3 ms·
I think this idea is pretty odd. If someone had a cure for diabetes, you'd bet they'd charge an arm and a leg for it. The patents alone would be incredibly valu
by sillysaurus3 9y ago
I think this idea is pretty odd. If someone had a cure for diabetes, you'd bet they'd charge an arm and a leg for it. The patents alone would be incredibly valuable.
From a non-monetary standpoint, dehumanizing companies is always a bit frustrating. They consist of people, like you and me. Most people aren't sociopaths and the idea that business leaders are entirely sociopathic is worth challenging. I don't think most people would want to withhold a cure for recurring revenue. Charge for it, yes, but not withhold it.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoAlso, withholding cure for a big disease is not necessarily a stable equilibrium on the market - the first company to release such a cure would mop the floor with their competitors.
- TheOtherHobbes 9y agoThis is only true if a one-off sale of the cure is significantly more profitable than a reliable income stream from products that help manage the disease without curing it. For that to be true the cure would have to be more expensive than management by at least an order of magnitude - assuming monthly refills for management and an annual reporting cycle - but still not so expensive that it became unaffordable.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoCan someone provide links to examples of companies withholding cures in exchange for profit? If not, the idea of this is nothing but conspiratorial. If it's true, though, it's worth knowing.
- TheOtherHobbes 9y agoI wasn't being conspiratorial, so much as adding some detail to a market-based model. As in the other post below, I don't believe magic bullet cures are possible for most diseases. Following that economic logic further, it's much cheaper and easier to produce a not-very-effective but marketable palliative than it is to aim for a Nobel-winning medical moonshot. I don't know of any suppressed super-cures, but evidence confirming the limited effectiveness of (e.g.) SSRIs is easy to find and hard to argue with. Similarly questionable outcomes have been noted in other fields. E.g. novel anticoagulants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabigatran https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabigatran
- Xoros 9y agoMy original statement was about how much money goes in treatment research vs in cure research. Not about some conspiracy :-)
- Xoros 9y agoI never said someone found it and is hiding it. I'm just a bit sad that there's probably more money that goes in treatment than in cure research. It's economically understandable but humanly sad.