND insurance companies should contribute to it and it would need to be in the billions of dollars to offset any profit motive of just treating a major disease.
What evidence do you have to support this accusation?
I don't mean links to some crackpot site, but actual evidence that some drug that was proven to cure an illness was bought and suppressed in order to keep selling drugs to treat the syndromes.
I have asked that question many times and never got evidence. All I ever got were assertions that it must be so.
The fact is that human biochemistry is very complex. Drugs that work in vitro or on mice often don't transfer well to humans, or are too toxic, or don't work for a multitude of reasons.
Pharmaceutical companies will often get up to bad s**t to make money, by messing with trials and hiding side-effects. They get away with it for a time, but because of the nature of science it comes out.
These companies are also made up of human beings who will have loved ones die of the same diseases the rest of us die from. Do you really think that they would stand by and watch that, knowing the drug to cure is locked away in a vault somewhere?
Until I get evidence of it really happening I remain sceptical and chalk comments like yours down to misanthropic conspiracy theories.
But still no new cures. Your argument that's too hard to cure is weak. The real problem is there's no profit in cures. Treatment is very profitable therefore there is huge progress in this area.
You ignore the examples I gave about sight being restored. http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-06/stem-cells-shown-restore-vision-and-maintain-it-years
"The treatment was fully successful in more than 75 percent of the patients, and partially successful in 13 percent. Success was defined as an absence of all symptoms and permanent restoration of the cornea. "
Is that not a cure? If you deny it you are just moving the goal posts. Another fallacy.
What about the trachea that was grown from stem cells and transplanted? A replacement bodypart!
Was that person not cured?
Just because it is early days and they can't grow complex organs doesn't mean the simpler parts aren't cures.
On what basis do you claim that cures should be easy? You offer no evidence for it.
Those are experiments that haven't been approved. If cures where profitable there would be hundreds of them by now. Upthread I commented that:
There should be an award for any cure to a disease. The government AND insurance companies should contribute to it and it would need to be in the billions of dollars to offset any profit motive of just treating a major disease.
Now you are being an idiot. We do not operate on humans without having got approval first. It doesn't matter if these cures are still being evaluated to make sure they are long lasting.
Governments already put plenty of money into research. Your argument about Insurance companies is beside the point.
WHO has been funding MDT (multidrug therapy) for free since 1995 in the efforts to eradicate leprosy.
If you go to this link you will see that what people simplistically call cancer when decrying the lack of a cure is actually hundreds of different diseases. http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/types/alphalist
Rather than throwing in red herrings about who should fund research, why don't you answer my question about the basis for believing that these cures should be easily achieved.
At least I back up my arguments with evidence. You just flail about making bad arguments and offering absolutely no evidence.
I'm not talking only about cancer. I know that it's the holy grail of diseases to be cured. There are hundreds of diseases and conditions out there that kill.
If by that you refer to: "If cures where profitable there would be hundreds of them by now." then I have been wasting my time.
That would only be a valid argument if it went something like this: 'Here is the evidence to show that these diseases are easily cured, and that along with the fact that we do not have cures for these diseases makes it highly likely that the will to cure these diseases is lacking. From that I argue that the reasons are basically greed. It is more profitable to treat rather than cure.'
Can you see the difference. I ask you for the basis of your belief that these diseases are easily cured and your answer just presupposes that they ARE easily cured. Faulty reasoning again.
Reality is immune to capitalism and its motivations. Just making the cure of a disease profitable does not make it easier to cure.
I have spent quite enough time trying to explain myself and either I have done so badly or you are so entrenched in your belief system that there is no moving you.
In the event that it's just me I leave you with a link to a particular article on a good site. Read it and you'll get some idea of the complexity of just cancer. http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/why-havent-we-cured-cancer-yet/
charlotte_webFeb 10, 2012Buried
Wonderful news for the geriatric mice population!
michaelpintoFeb 10, 2012Buried
that's cool — if it removes the plaque in your brain i wonder if it can also help people with plaque in the arteries? here's what little i found on the drug: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bexarotene
FesteringStumpFeb 11, 2012Buried
Let me start by pointing out your fallacious arguments.
You make an argument from ignorance, i.e. you don't know why something hasn't yet been cured so you argue therefore it must be for nefarious reasons. You don't get to say: "I don't know x therefore y.
Next, instead of offering evidence as I asked you try to shift the burden of proof on to me. That somehow I have to disprove your evidence-free assertion. Wrong!
The lack of any cures would not be 'proof' of anything in and of itself. One possible reason could be that your accusation of wrong-doing is true. However there is a big difference between possibilty and probability. I say that the reasons are because of the monumental difficulty of the task.
In the beginning of scientific medicine the least intractable illnesses were cured first, leaving the more difficult ones still to be tackled.
On what evidence do you base the idea that it would be simple to cure cancer, or alzheimers, or Parkinson's diisease, or all the other conditions we still have to tackle?
Leprosy, diphteria, smallpox and polio were cured because that was comparatively simple once antibiotics and vaccines were developed.
Cancer is way more complicated to cure. For one thing the label covers many different types which don't respond to the same treatments. If you think it could be easily done it just shows your ignorance of what those diseases involve. Your own cells mutate leaving it very difficult to kill the malignant cells while not damaging the healthy. Having said that, the survival rate from many cancers is improving all the time.
At the moment we are seeing people getting their sight back through stem cell treatments. So certain types of blindness are being cured. f**king blind people are getting to see.
The same with deafness as there are promising cures in guinea pigs. We just have to be sure of their safety in humans.
Gene therapies promise to be very potent but you don't go messing with peoples genetics without being reasonably sure you don't cause greater harm.
A man was cured of HIV, but the treatment involved irradiating his own bone marrow before he could be given a transplant from someone with natural immunity. It is too drastic a treatment to use on everyone and was only tried in him because he had to have the transplant anyway for his lymphoma, but it has opened new avenues to develop gene therapies that might accomplish the same thing without the danger.
Again with HIV, the difficulty is the vius targets a person's own immune system, using the very thing our bodies fight off disease with to infect us.
They had despaired of finding a cure for a long time because of how well the virus has evolved - over millions of years in primates before crossing into humans - to avoid the bodies defences. Yet people seem to think it would somehow be a simple matter to cure. Why on Earth should it be simple?
There are millions of people who would be dead today if not for anti-retrovirals. I know people who work on HIV and they are certainly not avoiding finding a cure. They are still human beings who realise that the person who finds the cure will go down in history. It would be the achievement of a lifetime.
Without evidence to back it up, the accusation that Pharmaceutical companies already have these cures and refuse to use them is not much more respectable than crackpot ideas like the British Royal family being shape-shifting, blood-drinking reptilians.
MrFrogyFeb 10, 2012Buried
If it's a CURE for anything then the drug companies will bury it, since there is more money for them when treating illness than there is curing it.
DiggPiggletFeb 10, 2012Buried
Bingo. That's the big conflict of interest. There should be an award for any cure to a disease. The government AND insurance companies should contribute to it and it would need to be in the billions of dollars to offset any profit motive of just treating a major disease.
FesteringStumpFeb 10, 2012Buried
What evidence do you have to support this accusation?
I don't mean links to some crackpot site, but actual evidence that some drug that was proven to cure an illness was bought and suppressed in order to keep selling drugs to treat the syndromes.
I have asked that question many times and never got evidence. All I ever got were assertions that it must be so.
The fact is that human biochemistry is very complex. Drugs that work in vitro or on mice often don't transfer well to humans, or are too toxic, or don't work for a multitude of reasons.
Pharmaceutical companies will often get up to bad s**t to make money, by messing with trials and hiding side-effects. They get away with it for a time, but because of the nature of science it comes out.
These companies are also made up of human beings who will have loved ones die of the same diseases the rest of us die from. Do you really think that they would stand by and watch that, knowing the drug to cure is locked away in a vault somewhere?
Until I get evidence of it really happening I remain sceptical and chalk comments like yours down to misanthropic conspiracy theories.
DiggPiggletFeb 11, 2012Buried
But still no new cures. Your argument that's too hard to cure is weak. The real problem is there's no profit in cures. Treatment is very profitable therefore there is huge progress in this area.
FesteringStumpFeb 11, 2012Buried
You ignore the examples I gave about sight being restored.
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-06/stem-cells-shown-restore-vision-and-maintain-it-years
"The treatment was fully successful in more than 75 percent of the patients, and partially successful in 13 percent. Success was defined as an absence of all symptoms and permanent restoration of the cornea. "
Is that not a cure? If you deny it you are just moving the goal posts. Another fallacy.
What about the trachea that was grown from stem cells and transplanted? A replacement bodypart!
Was that person not cured?
Just because it is early days and they can't grow complex organs doesn't mean the simpler parts aren't cures.
On what basis do you claim that cures should be easy? You offer no evidence for it.
DiggPiggletFeb 11, 2012Buried
Those are experiments that haven't been approved. If cures where profitable there would be hundreds of them by now. Upthread I commented that:
There should be an award for any cure to a disease. The government AND insurance companies should contribute to it and it would need to be in the billions of dollars to offset any profit motive of just treating a major disease.
What's your argument against this?
DiggPiggletFeb 11, 2012Buried
Replies ran out. See reply that starts with "Those are experiments that haven't....."
FesteringStumpFeb 11, 2012Buried
Now you are being an idiot. We do not operate on humans without having got approval first. It doesn't matter if these cures are still being evaluated to make sure they are long lasting.
Governments already put plenty of money into research. Your argument about Insurance companies is beside the point.
WHO has been funding MDT (multidrug therapy) for free since 1995 in the efforts to eradicate leprosy.
DiggPiggletFeb 11, 2012Buried
Reply #2 ...
FesteringStumpFeb 11, 2012Buried
If you go to this link you will see that what people simplistically call cancer when decrying the lack of a cure is actually hundreds of different diseases.
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/types/alphalist
Rather than throwing in red herrings about who should fund research, why don't you answer my question about the basis for believing that these cures should be easily achieved.
At least I back up my arguments with evidence. You just flail about making bad arguments and offering absolutely no evidence.
DiggPiggletFeb 11, 2012Buried
I'm not talking only about cancer. I know that it's the holy grail of diseases to be cured. There are hundreds of diseases and conditions out there that kill.
FesteringStumpFeb 11, 2012Buried
If by that you refer to: "If cures where profitable there would be hundreds of them by now." then I have been wasting my time.
That would only be a valid argument if it went something like this: 'Here is the evidence to show that these diseases are easily cured, and that along with the fact that we do not have cures for these diseases makes it highly likely that the will to cure these diseases is lacking. From that I argue that the reasons are basically greed. It is more profitable to treat rather than cure.'
Can you see the difference. I ask you for the basis of your belief that these diseases are easily cured and your answer just presupposes that they ARE easily cured. Faulty reasoning again.
Reality is immune to capitalism and its motivations. Just making the cure of a disease profitable does not make it easier to cure.
I have spent quite enough time trying to explain myself and either I have done so badly or you are so entrenched in your belief system that there is no moving you.
In the event that it's just me I leave you with a link to a particular article on a good site. Read it and you'll get some idea of the complexity of just cancer.
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/why-havent-we-cured-cancer-yet/
michaelpaul529Feb 10, 2012Buried
If theres any possible cure in Alzheimers's disease, the world and life expectancy will change... for the better!
FPSmotoFeb 10, 2012Buried
Yeah, it's called cannabis.
urdumania1Feb 10, 2012Buried
Yeah, it's called cannabis.
barfomaticFeb 10, 2012Buried
Another miracle breakthrough that we'll never see !
santosh_seoFeb 10, 2012Buried
sure but we should avoid little chip type friend