this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2024
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I mean the actual medicine part. When I think about it, there are still no cures for the major things that ail us (e.g. cancer, etc.). China cured that one guy from his diabetes, but I haven't heard anything beyond that.

The "promise" of stem cell technology from 20 years ago still hasn't amounted to anything that your average person can get (and there are all sorts of shady overseas places that give ppl "stem cell" injections, but honestly we should have figured out that shit by now).

If you tear a ligament/tendon, guess what, that shit will never heal back to 100%, and the "oh just rest and do physical therapy" shit is annoying because you're only really working around the problem and not solving it.

On top of that, as you get older it's harder for your body to heal from injuries, sickness, etc. and I've yet to see any legit progress on anti-aging. If your heart is damaged or arteries clogged, I don't see any way to reverse it.

And after covid, it's all been fucked. How many people have long covid and the medical establishment just throws it's hands up shrug-outta-hecks basically treating an entire segment of the population as though it was a bad crop yield ("I guess there's always the next batch!!).

And doctors themselves are often the biggest dipshits out there. They are high off their own supply because they're "smart" and lack the empathy to actually listen to patients. Either they're older conservative types or younger lib dipshits. And there are so many horror stories about nurses that talk shit about patients. It's just dismal.

The common reply is that "biology is hard" but honestly that's a WEAK excuse. So many advances were made in the past, and there are so many more to be made. An actual concerted international effort, unhindered by profit motives and fucking insurance, hospital, pharmaceutical industries, etc. would almost certainly yield results. I mean look at Cuba coming up with a lung cancer vaccine and curing HIV in an infant. Look at China curing diabetes in that one guy. These advances are possible, but honestly they aren't coming fast enough. If you're suffering from a terrible disease/ailment, the "promise" of a new drug that still may be 10 years away is just terrible.

So even if we had 100% socialism now with free healthcare, there are still so many things that need to be addressed. I can't help but think that had the Soviet Union not fallen, we would have had cures for many things. Hopefully xi-beard can do something about this, but overall I'm still super bummed that the future we dreamed has not materialized.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Capitalism always favors non-curative treatments over curative ones, and makes newer curative treatments extremely expensive (e.g. CAR-T cell therapies or genetic treatments).

But, as other users rightly point out, there are millions of ways our bodies can misbehave. Even something like "cancer" is just an array of several hundred diseases, wherein even each of them is not homogeneous across all cases. Cancer survival slowly goes up over the years as specific variants of it are tackled, but that wouldn't be different under socialism, at most just faster (Cuba has made some great contributions to cancer research) or more accessible.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

but that wouldn't be different under socialism, at most just faster

Yeah but how would we truly know? For example, if we had socialism the whole time, would we be having a climate crisis? I think a good argument can be made that we would easily avoid it. The same could be said about medicine. Perhaps under socialism, it would actually be different. Otherwise we're at risk of applying capitalist norms/etc to a socialist system, when it would not necessarily be the case.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago

We can't know how medicine would be practiced under socialism, but we do know that our bodies would be the same. Cancer wouldn't be any different. Maybe there would be less cases of lung cancer, and maybe treatments would be less expensive or would be found earlier. Maybe we'd find the cure for all types of cancer simultaneously. But the limitations imposed by the nature of disease itself wouldn't change.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

Cancer, diabetes, stem cells

These are all incredibly complex problems that aren't easily solved even with massive investment. This is like comparing sending a rocket to the moon and building a self-sustaining moon base. Most effective medicine has been about boosting the body's ability to do its job or using naturally derived chemicals, vaccines, pain killers, penicillin, etc etc.

We can't really do that with cancer and stuff like aging. We've been using chemicals derived from millions of years of evolution to do delicate, effective work. Now we're trying to build our own but we're nowhere near as precise yet.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I think it’s telling that the pharma industry keeps dumping so much R&D and subsequently marketing into treating what are effectively minor QoL issues for older people in WEIRD countries.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (3 children)

What do you mean by minor QoL issues?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

Cock issues

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)
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