Would Drug Companies Be Justifiable In Hiding A Cure For Disease For More Money?
 

I thought of this as I was skimming through Nikose's Conspiracy thread. A lot of people claim that drug companies have the know-how, money, and/or the technology to create a cure for fatal diseases like AIDS or Cancer, but instead choose not to make them.

Chris Rock best explains this phenomenon:

There's been a lot of press coverage of medical breakthroughs. Even a highly controversial topic like Stem Cell research could hold the key to curing a wide variety of health problems.

I guess the question isn't really "Are Drug Companies Justified," but "Why Are They Allowed To Hold Back Potentially Life-Saving Information?" Is it because it's their research, and they're allowed to do with it what they please? Or is it because they're not looking for a cure - they're looking for - again, Chris Rock - "[Something that'll] get you to the next stop. Hopefully, in my life time I'll hear somebody say "Yo, Phil - you weren't at work yesterday, what happened?" "Oh, my AIDS was actin' up.""

And what about homeopathic medicine? All those "experts" on TV stating that through holistic medicine they've found cures for various sorts of diseases and ailments.

Everyone knows my opinion on the matter, and I don't think that there'll be much dissent - but I'm curious to see how it turns out.

This was actually talked about before in an old thread. If a drug company could cure AIDS, they would. Cancer is harder because it's not a disease, and is in fact a tumor of mutated cells. Curing cancer would amount to some sort of heavy chemotherapy, which basically boils down to poisoning the crap out of yourself and hoping the cancer dies first.

If they found a cure for a deadly disease, they would NOT hide it. There are enough people who would continue to get it to provide a market, and even then, eradicating the disease would be the goal so they could go back to worrying about lesser stuff. While the pharmaceutical industry is corrupt, they're not THAT corrupt. They're at least human.

The question doesn't really make sense. If they're not interested in selling a cure, then they won't develop one.

Even if that were fully true (there are a number of other methods of treatment being researched), cancer is still the devil you know. AIDs is downright insidious in the way it hides in your body, avoiding attempts to fight it. It's like the ninja of terminal illnesses. Tumours are frequently benign or operable. One can potentially sit in one place and not metastasize for a long time. Once you have HIV, that's kind of it, and by the time you realise you have it, you've probably given it to someone else. There's big problems with fighting it at all, let alone curing it. My biology is fuzzy, but as I recall, it has to do with some of the virus going dormant for big chunks of time, which makes eradicating it with any course of treatment more or less impossible, and then of course treatments lose their effectiveness as time goes on.

If you know you've gotten it very shortly after you were exposed, you can potentially get rid of the virus through a very strict and unpleasant course of treatment. The problem is that you aren't likely to know you have it for around three to six months at least. Methods of early detection are getting better, but this still all depends on you actually getting tested.

There's a reason AIDs is pandemic (and it's on the rise right now). They've been trying to make a vaccine for thirty years, and have been more or less completely unsuccessful. Cancer is something that potentially can be removed, and the technology is advancing there. I only know of one case of AIDs where the patient recovered, but I am admitably uninformed there, so there might be more. Not too bloody many though.

Edit: And besides all of that, by the time it's called AIDs at all, the immune system is generally in such piss poor shape that someone coughing in the next room may kill you. Curing it at that point is like trying to cure TB right around the time someone coughs up their lungs.

Whether its true or not, the perception that pharmaceutical companies are withholding cures is a strong one for a number of reasons. For starters, where's the real profit? In developing a once and for all cure that we'll never need again, or developing a treatment that you can sell to people for the rest of their now elongated lives?

Again, I have no idea whether pharmaceutical companies withhold cures or not, but it wouldn't surprise me. Our capitalism has led to a philosophy of planned obsolescence, and that, in its own way, has filtered into the pharmaceutical industry.

Take antibiotic resistance, for instance. Bacteria are now becoming more and more resistant to the drugs that used to kill them decades ago. The most common cited cause for this is overuse in both humans and animals.

There's also the materialist-reductionist movement that has slowly but surely placed all mental disorders firmly in the realm of biological treatment. Antidepressants and ADHD medications are among the most prescribed drugs, and they're being prescribed mostly by general practitioners who aren't really qualified to diagnose mental disorders.

We live in an over-medicated society.

see, this where I am on the topic, if they did'nt want ot cure it, they'd jut keep releasing different forms of the same treatment every once in a while to give the illusion that they were working for a cure, but then a good amount of medical research is funded by non-profit orginizations,
I think a lot of people imagine Lex Luthor in the to video superman:Doomsday movie
Lex(fiddling with uPC)
Lex's assistant: what's that, the cure for AID's?
Lex: Leukemia, give it to R&D, have them slow it to a crawl.

The profit?

Well, it's in the fact that if you're smart enough to figure it out, that asshole over there is probably smart enough to figure it out. Now if that asshole over there figures it out and decides he's not going to do anything with it, that's fine.

On the other hand, let's say that guy's NOT an asshole, and he patents and sells the cure.

Now where does that leave you?

I'll tell you where it leaves you. It leaves you with millions of wasted research dollars, entire factories producing the 'treatment' are now useless, and you're suddenly in the hole because a bunch of your drugs just became obsolete. And now because you don't have money you can't afford to research new shit.

That guy who's selling the cure, though? Yeah, sure, his profit margins take a little hit as he's curing people and not treating them anymore, but he knows this is coming. He's switching his old factories over to produce the cure or other drugs ahead of time, his transition is smoother, and EVERYONE is buying his shit because his shit cures you.

End result: You decided not to market the cure and now your competition is buying out your company because you were an asshole.

IF one company had a total monopoly over the drug industry this would be an almost viable argument--however releasing the cure would still be financially advantageous in today's market, because it would screw over everyone else, and if you don't, they will.

Now, the reason I said ALMOST viable, is because a lot of the research dollars for curing this kind of thing come from non-profit organizations who are paying non-affiliated research groups to find a cure.

What this means is that even IF every corporate pharmaceutical company had some kind of deal not to release the cure, these non-profit scientists would have no financial reason not to release a cure--as they could rack in all kinds of money they wouldn't otherwise be making, not to mention the renown and the tenure and job offers that come with it.

So, at the end of the day, this--popular--conspiracy theory is nothing but a bunch of people toying with people suffering from terrible illnesses, and those people clutching to any strand of false hope they can.

Krylo, you hit the nail pretty well on the head. Providing a cure doesn't kill the market because there will always be more people who get the illness. Look at things like Syphilis. The disease has been around since the Middle Ages and before, and we have a cure for it, but that doesn't mean it's not still around. The same goes for things like HIV. There will probably always be people who get it and can't afford the cure, so finding a cure doesn't kill the market, as they'll continue to spread it, sometimes maliciously.

Finding a cure to a deadly disease is pretty much guaranteed to shoot your positive press through the roof. By not losing a market in the process, they're having their cake and eating it, too.

I could swear that there was a link to AIDS and Bubonic Plague. As well, there were some controversial (Note: Not FDA approved) issues with a supposed cure for it. I don't remember if it was on the History channel, Discovery, or Nat Geo, but there are studies currently out about this.

But yes, getting a cure doesn't necessarily mean that all the other diseases are just out to lunch either. ;)

The documentary was about how there's a certain trait in the blood of people whose ancestors survived the bubonic plague that makes it harder for HIV to latch onto it or something. Obviously, not everyone has the trait, as it's had hundreds of years to fall out, and not everyone who survived the plague had it. They also are just a bit more resistant, not immune.

As for a cure for AIDS, there was some debacle in the news a few years back about the FDA putting the kibosh on a drug, but IIRC, there was damn good reason for it and I don't think it actually worked as well as it was claimed to. Don't remember if it was touted as a cure, but I know people got pissed.


Edit:

Can't find anything on it, or at least not in a timely manner, but there are all sorts of articles on gene therapy and one interesting one on Astralagus root, which is used in Chinese herbal medicine. At any rate, none of the articles Google provided made any sweeping statements about a reliable cure.