politics

I met an older student at uni who said she used to be in biotech, but quit and went back to school because, as she described it "I'm still in NDA, so I can't say too much, but let's just say we produced a lot of things that could have saved lives but the company would shelve it because it wasn't profitable to sell things that worked too well. I couldn't do it anymore, it was too depressing, so here I am."

Wow, I can't believe capitalism has made me a finite being necessarily constrained to a particular time and place.

I'ma be real with you chief, this ain't it

My mom got some special stem cell plus chemo shit that put her brain cancer in remission and now she's basically fine so that was pretty cool

"there is no cure for cancer?l"

which one of the over 200 distinct diseases that we call cancer are you referring to?

Yeah but this is what people say to dismiss socialism/communism. "It's too complex, human nature, etc. etc."

Sure but lots of things are "hard." Or "complex." That's what zionists say about Israel ("oh it's soooo complex!") when we know for damn sure it's not.

You keep trotting this out but it's a ridiculous (and frustrating) comparison. People (libs/chuds) will often say "starving millions of people is bad" to "dismiss communism." It doesn't mean that the opposite is true and that "starving millions of people" is actually good. Those who say that it is bad are right. It is bad. It just doesn't apply to the Soviet Union or communism but it does apply to other circumstances (like Churchill’s evil, racist, and fully intentional genocidal policies causing four million people to starve to death during the Bengal "famine" in 1943). Just because people use a truism to sometimes criticize a thing unjustifiably, that doesn't mean the truism is false. Some things actually are inherent human nature, it's just that market competition isn't one of them. Some things actually are complex, it's just that the Isntreal-Palestine conflict isn't one of them. Etc.

I can't believe I'm reading this here and I'm not convinced you aren't a troll. Modern medicine is a fucking miracle of human accomplishment, and while it's not cured us of death or the human condition, and despite how much it is disgustingly hampered and distorted by capitalism, we are profoundly lucky to live in an age where so many of the conditions that have caused untold human suffering and death for the entire existence of our species are now nothing more than a minor inconvenience. I for one, without question, would not be alive without "modern medicine."

The common reply is that "biology is hard" but honestly that's a WEAK excuse.

lol

I mean I know you don't want to hear this, but it is hard and incredibly complex. "Curing cancer" would be basically the same as curing thousands of diseases simultaneously, you'd need a different cure for each type of cancer and how it effects different cells. Biomechanics are complicated with ligaments, tendons, bones and soft tissue. For instance, the best surgery we have at the moment for severe scoliosis or kyphosis (someone's spine growing skew in various different ways) still boils down to taking most of the affected vertebrae (often around a dozen vertebrae), and fusing them all together into one big bone/vertebrae that's straightened out, with what amounts to permanent braces that never get removed (metal screws and rods) that hold the vertebrae in place while they form into one big bone. Yes, that's how it's "fixed", by losing most of the mobility in your spine.

It does suck that things are moving slowly. There has been good news. Like Hepatitis C is completely curable. Hepatitis B is pretty close to being outright cured and can be controlled by antivirals like HIV (affects millions in the global south). HIV is preventable via PREP and completely controllable with medication with very little side effects that stop you from spreading it. HIV vaccines are probably going to be in our lifetimes.

There's a lot of discussion about Ozempic, but GLP-1 agonists (and a different class sglt2 inhibitors) are huge breakthroughs not just for diabetes, but for heart disease, renal disease and a bunch of other conditions. It sucks that capitalists are rolling out the near miracle medications and focusing on the wrong thing (like exclusively weight loss), but they're a crazy breakthrough in our lifetime.

But I definitely agree if the Soviet Union was around we'd have better stuff, from collaboration rather than competition.

I can assure you that biological science is progressing at an ever increasing exponential rate

Also there will never be "a cure for cancer" because there are many different cancers with many different causes, it's like expecting a one pill cure for every disease

Stem cell injections have helped my mom with her blood cancer.

in addition to capitalism and imperialist wars holding society back, technology is not like a linear video game progression, everything is subject to the law of diminishing returns. we have already made all (or most) of the easy discoveries, most that are left are very difficult or impossible or particularly power/resource-intensive. some stuff might just be exceptionally inimical to our current thought paradigms and material conditions though. for example Rome probably could have built steam engines, they knew of the technology from toy/model examples from greece, and they eventually had better metallurgy, but slaves were overall cheaper and more important to the economy and in fact rome enacted laws against certain kinds of labor saving devices/factory designs (yes they had slave-powered factories in ancient rome) to protect the economic position of slavery. it will be even more crucial to efficiently organize production and resource allocation the 'farther along' we go. unlikely we could ever build a dyson swarm etc. if we are wasting resources on imperialist wars and long-term-inefficient economic scams and total environmental destruction.

Cause you can’t fix structural breaks, like ligament tears, with drugs. Best you can hope for is put it in good position, and maybe eat something promoting repairs.

Also, anti-aging always got tons of money (guess why), and billionaires seems to live to like 90+. I have very significant doubts it will advance much though, it will have to be something like you take it before 20 or some shit and it works (so we’ll see in like 50 years)

I feel slightly angry with you punching on the people working in healthcare that actually provide the care.

Nurses, but also doctors are working nonstop to keep the patients and also the system running as good as possible within the constraints that they're given. They cannot afford the time to try and change the broader political environment in which they have to operate. Doing so would cost lives. I'm not American, but German and I know a few doctors personally. They're pretty decent and even very left leaning people. The shit, human misery caused by a broken system, privatization/monetization of healthcare they have to deal with necessitates a certain dark humor, fatalism or cynicism to just stay sane enough to continue doing it. We as a society have failed to address this problem - the conditions that we put on them - and their only option is to develop a defense mechanism. You may not like it, but this defense mechanism against all this shit is better than the alternative - them all giving up and quitting. At least short time. Maybe the only way to fix it would be a mass walk-off/strike that actually causes a lot of deaths for us (society) to actually wake up and fix it. Unfortunately the majority only has to experience health care in exceptional circumstances. Otherwise it's pretty invisible to us. We only know about the overworked nurse or the uninterested uncaring doctor. We don't know the rest of the story - all the other patients they have to deal with at the same time. The bad news that they have to bring and the angry responses they get a thousandfold from unlucky patients, the treatment they have to deny because of asshole CEOs of insurance firms and the politicians who enable them (that we as a society don't remove with some pitchforks). We only see the end product of a person that has been molded by this broken system and we get angry at them. But they are not the problem. Doctors don't start their job wanting to be this cynic version of them. That's just the shit they have to deal, because we as a society don't help them that makes them so.

And yes they get tons of money and all that (the doctors), but I'm not convinced that they get to enjoy it that much.

Yes, we shouldn't be charged for healthcare and for innovations we already fund through our taxes being given as grants, but medical science isn't magic.

The medical science community is and should be international, those advancements happening in Cuba and China are not happening in a vacuum.