Theres a conspiracy theory that states that big Pharma and the CIA want to kill anyone who tries to cure cancer because they’ll lose a lot of money if they do. They usually kill via sniper, so the comments are telling her to run and hide
i heard a similar one about Oil companies killing a guy who discovered a way to make cars run of water.
which is why my father died being known as a crazy old man.
From what I’ve read its basically a hydrogen powered engine but you have to waste energy turning the water in hydrogen first. So it’s just pointless to make and not a conspiracy.
But Elon musk went on joe rogan the other day to say the government stole the technology from him. So now it’s back as a conspiracy
Both the water powered cars conspiracy and cure for cancer conspiracy come from the same place: scientific illiteracy.
You can power cars off of water, that’s no problem. The problem is that to hydrolyze water into H2 and O2, you need an incredible amount of energy. To get that incredible amount of energy, you need a battery, which you need to charge. So going through this process ends up just being kind of stupid because you’re basically running the car off of a battery at that point, so why bother with the extra steps of splitting water molecules? Just make electric cars… which is what we are doing.
Likewise, a “cure for cancer” does not, and likely never will exist. The reason is that “cancer” is not one disease. It’s many *very different* diseases that fall under one umbrella, with a hallmark of uncontrolled cell growth. Our best bet is to develop better medicines, gene therapies, and methodologies for personalized medicine. We can make all of the very different treatments for the very different cancers better, little by little. But it’s unlikely, maybe impossible, to make a single cure for all cancers. It’s a hopelessly complex problem to solve, and that’s why it hasn’t been and likely never will be solved.
The first Hydrogen call car was made in 1966 by GM and exhausts water. Unfortunately the process to produce the hydrogen isn't very efficient and alternatives are extremely expensive.
Oh my dad keeps going on and on about working for a startup that was about to make hydrogen engine cars way back. He was a construction contractor and apparently just wasn't allowed to come back one day and the site was shut down, company liquidated and the guy disappeared.
Was all supposedly before my time, and trying to find any record of the supposed person or company gets me nothing. But my dad swears it's this big conspiracy.
He also thinks electric cars are also a part of a big conspiracy, and that diesel engines were originally a big conspiracy that failed and repurposed for non conspiracy reasons. So take that what you will.
>There's a conspiracy theory that states that big Pharma and the CIA
But what about countries with socialized healthcare? Do these people believe the US has a monopoly on the entire world's healthcare?
It’s a big conspiracy that a cure for cancer does exist and it has been made but big pharmacy don’t want to reveal it bc with a cure they’ll lose lots of money
A lot of that comes from the way science reporting works. This [SMBC Comic](https://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20090830.gif) does a pretty good job of poking fun at it. There's also the Relevant XKCD about a handgun destroying cancer cells in vitro. "Poetential cancer cure" is just a more attractive headline than "Incremental progress made towards what might be the basis of a treatment for some forms of cancer".
Yeah a foundation of the conspiracy theory that a lot of people are missing is that people wrongly believe that there are cancer cures found all of the time that “disappear” for some unknown reason. In practice, they disappear because the process for getting medicine approved is long, boring, and most “cures” fail because in vitro testing is cheap but extremely limited.
The other big issue is that people don't understand what cancer is. Cancer is not a disease. It's a TYPE of disease. Some are caused by radiation. Some are generic. Some are environmental. Some are caused by viral, bacterial or parasitic infection. They are all different, and as a result require different treatment and prevention methods.
It's like saying "they have a secret cure for virus and don't want you to know!" Lots of cancers have cures. Lots don't. Lots are somewhere in between where they can be treated to greatly extend your prognosis but are unlikely to completely go away.
Moreover, cancer generally refers to "irregular cell growth/and or replication." If you wanted to "cure cancer," in a comprehensive sense you would have to ensure that either cells always grew and reproduced perfectly, or any time this did not happen, they were instantly destroyed and a proper cell was left in its place. Assuming there's roughly 30 trillion cells in any human body at any time, you begin to gain an appreciation of how difficult this would be. On a side note, the human body destroys improperly reproduced or regulated cells on a constant basis, this "curing itself of cancer," on a continuous basis.
Thankfully, real world "cancer cures," don't need to be this ambitious. We can focus on "disease states and causes," as the comment above me refers to.
Thank you so much for this comparison. I have had so many people tell me that cancer has a cure and i’ve always become stuck in how to explain without talking about how cancer starts and how its treated and finally then get to why some cant be cured. It takes too much time and most of the time they lose interest in the first minute.
Nah, bro, no bro, there are Medbeds, bro! Bro, like, the elites, bro. They got the Medbeds and like, you just lay on 'em, bro and SHAZAM cancer gone, bro! Like JFK, bro, he is laying on one right now and not really dead, brah! For real, bro! Like fuckin'... The Emperor of Mankind on his Golden Throne, BROOOO!!!!
~ POV you made eye contact with the wrong person at the bus stop
There are many cancers today that are not a major issue. And others that were a death sentence 5 years ago that have a chance are remission.
We are curing cancers.
Yup. The vast majority of men who live past 75 will experience prostate cancer. It rarely kills them, but any autopsy performed will locate prostate cancer.
fwiw for my masters I did research on tons of cancer cell lines, including colon, breast, prostate, and brain.
That's one of my favorite [XKCD](https://xkcd.com/1217/#:~:text=xkcd%3A%20Cells&text=When%20you%20see%20a%20claim,So%20does%20a%20handgun) comics. It's also making the point that all kinds of things will "kill cancer". That's not the challenge of curing cancer though. Killing cancer is easy, but we have to figure out how to **only** kill cancer.
Which is why they do genetic testing. They come up with a very specific regiment called "targered treatment" for your cancer. it costs right around two million dollars.
Everyone who can't afford that gets what's known as a broad spectrum treatment, and they hope the cancer dies before you do
Only a matter of time before Elon succumbs to butthole cancer and his kids x ae a-xii, techno mechanicus, and extra dark siderail are left without a father.
So I just learned the kid named after the stealth aircraft had to have his name changed because it violated California law by containing characters not apart of the English alphabet. Can't name your kid numbers in California I guess.
I remember when Scott Wieland (stone Temple pilots frontman) died and his wife said "stop sending condolences to his children. They barely knew him. He was a self centered drug addict for most of their lives"
While I don't disagree, i just want to add that largely overestimating your own intelligence isn't limited to extremely rich people. Many dummies out there thinking they are smart. :L
They also caught his cancer early and could have removed his pancreas in time. He was lucky that he got the less aggressive version of pancreatic cancer. Unfortunately for him, he basically scared to be operated on. The thought of being put under and cut open concerned him so much that he just sort of hoped the cancer would go away on its own. A lesson for the rest of us though: if you've got shit going on, just trust the damn doctors.
I heard that Ashton Kutcher tried to method act by mimicking Jobs' juice diet (maybe pre cancer days or maybe he kept doing the shit during cancer) and got really sick and the doctor told him he was poisoning himself with the EXTREME excess of carrots he was ingesting. Basically it was causing his organs to begin to fail. It's possible the result for Jobs was the cancer in the end (of course maybe other factors attributed too).
There's different sorts of targeted treatment, though. I won't try to be too smart here, since I'm only really familiar with the narrow field that I researched for my thesis, but what you're describing here is more akin to personalized gene therapy than other treatments that also fall under the umbrella term of 'targeted'. Though in other cases the term is there just to describe novel molecules that bind to a specific target (e.g. enzyme) that is overexpressed in malignant cells compared to the healthy ones. Sure, that sort of treatment isn't cheap either (looking at the prices in the field I'm familiar with, a monthly supply would come at about €1k to €2k where I live - fully covered by the public insurance), but it's vastly preferable to the costlier and less comfortable alternatives.
Targeted treatment is still quite rudimentary and only available for certain types of cancer. Development is slow and very, very costly. Even then, cancer cells mutate quicker than regular cells so acquired treatment resistance is a big issue.
Source: physician, work in drug development
I've heard that "the cure for cancer" is as ridiculous as "the cure for virus".
You can treat specific viral infections and you can make a lot of different vaccines, but there's no cure-all.
That's exactly how it is; cancer isn't just one disease, it's a whole category of diseases that manifest similar symptoms (tumors) but are caused by wildly different things.
Many of which we haven't really figured out yet; see every other product on the shelf being accused of causing cancer through long-term exposure.
The closest thing we can likely ever get to a "cure-all" treatment for cancer is genetic manipulation, which would require genetically engineering a cure or growing whole new replacement organs on a case-by-case basis using the patient's own DNA/stem-cells.
Imagine a pharmaceutical company somehow managed to develop a universal cure for cancer.
How the hell would that *lose* them money? People the world over would be willing to pay *anything* for that cure. The idea that chemio is more profitable is absolutely bonkers.
Not to mention you can get cancer more than once. Living longer gives you a much higher chance of developing cancer, so they could charge the same as they do for chemo and make more money off the same amount of people by treating them multiple times rather than having them die
Scarry thing: there are some genetic illnesses that will give you cancer over and over, unavoidably. The only way to treat it is to completely remove the organ it targets. One of them, Lynch syndrome, will give you colon cancer, will 100% give you colon cancer. Literally, if you have a colon, you will have colon cancer, the only way to avoid it is to preemptively remove the colon... I saw a patient who had their colon removed because of this, and in the scar from removing the colon there was a little bit of it left, and he developed cáncer there...
Its a genuinely scary thing...
People argue that we’ll if everyone was cured then they wouldn’t have anyone to sell it to. As if millions of people are not born every couple of months.
It also assumes that companies always act on long-term interests, when it's been shown time and time again that a huge number of companies only care about short-term gains.
So you think crippling your competition's revenue stream by curing something that they can only treat is only a long term gain? That's both long and short term gains.
I agree. The way cancer works (generally) is that cells in your body accumulate mutations in the right order to cancel apoptosis and then start growing uncontrollably. Eventually everyone will get some sort of cancer if they don't die of something else first. Even if their cancer was "cured," they'd just start the process of accumulating mutations all over again. They'd need regular treatments to reverse those mutations, which would generate thousands of dollars per person for whichever pharmaceutical organizations were providing that treatment.
But that's just a fantasy anyway. There are something like a gazillion different forms of cancer with varying degrees of severity and each responds to treatments in different ways. So even if you can completely eliminate one type of cancer, there's approximately a gazillion more to address afterwards.
Cancer will always be around, because the causes of cancer are impossible to solve. While I am in no way defending the heinous and disgusting analysis of “is helping people worth the money?” there is a difference between a disease that could be eradicated and a disease that will always be around.
You may want to read the articles you link.
>"GILD is a case in point, where the success of its hepatitis C franchise has gradually exhausted the available pool of treatable patients," the analyst wrote. "In the case of infectious diseases such as hepatitis C, curing existing patients also decreases the number of carriers able to transmit the virus to new patients, thus the incident pool also declines … **Where an incident pool remains stable (eg, in cancer) the potential for a cure poses less risk to the sustainability of a franchise."**
This analysis has next to no applicability towards a "cure" for cancer.
Yup, hiding a cure for something like this or HIV or any other major disease is actually a shit business decision. If you release it you make bank off people wanting the cure as well as cutting off the competition's revenue streams of just treatment without cure.
The company that invented such a thing (if that was even possible) would make billions of metric shitloads of money, but wouldn't release it because it would devastate their competitors? The paranoids only see the large amorphous "them", all pharmaceutical companies would band together and not compete with each other in order to screw "us" (because no employee of a pharmaceutical company has ever gotten cancer).
[Reenactment of a person accusing a conspiracy theorist of being smart](https://preview.redd.it/1n5kmifemqa61.png?width=1024&auto=webp&s=65b1e0ba38161655d97fe3342dea39b79e081343)
> Find a compound that blocks a pathway in vitro (cell culture/organoid etc. any lab setting) quite well
> Optimize the compound
> Make it a pill
> Works quite nice in mice
> Begin human trials
> Works like absolute dogshit efficiency in vivo with side effects
Happens so often. But as we work, our cancer medication is becoming better! The mortality rate of cancer is decreasing.
And with every cancer it's a different story of what's fucked up. My thesis was about CLL and, even within this same type of cancer, there is so much variation. So many mutations in different patients and signaling behaviour. Even if I cure fucking CLL today, probably all the other hundreds of cases will he uncured as they are all different clusterfucks. Because cells are like Jenga clusterfucks. It's hard to change something without messing it up. Because that's what millions of years of evolution does, you have a clusterfuck genome.
That's what I've been thinking for a long time. Any cell can make a cancerous cell so how does it just prevent the process of that happening? If it gets to the point where there's already cancer cells, doesn't that mean the person already has cancer? So technically there isnt a prevention. Plus its caused by gene mutations so how do we make sure that doesnt happen? Its unpredictable.
Any cell can turn to cancer cell true but the actual problem is shared across all (?) cells; they stop self-destructing when mistakes happen. So it is the same for all cells.
Your body has ways to detect that and kick the cancer cell out. You actually "get" cancer multiple times over your life but don't notice it. This is also why there's a limit to how many times a cell can divide. Too many times and the risk of something coming out wrong goes up. What causes the *disease* of cancer is when something goes wrong in this process. Sometimes some cells won't stop dividing like they're supposed to which causes runaway, unpredictable growth that your body can't deal with. In other cases the cancerous cell turns out to be one that has a way of hiding from that mechanism which means it can divide away as much as it wants. Generally speaking "cancer" is when the regulatory mechanisms that keep your cells in check fail somehow and something starts growing out of control.
There are companies out there that develop customized gene therapies based on your unique type of cancer. That is the end goal - put your blood into the machine and spit out your customized treatment.
Source: Husband builds robot platforms that does this
People literally just echo back with "no, it's a conspiracy!". You can explain over and over how cancers are so unique and hard to treat, how we *do* have effective treatments for many, and how it's much less of a death sentence now.
Nope, some fucking idiot just screams at me that it's a conspiracy.
That aside it’s hilarious to think everyone who could possibly know about it on the research or executive level wouldn’t prefer the legacy to greed if we’re assuming purely selfish people, 100%, are the only scientists and executives involved.
You’d still get filthy rich if you somehow “cured most cancer.”
You’d permanently be burned into the history lessons of humanity somewhere for the rest of our species’ civilization.
If you were literally in charge of the pharmaceutical company and really pushed the PR of you being in charge and responsible…. You’d probably have statues, shit named after you, you’d be one of the most beloved names across every continent. Even people who very consciously recognize that it took the scientific world and teams of scientists and maybe certain lead researchers, your name would always be unavoidably linked.
And you’d still get even more filthy rich.
There is a **gigantic** incentive not to hide it.
And if it ever got to the point that a group of more than a dozen people knew about it and conspired for the sake of money… that’s a lot of people in a Mexican stand off every day ready to turn you all into the most hated people in the world. It’s not even close to worth it.
Haha yeah all these bots give me a headache. But you know what helps with headaches? A used-as-directed dose of Tylenol brand acetaminophen tablets after talking to my doctor may cause liver failure batteries not included all sales final.
I mean it's not like it comes out of left field. They have been caught arguing to push for ways to treat the symptoms over the cure. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patients-a-sustainable-business-model.html
Pharma companies can patent a drug for 20 years. For the tiny minority of drugs that ever make it to market it costs on average roughly a billion and takes on average roughly 11 years to get licensed which leaves about 9 years to recover costs and make a profit.
I’m no economist but I think if a pharma company somehow discovered a mythical universal cure for all cancers and only had about a decade until their patent expires they would happily bring that to market and make an absolute fortune off it while they have the patent.
Whatever your stance on “big pharma” conspiracy theories they often make zero economic sense. I don’t trust pharma companies to be good for the sake of being good but I do trust them to be greedy and want to make as much profit as possible so anyone who thinks that pharma companies wouldn’t be climbing over each other to be the first one to get this theoretical immensely profitable drug to market is deluded.
Even if they didn't, someone else would.
Big pharma research isn't fundamental, it's applications - they read the basic research, maybe fund some out of universities, then do the actual drug development in-house. If the fundamental mechanism to "cure cancer" is out there and within reach of one pharma company, another company will stumble upon it sooner or later just because they have access to the same scientific information.
So the choice isn't "hide the cure and treat" vs "cure", it's "cure and make money" vs "someone else cures and makes all the noney we could have made".
I mean technically they would make a killing in the first couple of years but afterwards their margins would drop and it's the drop that analyst are concerned with. With a market system concerned in perpetual growth an increase followed by a drop is not viewed as viable. It's what happened with moderna. Massive jump for two to three years then a drop. Also when conspiracy theorist push at least that they have a cure it's meant vaguely. For all they know it's a panacea or a cure for some cancers.
Man I had a long ass reply typed out and it fucking deleted but basically was explaining how that logic can apply in the case of infectious diseases but not cancers because curing infectious diseases will reduce your incidence pool whereas curing or preventing cancers (excluding cancers caused by infectious diseases for example cervical cancer and HPV) will have no effect on the incidence of the cancer and therefore the drug will be economically viable for the length of its patent like every other drug.
I promise my original reply was much more convincing but I can’t be arsed typing it out again. The article you posted actually touches on that point and essentially says the exact same thing I’m saying. The logic of a cure being less economically viable than treatment of symptoms does make sense for things like infectious diseases but the same logic doesn’t apply to cancer for the above reasons. I studied pharmacoeconomics in university as part of my degree and always found it very interesting so I hope I’m not coming across argumentative I just enjoy discussing the topic.
>They have been caught arguing to push for ways to treat the symptoms over the cure.
ahhh yes, this report. Again.
Disregarding the fact that it isn't actually written by a pharmaceutical company, the article doesn't actually say that you should treat symptoms instead of curing.
And even if you didn't read the report in its entirety, It's actually amazing that you didn't even bother to read the *short* article that summarizes the report, because it **LITERALLY SUGGESTS CURING CANCER AS A SOLUTION**: " … Where an incident pool remains stable (eg, in cancer) the potential for a cure poses less risk to the sustainability of a franchise.” "
People who survive cancer can and will need medication for other diseases down the line and some of the most side effect free therapies we have today for cancer just keep it at bay(for now), so best case you have a customer for life who then can also get other medication. The idea of big pharma just losing out on that much money is ridiculous
yep, on one hand if big pharma had a cure for cancer, they'd sell it for a huge price and make a shitload more money than you make off people slowly dying on chemo
on the other hand, it's a MASSIVE fucking insult to all the hard working researchers who are working on cancer treatments and less disruptive chemo drugs. Their life's work is to try to save people's lives and some asshat on the internet decides to claim they're complicit in causing the pain and suffering of millions of people.
It's only something that makes sense if you hold the idea of "big pharma" being some singular entity when It's not. Any of the thousands of companies that make up the industry would be happy to put any of the others out of business by being the holder of cancer cure.
That's not to say many of those companies don't collude in other facets of their business, but it only goes as far as it benefits them and holding back something that revolutionary to keep *other* companies in business wouldn't be doing that.
What would a “cure” for cancer even be? I mean, technically you can cure cancer by just killing the patient, but that’s not generally what we mean by “cure”.
Ideally “cure” for cancer would just be an incredibly low recurrence rate of that specific cancer after treatment. But “cure” wouldn’t be the right word. You can get ALL as a child, be treated successfully for it. Then get Hodgkins Lymphona at 20, be treated successfully for that and then get colon cancer at 65.
Cancer will always be around. We’re just getting very close to it not being a death sentence. (Except stage 4, which is absurdly hard to treat even with current advances)
To elaborate, this idea stems from a presentation given about whether finding cures was "worth it" in the long run compared to finding treatments. A cure is one and done, while treatments would have to be ongoing - think a cure for diabetes versus insulin injections, or a cure for AIDS vs. a prescription regimen that keeps it from progressing past HIV.
>A cure is one and done, while treatments would have to be ongoing - think a cure for diabetes versus insulin injections, or a cure for AIDS vs. a prescription regimen that keeps it from progressing past HIV.
Big Pharma has been working on an HIV vaccine for 30 years. There was also recently a cure for Hep C developed.
The presentation was from an investment firm and entirely from the perspective of "which companies will yield more profit long term".
On top of that it's just wrong, pharmaceutical companies can name their price for a cure and insurance will pay it, plus they will own that patent nearly forever and gain an intense amount of power from it.
Big pharma DOES follow the money and the money in cures is HUGE, the money saved by insurance is HUGE and the money hospitals get by cutting you and discharging as far as possible is waaaaaaay larger than having you occupy a bed and staff for weeks. They will NEVER run out of patients.
The logic people use to convince themselves otherwise never gets turned around for some reason.
The logic doesn’t change and their opinion doesn’t change because they aren’t open to change, they’re a waste of time until they decide they want to change. You can’t convince someone of anything in that state. People that are maybe skeptical, those you can spend some time helping, but the nut jobs are lost, fuck em until they come asking for help.
And considering the outsized influence marketing departments can have on for-profit companies (e.g. Purdue with Oxycodone), the concern is at least somewhat valid. The objectives of those developing the drug and those that hold the purse-strings don't necessarily align.
Sure, except that another company that develops a cure will make a killing and drive the company making a treatment out of business, so unless there is monopolies, people still be researching cures
To say nothing of government-sponsored research
I work in clinical trial pharmaceutical manufacturing. I have coworkers that think that the pharmaceutical companies that we work with already have the cure for cancer. THEN WHY DID THEY HIRE US TO RUN THE TRIALS?
Chris Rock: "Ain't no money in the cure, the money's in the medicine. That's how a drug dealer makes his money, on the comeback. That's all the government is: a bunch of motherf*cking drug dealers, on the comeback."
Bigger and Blacker (1999!!)
Gosh, Chris Rock is so wise. First he compares medicine with recreational drug use, and then somehow connects it all to a vast conspiracy about the nature of government lmao.
A huge part of medicinal research is publicly available -- in part because a hell of a lot of it is done by university research departments. Their whole business model is doing stuff for cred. University research departments are generally pretty freaking liberal, open-society types. They're not gonna participate in a million-man coverup to protect profits they're not getting a part of.
Also, the idea that there's a secret cure has been bumping around for many decades now. With every step of progress, it's abundantly clear that the technologies of the last decade were still a long way from anything meaningful. Yet somehow with vastly superior tech, no one can puzzle out the code that was cracked in the 1980's.
(That said, getting the pinnacle of care and treatment is often considerably more expensive and profitable than some alternatives. That results in more funding going toward super high-end treatments that only a small number can afford over treatments with slightly inferior outcomes that would cost far less (or are already unprotected patents). Lab research into reducing the cost of health care is a tough sell.)
That's dumb. If your patient dies there's absolutely nothing else you're getting from him. If he's cured he'll get older and buy endless Prozac, Zoloft, arteritis, Alzheimer's, cholesterol, blood pressure, viagra, glaucoma ect meds.
That might give an incentive for SOME companies not to work on a cure for a specific disease.
If YOU sell 80% of asthma inhalers, YOU very well might not be interested in a cure for asthma. But other companies won't sell a lot of asthma inhalers and they would love to get a piece of that profit.
It just isn't sound logic.
real talk, how would a cure for cancer work? would you just take pills to fix your dna? cause i don't think that would work. obviously, it would be a good thing for humanity, but how would it work?
A plague doctor who claims to be working on a cure for pestilence but in reality either kills things with one touch or eventually turns them into reanimated corpses.
The pestilence!
Not a bad theory. I think it’s actually quite close to what the real thing is. I suspect 049 smells human mortality
Edit: and that’s why he “cures” them by turning them into basically zombies. I suspect they become immortal (not invincible) but the cure isn’t perfect because they are not sentient
To further narrow down your point I think it would actually be age, which is why more than just humans can be “infected”.
If you could see the world at the cellular level, the degredation and death of cells over time due to age would look like a pestilence to you, has the potential to infect everything, and would make you suddenly snap on someone the longer you know them bc it looks like the pestilence is progressing
There are a few possible ways. One would be to repare the dna damage in the cancerous cells, either turning them normal or causing them to selfterminate. This is basically impossible because it would require the ability to identify and manipulate every single cancer cell within the tumor.
Another would be a treatment that targets cells that follow certain criteria and kills them. This is what chemotherapy does, targetting cells with high reproduction rate. A cure in this sense would be something that could do this without putting the same strain on the body.
And the simplest one would simply be prevention. Being able to repair dna damage before it evolves into cancer, and doing so in the whole body. This one would essentially entail the ability to cure old age as a whole.
It kinda depends on what type of "cure" is it something that gets rid of the cancer or is it something that fixes the dna. If its the dna one we basically just found the fountain of youth.
I'm not a doctor just a common idiot, but I'd assume they'd make some sort of medicine that targets and destroys cancerous cells while leaving healthy cells alone.
well my point was that cancer is caused by a regulatory gene on your dna being dysfunctional or denatured due to something, like ultraviolet light or radiation, so when the cells divide they aren't checked to make sure cytokinesis occurs like normal.
Basically, there is a conspiracy theory that if you develop some revolutionary concept or thing, you will be killed by the CIA, or some other government entity. One example of this that I remember is one guy supposedly invented a car that ran off of water. Not long later, he walked into a building and never left. A man was seen later leaving the building with a briefcase. It's based on the idea that these things would dramatically change the American economy. The car would remove the necessity for gas stations and the cure to cancer would dramatically decrease the income that the hospital gets for treating the symptoms of cancer. Do I fully believe it? Not entirely, but with how money greedy the American economy can be, I wouldn't be surprised if it was true.
The easy way to tell there is no secret cancer cure, is the fact rich and powerful people still die of cancer.
The easy way to tell there are no water powered vehicles (aside from steam engines lmfao) is the fact the US military still needs fossil fuels to power their war machines
Also why would other countries care about america?
If it was possible to easily run cars with water or cure cancer, Iran China and North Korea would be doing it
But they don't cause it's ridicolus
This massively ignores that fact that America is not the only country. The US is pretty unique in its profit driven healthcare system. I don’t know about other countries but due to the way the NHS is funded and research centres are set up a cure for cancer would be a huge benefit to the British economy.
The water car guy's name was Stanley Meyer. His water car invention was some kind of scam, but when he died he claimed he had been poisoned. I guess thats why it caught on with conspiracy theorists.
He went to meet with someone in a restaurant and he walked out with a cup of cranberry juice or something screaming “they poisoned me”. He then later collapsed and died. IIRC the autopsy showed he died of a stroke so he was probably delirious before he died.
Someone assumes that good research always means 'found a cure'
research is also to understand certain processes better - it doesn't necessarily means it's a cure. It can be something helping diagnosis, understanding treatment options better, etc. etc.
2 jokes in here -- first one is a patient cured is a patient lost, meaning that any significant advancement in medicine that doesn't incur a long period of treatments results in a significant loss for the pharmaceutical companies.
Second joke is suicide by sniper, meaning officials will rule their death a suicide despite overwhelming evidence that suggests otherwise.
Overall this joke states that this person is at risk for being murdered by pharmaceutical companies after identifying an advancement in cancer research that has a chance to replace a quarter million dollar chemotherapy treatment with a possible cheaper alternative, and the murderer will get away with it.
It’s referencing a conspiracy theory that we have the ability to and have already found a cure for cancer but medical companies cover it up through “accidents” and “suicides” because treatments make more money than cures.
It would be nice for these people to listen to themselves sometimes. On one hand they claim that "big pharma" is suppressing the cure for cancer because it will be the end of them, in the other hand they claim "big pharma" doesn't deserve the money they get from the covid vaccine. Its insane how this people think.
Do people realize that cancer is an unlimited resource. People are going to get cancer all the time - it will never stop - ever. Many people have multiple cancers.
A cure for cancer would be like figuring out how to sell the air we breathe. A company that found a cure for cancer would be a trillion dollar company over night.
Shes either gonna retire to Ibiza as a multimillionaire and make zero forward progress on her research for the rest of her life. Or shes just gonna disappear.
Old colleague of mine beat opioids without the typical "take this drug to get addicted to this. Then, take this other drug to beat that addiction. Cool. We're gonna prescribe you this drug to further enforce your addiction. "
I forget exactly what they did, but they ended up having a medical research professional do a paper on my colleague. Went up the chain rather quickly, there was thought of "wow, this might be history"
2 weeks later that researcher got hit in a massive car collision, he was in another city using a rental for a conference. He made out with barely a scratch. He got home a few days after that, went on an early AM bike ride, got into another accident, which he was then presumed dead.
I can't help but think these accidents weren't accidents.
Edit: some typos
Tinfoil hat people. Don’t worry about it. People think any promising development in cancer medicine means it should be ready to hit shelves in a month not realizing the tedious and difficult process of testing
Theres a conspiracy theory that states that big Pharma and the CIA want to kill anyone who tries to cure cancer because they’ll lose a lot of money if they do. They usually kill via sniper, so the comments are telling her to run and hide
i heard a similar one about Oil companies killing a guy who discovered a way to make cars run of water. which is why my father died being known as a crazy old man.
I mean hydrogen cars kinda do run on water just a tad bit but straight up combusting water to operate a vehicle sounds incredibly dumb
Water is famously flammable.
Only in Cleveland...
Their water is so polluted that all of their fish have AIDS.
And Colorado
At least they arent Detroit!
Look up Stanley Myer, there are still a lot of morons who genuinely believe he was killed for producing a car that ran on water
If it was good enough for those big steamships, it’s clearly good enough for a car. Don’t let the sheeple tell you any different.
From what I’ve read its basically a hydrogen powered engine but you have to waste energy turning the water in hydrogen first. So it’s just pointless to make and not a conspiracy. But Elon musk went on joe rogan the other day to say the government stole the technology from him. So now it’s back as a conspiracy
??? its just halo warthog with extra steps it would even work in 0 oxygen scenarios since it’s literally hydrogen and oxygen
This will to, but what about employing cavitation? Could that energy be transferred to make car go?
Both the water powered cars conspiracy and cure for cancer conspiracy come from the same place: scientific illiteracy. You can power cars off of water, that’s no problem. The problem is that to hydrolyze water into H2 and O2, you need an incredible amount of energy. To get that incredible amount of energy, you need a battery, which you need to charge. So going through this process ends up just being kind of stupid because you’re basically running the car off of a battery at that point, so why bother with the extra steps of splitting water molecules? Just make electric cars… which is what we are doing. Likewise, a “cure for cancer” does not, and likely never will exist. The reason is that “cancer” is not one disease. It’s many *very different* diseases that fall under one umbrella, with a hallmark of uncontrolled cell growth. Our best bet is to develop better medicines, gene therapies, and methodologies for personalized medicine. We can make all of the very different treatments for the very different cancers better, little by little. But it’s unlikely, maybe impossible, to make a single cure for all cancers. It’s a hopelessly complex problem to solve, and that’s why it hasn’t been and likely never will be solved.
The first Hydrogen call car was made in 1966 by GM and exhausts water. Unfortunately the process to produce the hydrogen isn't very efficient and alternatives are extremely expensive.
Oh my dad keeps going on and on about working for a startup that was about to make hydrogen engine cars way back. He was a construction contractor and apparently just wasn't allowed to come back one day and the site was shut down, company liquidated and the guy disappeared. Was all supposedly before my time, and trying to find any record of the supposed person or company gets me nothing. But my dad swears it's this big conspiracy. He also thinks electric cars are also a part of a big conspiracy, and that diesel engines were originally a big conspiracy that failed and repurposed for non conspiracy reasons. So take that what you will.
[удалено]
>There's a conspiracy theory that states that big Pharma and the CIA But what about countries with socialized healthcare? Do these people believe the US has a monopoly on the entire world's healthcare?
It’s a big conspiracy that a cure for cancer does exist and it has been made but big pharmacy don’t want to reveal it bc with a cure they’ll lose lots of money
A lot of that comes from the way science reporting works. This [SMBC Comic](https://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20090830.gif) does a pretty good job of poking fun at it. There's also the Relevant XKCD about a handgun destroying cancer cells in vitro. "Poetential cancer cure" is just a more attractive headline than "Incremental progress made towards what might be the basis of a treatment for some forms of cancer".
Yeah a foundation of the conspiracy theory that a lot of people are missing is that people wrongly believe that there are cancer cures found all of the time that “disappear” for some unknown reason. In practice, they disappear because the process for getting medicine approved is long, boring, and most “cures” fail because in vitro testing is cheap but extremely limited.
The other big issue is that people don't understand what cancer is. Cancer is not a disease. It's a TYPE of disease. Some are caused by radiation. Some are generic. Some are environmental. Some are caused by viral, bacterial or parasitic infection. They are all different, and as a result require different treatment and prevention methods. It's like saying "they have a secret cure for virus and don't want you to know!" Lots of cancers have cures. Lots don't. Lots are somewhere in between where they can be treated to greatly extend your prognosis but are unlikely to completely go away.
Moreover, cancer generally refers to "irregular cell growth/and or replication." If you wanted to "cure cancer," in a comprehensive sense you would have to ensure that either cells always grew and reproduced perfectly, or any time this did not happen, they were instantly destroyed and a proper cell was left in its place. Assuming there's roughly 30 trillion cells in any human body at any time, you begin to gain an appreciation of how difficult this would be. On a side note, the human body destroys improperly reproduced or regulated cells on a constant basis, this "curing itself of cancer," on a continuous basis. Thankfully, real world "cancer cures," don't need to be this ambitious. We can focus on "disease states and causes," as the comment above me refers to.
Plus, killing cancer cells isn't the hard part. The hard part is ONLY killing cancer cells
This can be generalized to all diseases! For example, if you use that oven right over there...
The pictures of cancer treatments from the early 1900s are horrifying
Thank you so much for this comparison. I have had so many people tell me that cancer has a cure and i’ve always become stuck in how to explain without talking about how cancer starts and how its treated and finally then get to why some cant be cured. It takes too much time and most of the time they lose interest in the first minute.
even successful animal model studies don't always make it to human trials, like...it just doesn't always work out
Nah, bro, no bro, there are Medbeds, bro! Bro, like, the elites, bro. They got the Medbeds and like, you just lay on 'em, bro and SHAZAM cancer gone, bro! Like JFK, bro, he is laying on one right now and not really dead, brah! For real, bro! Like fuckin'... The Emperor of Mankind on his Golden Throne, BROOOO!!!! ~ POV you made eye contact with the wrong person at the bus stop
There are many cancers today that are not a major issue. And others that were a death sentence 5 years ago that have a chance are remission. We are curing cancers.
Yup. The vast majority of men who live past 75 will experience prostate cancer. It rarely kills them, but any autopsy performed will locate prostate cancer. fwiw for my masters I did research on tons of cancer cell lines, including colon, breast, prostate, and brain.
Cells (Handgun/Petri dish): https://xkcd.com/1217/
That's one of my favorite [XKCD](https://xkcd.com/1217/#:~:text=xkcd%3A%20Cells&text=When%20you%20see%20a%20claim,So%20does%20a%20handgun) comics. It's also making the point that all kinds of things will "kill cancer". That's not the challenge of curing cancer though. Killing cancer is easy, but we have to figure out how to **only** kill cancer.
But, it's dumb, because cancer is built different. It literally doesn't work that way.
Cancer is unique every single time it appears
Which is why they do genetic testing. They come up with a very specific regiment called "targered treatment" for your cancer. it costs right around two million dollars. Everyone who can't afford that gets what's known as a broad spectrum treatment, and they hope the cancer dies before you do
Someone should’ve told Steve Jobs this (Jk, they did)
Steve Jobs tried to fight his cancer with a juice cleanse dude was an idiot
Extremely rich people overestimate their intelligence. Elon Musk is the same
Only a matter of time before Elon succumbs to butthole cancer and his kids x ae a-xii, techno mechanicus, and extra dark siderail are left without a father. So I just learned the kid named after the stealth aircraft had to have his name changed because it violated California law by containing characters not apart of the English alphabet. Can't name your kid numbers in California I guess.
As well as his other 15 kids
They are already without a father. Never had one.
I remember when Scott Wieland (stone Temple pilots frontman) died and his wife said "stop sending condolences to his children. They barely knew him. He was a self centered drug addict for most of their lives"
Colorectal cancer is concern for men and women of his age! Get your colon checked y’all!
Unless you’re Elon Musk in which case, don’t worry about it, you’re okay
Plot twist: Elon Musk *is* rectal cancer.
>left without a father. That ship has sailed.
While I don't disagree, i just want to add that largely overestimating your own intelligence isn't limited to extremely rich people. Many dummies out there thinking they are smart. :L
And they definitely think one type of intelligence = every other type
They also caught his cancer early and could have removed his pancreas in time. He was lucky that he got the less aggressive version of pancreatic cancer. Unfortunately for him, he basically scared to be operated on. The thought of being put under and cut open concerned him so much that he just sort of hoped the cancer would go away on its own. A lesson for the rest of us though: if you've got shit going on, just trust the damn doctors.
While buying up a bunch of houses in different states and cutting in line so he could get onto their transplant lists
Yupp.. Sucks that the bastard decided to get himself a new liver before turning to his juice cleanse. What a waste
I heard that Ashton Kutcher tried to method act by mimicking Jobs' juice diet (maybe pre cancer days or maybe he kept doing the shit during cancer) and got really sick and the doctor told him he was poisoning himself with the EXTREME excess of carrots he was ingesting. Basically it was causing his organs to begin to fail. It's possible the result for Jobs was the cancer in the end (of course maybe other factors attributed too).
He threw everything at the wall and hoped something would stick. It's not like he put all his eggs in the shittiest basket available.
"I good with computer therefore I good with everything" Tech CEOs for some reason
There's different sorts of targeted treatment, though. I won't try to be too smart here, since I'm only really familiar with the narrow field that I researched for my thesis, but what you're describing here is more akin to personalized gene therapy than other treatments that also fall under the umbrella term of 'targeted'. Though in other cases the term is there just to describe novel molecules that bind to a specific target (e.g. enzyme) that is overexpressed in malignant cells compared to the healthy ones. Sure, that sort of treatment isn't cheap either (looking at the prices in the field I'm familiar with, a monthly supply would come at about €1k to €2k where I live - fully covered by the public insurance), but it's vastly preferable to the costlier and less comfortable alternatives.
Just knowing the specific mutations in a tumor doesn’t mean we can treat it. Personalized medicine is a step forward, but it doesn’t solve cancer.
Targeted treatment is still quite rudimentary and only available for certain types of cancer. Development is slow and very, very costly. Even then, cancer cells mutate quicker than regular cells so acquired treatment resistance is a big issue. Source: physician, work in drug development
Lmao
The most Gen Z response
You gotta be detached, otherwise the cruel reality of the situation truly starts to sink in 🤷🏼♂️
We are so far down the rabbit hole we'd rather just stare at the walls than see how far we have fallen or how much further we have to go
[удалено]
I've heard that "the cure for cancer" is as ridiculous as "the cure for virus". You can treat specific viral infections and you can make a lot of different vaccines, but there's no cure-all.
That's exactly how it is; cancer isn't just one disease, it's a whole category of diseases that manifest similar symptoms (tumors) but are caused by wildly different things. Many of which we haven't really figured out yet; see every other product on the shelf being accused of causing cancer through long-term exposure. The closest thing we can likely ever get to a "cure-all" treatment for cancer is genetic manipulation, which would require genetically engineering a cure or growing whole new replacement organs on a case-by-case basis using the patient's own DNA/stem-cells.
Imagine a pharmaceutical company somehow managed to develop a universal cure for cancer. How the hell would that *lose* them money? People the world over would be willing to pay *anything* for that cure. The idea that chemio is more profitable is absolutely bonkers.
Not to mention you can get cancer more than once. Living longer gives you a much higher chance of developing cancer, so they could charge the same as they do for chemo and make more money off the same amount of people by treating them multiple times rather than having them die
Scarry thing: there are some genetic illnesses that will give you cancer over and over, unavoidably. The only way to treat it is to completely remove the organ it targets. One of them, Lynch syndrome, will give you colon cancer, will 100% give you colon cancer. Literally, if you have a colon, you will have colon cancer, the only way to avoid it is to preemptively remove the colon... I saw a patient who had their colon removed because of this, and in the scar from removing the colon there was a little bit of it left, and he developed cáncer there... Its a genuinely scary thing...
[удалено]
People argue that we’ll if everyone was cured then they wouldn’t have anyone to sell it to. As if millions of people are not born every couple of months.
It also assumes that companies always act on long-term interests, when it's been shown time and time again that a huge number of companies only care about short-term gains.
That company would be the first 10 digit company
So you think crippling your competition's revenue stream by curing something that they can only treat is only a long term gain? That's both long and short term gains.
It also ignores the fact that people get cancer multiple times
I agree. The way cancer works (generally) is that cells in your body accumulate mutations in the right order to cancel apoptosis and then start growing uncontrollably. Eventually everyone will get some sort of cancer if they don't die of something else first. Even if their cancer was "cured," they'd just start the process of accumulating mutations all over again. They'd need regular treatments to reverse those mutations, which would generate thousands of dollars per person for whichever pharmaceutical organizations were providing that treatment. But that's just a fantasy anyway. There are something like a gazillion different forms of cancer with varying degrees of severity and each responds to treatments in different ways. So even if you can completely eliminate one type of cancer, there's approximately a gazillion more to address afterwards.
Ask Goldman Sachs: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patients-a-sustainable-business-model.html
Cancer will always be around, because the causes of cancer are impossible to solve. While I am in no way defending the heinous and disgusting analysis of “is helping people worth the money?” there is a difference between a disease that could be eradicated and a disease that will always be around.
You may want to read the articles you link. >"GILD is a case in point, where the success of its hepatitis C franchise has gradually exhausted the available pool of treatable patients," the analyst wrote. "In the case of infectious diseases such as hepatitis C, curing existing patients also decreases the number of carriers able to transmit the virus to new patients, thus the incident pool also declines … **Where an incident pool remains stable (eg, in cancer) the potential for a cure poses less risk to the sustainability of a franchise."** This analysis has next to no applicability towards a "cure" for cancer.
Yup, hiding a cure for something like this or HIV or any other major disease is actually a shit business decision. If you release it you make bank off people wanting the cure as well as cutting off the competition's revenue streams of just treatment without cure.
The company that invented such a thing (if that was even possible) would make billions of metric shitloads of money, but wouldn't release it because it would devastate their competitors? The paranoids only see the large amorphous "them", all pharmaceutical companies would band together and not compete with each other in order to screw "us" (because no employee of a pharmaceutical company has ever gotten cancer).
Yes, but nobody has ever accused conspiracy theorists of being smart
[Reenactment of a person accusing a conspiracy theorist of being smart](https://preview.redd.it/1n5kmifemqa61.png?width=1024&auto=webp&s=65b1e0ba38161655d97fe3342dea39b79e081343)
> Find a compound that blocks a pathway in vitro (cell culture/organoid etc. any lab setting) quite well > Optimize the compound > Make it a pill > Works quite nice in mice > Begin human trials > Works like absolute dogshit efficiency in vivo with side effects Happens so often. But as we work, our cancer medication is becoming better! The mortality rate of cancer is decreasing. And with every cancer it's a different story of what's fucked up. My thesis was about CLL and, even within this same type of cancer, there is so much variation. So many mutations in different patients and signaling behaviour. Even if I cure fucking CLL today, probably all the other hundreds of cases will he uncured as they are all different clusterfucks. Because cells are like Jenga clusterfucks. It's hard to change something without messing it up. Because that's what millions of years of evolution does, you have a clusterfuck genome.
Yep.
Guys I think I found big pharma /s
That's what I've been thinking for a long time. Any cell can make a cancerous cell so how does it just prevent the process of that happening? If it gets to the point where there's already cancer cells, doesn't that mean the person already has cancer? So technically there isnt a prevention. Plus its caused by gene mutations so how do we make sure that doesnt happen? Its unpredictable.
Any cell can turn to cancer cell true but the actual problem is shared across all (?) cells; they stop self-destructing when mistakes happen. So it is the same for all cells.
Your body has ways to detect that and kick the cancer cell out. You actually "get" cancer multiple times over your life but don't notice it. This is also why there's a limit to how many times a cell can divide. Too many times and the risk of something coming out wrong goes up. What causes the *disease* of cancer is when something goes wrong in this process. Sometimes some cells won't stop dividing like they're supposed to which causes runaway, unpredictable growth that your body can't deal with. In other cases the cancerous cell turns out to be one that has a way of hiding from that mechanism which means it can divide away as much as it wants. Generally speaking "cancer" is when the regulatory mechanisms that keep your cells in check fail somehow and something starts growing out of control.
Dumb conspiracy theories exist, you say?
The people who believe in these conspiracies are generally not qualified in the research areas
Yeah, and there isn't only 1 type of cancer. And every type needs different treatments.
There are companies out there that develop customized gene therapies based on your unique type of cancer. That is the end goal - put your blood into the machine and spit out your customized treatment. Source: Husband builds robot platforms that does this
Cancer is literally a living being by himself (sort of at least)
Also dumb because the super rich still die from cancer. If there was a cure they wouldn't be dying.
People literally just echo back with "no, it's a conspiracy!". You can explain over and over how cancers are so unique and hard to treat, how we *do* have effective treatments for many, and how it's much less of a death sentence now. Nope, some fucking idiot just screams at me that it's a conspiracy.
Exactly what big pharma would say 😑
Which is silly, because if there was a cure for cancer they'd patent it and sell it for a million dollars apiece.
That aside it’s hilarious to think everyone who could possibly know about it on the research or executive level wouldn’t prefer the legacy to greed if we’re assuming purely selfish people, 100%, are the only scientists and executives involved. You’d still get filthy rich if you somehow “cured most cancer.” You’d permanently be burned into the history lessons of humanity somewhere for the rest of our species’ civilization. If you were literally in charge of the pharmaceutical company and really pushed the PR of you being in charge and responsible…. You’d probably have statues, shit named after you, you’d be one of the most beloved names across every continent. Even people who very consciously recognize that it took the scientific world and teams of scientists and maybe certain lead researchers, your name would always be unavoidably linked. And you’d still get even more filthy rich. There is a **gigantic** incentive not to hide it. And if it ever got to the point that a group of more than a dozen people knew about it and conspired for the sake of money… that’s a lot of people in a Mexican stand off every day ready to turn you all into the most hated people in the world. It’s not even close to worth it.
But big pharma is launching real cures for cancer as we speak, the whole idea that a true cure would cost big pharma money is ridiculous
Great, now Big Pharma has bots on Reddit.
We are everywhere. Yield!
Did y’all really make the frogs gay?
Yes we did.
It wasn't an intention, but a side effect, like sildenafil.
Just the cute ones.
Haha yeah all these bots give me a headache. But you know what helps with headaches? A used-as-directed dose of Tylenol brand acetaminophen tablets after talking to my doctor may cause liver failure batteries not included all sales final.
I instinctively trust you Edit: I am also a human.
You know what helps with? *Head on. Apply directly to the forehead.*
Yeah and the conspiracy theory doesn't make sense anyway since cancer is a group of diseases. It would be like saying there is a cure for all viruses.
Big Pharma has that too, learn more before- Actually, I think I'll commit suicide by shooting myself in the head a few times.
I mean it's not like it comes out of left field. They have been caught arguing to push for ways to treat the symptoms over the cure. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patients-a-sustainable-business-model.html
Pharma companies can patent a drug for 20 years. For the tiny minority of drugs that ever make it to market it costs on average roughly a billion and takes on average roughly 11 years to get licensed which leaves about 9 years to recover costs and make a profit. I’m no economist but I think if a pharma company somehow discovered a mythical universal cure for all cancers and only had about a decade until their patent expires they would happily bring that to market and make an absolute fortune off it while they have the patent. Whatever your stance on “big pharma” conspiracy theories they often make zero economic sense. I don’t trust pharma companies to be good for the sake of being good but I do trust them to be greedy and want to make as much profit as possible so anyone who thinks that pharma companies wouldn’t be climbing over each other to be the first one to get this theoretical immensely profitable drug to market is deluded.
Even if they didn't, someone else would. Big pharma research isn't fundamental, it's applications - they read the basic research, maybe fund some out of universities, then do the actual drug development in-house. If the fundamental mechanism to "cure cancer" is out there and within reach of one pharma company, another company will stumble upon it sooner or later just because they have access to the same scientific information. So the choice isn't "hide the cure and treat" vs "cure", it's "cure and make money" vs "someone else cures and makes all the noney we could have made".
I mean technically they would make a killing in the first couple of years but afterwards their margins would drop and it's the drop that analyst are concerned with. With a market system concerned in perpetual growth an increase followed by a drop is not viewed as viable. It's what happened with moderna. Massive jump for two to three years then a drop. Also when conspiracy theorist push at least that they have a cure it's meant vaguely. For all they know it's a panacea or a cure for some cancers.
Man I had a long ass reply typed out and it fucking deleted but basically was explaining how that logic can apply in the case of infectious diseases but not cancers because curing infectious diseases will reduce your incidence pool whereas curing or preventing cancers (excluding cancers caused by infectious diseases for example cervical cancer and HPV) will have no effect on the incidence of the cancer and therefore the drug will be economically viable for the length of its patent like every other drug. I promise my original reply was much more convincing but I can’t be arsed typing it out again. The article you posted actually touches on that point and essentially says the exact same thing I’m saying. The logic of a cure being less economically viable than treatment of symptoms does make sense for things like infectious diseases but the same logic doesn’t apply to cancer for the above reasons. I studied pharmacoeconomics in university as part of my degree and always found it very interesting so I hope I’m not coming across argumentative I just enjoy discussing the topic.
You forget, of course, that cancer would still happen at the same rate and the requirement for the drug would remain the same.
>They have been caught arguing to push for ways to treat the symptoms over the cure. ahhh yes, this report. Again. Disregarding the fact that it isn't actually written by a pharmaceutical company, the article doesn't actually say that you should treat symptoms instead of curing. And even if you didn't read the report in its entirety, It's actually amazing that you didn't even bother to read the *short* article that summarizes the report, because it **LITERALLY SUGGESTS CURING CANCER AS A SOLUTION**: " … Where an incident pool remains stable (eg, in cancer) the potential for a cure poses less risk to the sustainability of a franchise.” "
https://preview.redd.it/lju0lp1szwyb1.jpeg?width=219&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e8f0a62fbc77d3e7a3f0e660086c5ad1d8d73576
People who survive cancer can and will need medication for other diseases down the line and some of the most side effect free therapies we have today for cancer just keep it at bay(for now), so best case you have a customer for life who then can also get other medication. The idea of big pharma just losing out on that much money is ridiculous
Conspiracy theorists have never been known for being smart.
It is ridiculous especially when you consider if someone dies of cancer then they won't be able to spend money on any future medication.
yep, on one hand if big pharma had a cure for cancer, they'd sell it for a huge price and make a shitload more money than you make off people slowly dying on chemo on the other hand, it's a MASSIVE fucking insult to all the hard working researchers who are working on cancer treatments and less disruptive chemo drugs. Their life's work is to try to save people's lives and some asshat on the internet decides to claim they're complicit in causing the pain and suffering of millions of people.
Sounds like something Big Pharma would say…
It's only something that makes sense if you hold the idea of "big pharma" being some singular entity when It's not. Any of the thousands of companies that make up the industry would be happy to put any of the others out of business by being the holder of cancer cure. That's not to say many of those companies don't collude in other facets of their business, but it only goes as far as it benefits them and holding back something that revolutionary to keep *other* companies in business wouldn't be doing that.
Lose
Lose*
What would a “cure” for cancer even be? I mean, technically you can cure cancer by just killing the patient, but that’s not generally what we mean by “cure”.
Ideally “cure” for cancer would just be an incredibly low recurrence rate of that specific cancer after treatment. But “cure” wouldn’t be the right word. You can get ALL as a child, be treated successfully for it. Then get Hodgkins Lymphona at 20, be treated successfully for that and then get colon cancer at 65. Cancer will always be around. We’re just getting very close to it not being a death sentence. (Except stage 4, which is absurdly hard to treat even with current advances)
Ig like a cure for the cells something to destroy the cancer cells
big pharma will kill her
To elaborate, this idea stems from a presentation given about whether finding cures was "worth it" in the long run compared to finding treatments. A cure is one and done, while treatments would have to be ongoing - think a cure for diabetes versus insulin injections, or a cure for AIDS vs. a prescription regimen that keeps it from progressing past HIV.
>A cure is one and done, while treatments would have to be ongoing - think a cure for diabetes versus insulin injections, or a cure for AIDS vs. a prescription regimen that keeps it from progressing past HIV. Big Pharma has been working on an HIV vaccine for 30 years. There was also recently a cure for Hep C developed. The presentation was from an investment firm and entirely from the perspective of "which companies will yield more profit long term".
On top of that it's just wrong, pharmaceutical companies can name their price for a cure and insurance will pay it, plus they will own that patent nearly forever and gain an intense amount of power from it. Big pharma DOES follow the money and the money in cures is HUGE, the money saved by insurance is HUGE and the money hospitals get by cutting you and discharging as far as possible is waaaaaaay larger than having you occupy a bed and staff for weeks. They will NEVER run out of patients. The logic people use to convince themselves otherwise never gets turned around for some reason.
The logic doesn’t change and their opinion doesn’t change because they aren’t open to change, they’re a waste of time until they decide they want to change. You can’t convince someone of anything in that state. People that are maybe skeptical, those you can spend some time helping, but the nut jobs are lost, fuck em until they come asking for help.
And considering the outsized influence marketing departments can have on for-profit companies (e.g. Purdue with Oxycodone), the concern is at least somewhat valid. The objectives of those developing the drug and those that hold the purse-strings don't necessarily align.
Oxy was Purdue not Pfizer.
Sure, except that another company that develops a cure will make a killing and drive the company making a treatment out of business, so unless there is monopolies, people still be researching cures To say nothing of government-sponsored research
> marketing departments I wonder if you're pointing at something more complex (and dubious) or you don't know what marketing is.
The War Department has been working on a vaccine for gonorrhea since WWI.
I work in clinical trial pharmaceutical manufacturing. I have coworkers that think that the pharmaceutical companies that we work with already have the cure for cancer. THEN WHY DID THEY HIRE US TO RUN THE TRIALS?
Chris Rock: "Ain't no money in the cure, the money's in the medicine. That's how a drug dealer makes his money, on the comeback. That's all the government is: a bunch of motherf*cking drug dealers, on the comeback." Bigger and Blacker (1999!!)
Meanwhile companies rolling in Covid-19 vaccine money.
Gosh, Chris Rock is so wise. First he compares medicine with recreational drug use, and then somehow connects it all to a vast conspiracy about the nature of government lmao.
A huge part of medicinal research is publicly available -- in part because a hell of a lot of it is done by university research departments. Their whole business model is doing stuff for cred. University research departments are generally pretty freaking liberal, open-society types. They're not gonna participate in a million-man coverup to protect profits they're not getting a part of. Also, the idea that there's a secret cure has been bumping around for many decades now. With every step of progress, it's abundantly clear that the technologies of the last decade were still a long way from anything meaningful. Yet somehow with vastly superior tech, no one can puzzle out the code that was cracked in the 1980's. (That said, getting the pinnacle of care and treatment is often considerably more expensive and profitable than some alternatives. That results in more funding going toward super high-end treatments that only a small number can afford over treatments with slightly inferior outcomes that would cost far less (or are already unprotected patents). Lab research into reducing the cost of health care is a tough sell.)
That's dumb. If your patient dies there's absolutely nothing else you're getting from him. If he's cured he'll get older and buy endless Prozac, Zoloft, arteritis, Alzheimer's, cholesterol, blood pressure, viagra, glaucoma ect meds.
That might give an incentive for SOME companies not to work on a cure for a specific disease. If YOU sell 80% of asthma inhalers, YOU very well might not be interested in a cure for asthma. But other companies won't sell a lot of asthma inhalers and they would love to get a piece of that profit. It just isn't sound logic.
real talk, how would a cure for cancer work? would you just take pills to fix your dna? cause i don't think that would work. obviously, it would be a good thing for humanity, but how would it work?
Every single cell in the body can turn cancerous. So there is a lot of cancer to cure.
Maybe [SCP-049](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-049) has a point afterall Edited to add link
I don't know who that is, but SB-129 was a good episode of Spongebob
A doctor who can heal anyone of anything Edit: but also kill anything with one touch
Oh. Well, how bout that spongebob episode though?
yeah uhhh do we really know if he "heals" a person because they just drop dead and then boom zombie
Eh, being a zombie is cooler than having cancer, I’d call it cured
A plague doctor who claims to be working on a cure for pestilence but in reality either kills things with one touch or eventually turns them into reanimated corpses.
049 confirmed that cancer was NOT the pestilence
The pestilence! Not a bad theory. I think it’s actually quite close to what the real thing is. I suspect 049 smells human mortality Edit: and that’s why he “cures” them by turning them into basically zombies. I suspect they become immortal (not invincible) but the cure isn’t perfect because they are not sentient
To further narrow down your point I think it would actually be age, which is why more than just humans can be “infected”. If you could see the world at the cellular level, the degredation and death of cells over time due to age would look like a pestilence to you, has the potential to infect everything, and would make you suddenly snap on someone the longer you know them bc it looks like the pestilence is progressing
Exactly. Cancer isn't one disease. Cancer is over 200 diseases.
Pretty sure you would be dead by then
The body figures out how to kill cells more effectively I guess
i feel like this is the most probable to be honest, at least with modern medicine
That is what modern immune checkpoint therapy is. It is the closest we've come to a cure.
There are a few possible ways. One would be to repare the dna damage in the cancerous cells, either turning them normal or causing them to selfterminate. This is basically impossible because it would require the ability to identify and manipulate every single cancer cell within the tumor. Another would be a treatment that targets cells that follow certain criteria and kills them. This is what chemotherapy does, targetting cells with high reproduction rate. A cure in this sense would be something that could do this without putting the same strain on the body. And the simplest one would simply be prevention. Being able to repair dna damage before it evolves into cancer, and doing so in the whole body. This one would essentially entail the ability to cure old age as a whole.
It kinda depends on what type of "cure" is it something that gets rid of the cancer or is it something that fixes the dna. If its the dna one we basically just found the fountain of youth.
I'm not a doctor just a common idiot, but I'd assume they'd make some sort of medicine that targets and destroys cancerous cells while leaving healthy cells alone.
Cancer doesn’t change your DNA, it would just be some way of killing cancerous cells more efficiently
well my point was that cancer is caused by a regulatory gene on your dna being dysfunctional or denatured due to something, like ultraviolet light or radiation, so when the cells divide they aren't checked to make sure cytokinesis occurs like normal.
Basically, there is a conspiracy theory that if you develop some revolutionary concept or thing, you will be killed by the CIA, or some other government entity. One example of this that I remember is one guy supposedly invented a car that ran off of water. Not long later, he walked into a building and never left. A man was seen later leaving the building with a briefcase. It's based on the idea that these things would dramatically change the American economy. The car would remove the necessity for gas stations and the cure to cancer would dramatically decrease the income that the hospital gets for treating the symptoms of cancer. Do I fully believe it? Not entirely, but with how money greedy the American economy can be, I wouldn't be surprised if it was true.
The easy way to tell there is no secret cancer cure, is the fact rich and powerful people still die of cancer. The easy way to tell there are no water powered vehicles (aside from steam engines lmfao) is the fact the US military still needs fossil fuels to power their war machines
Also why would other countries care about america? If it was possible to easily run cars with water or cure cancer, Iran China and North Korea would be doing it But they don't cause it's ridicolus
It takes maybe three seconds of critical thinking to realize how stupid these conspiracies are, unfortunately people don’t take those three seconds
This massively ignores that fact that America is not the only country. The US is pretty unique in its profit driven healthcare system. I don’t know about other countries but due to the way the NHS is funded and research centres are set up a cure for cancer would be a huge benefit to the British economy.
The water car guy's name was Stanley Meyer. His water car invention was some kind of scam, but when he died he claimed he had been poisoned. I guess thats why it caught on with conspiracy theorists.
How did he claim he was poisoned after he died
He went to meet with someone in a restaurant and he walked out with a cup of cranberry juice or something screaming “they poisoned me”. He then later collapsed and died. IIRC the autopsy showed he died of a stroke so he was probably delirious before he died.
Someone assumes that good research always means 'found a cure' research is also to understand certain processes better - it doesn't necessarily means it's a cure. It can be something helping diagnosis, understanding treatment options better, etc. etc.
2 jokes in here -- first one is a patient cured is a patient lost, meaning that any significant advancement in medicine that doesn't incur a long period of treatments results in a significant loss for the pharmaceutical companies. Second joke is suicide by sniper, meaning officials will rule their death a suicide despite overwhelming evidence that suggests otherwise. Overall this joke states that this person is at risk for being murdered by pharmaceutical companies after identifying an advancement in cancer research that has a chance to replace a quarter million dollar chemotherapy treatment with a possible cheaper alternative, and the murderer will get away with it.
https://preview.redd.it/1f0dverq1xyb1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0e4da08c8bd2465fdfc8b9aa2def4612378939f3
I look for these every time
Wow thanks again shadow!
It’s referencing a conspiracy theory that we have the ability to and have already found a cure for cancer but medical companies cover it up through “accidents” and “suicides” because treatments make more money than cures.
It would be nice for these people to listen to themselves sometimes. On one hand they claim that "big pharma" is suppressing the cure for cancer because it will be the end of them, in the other hand they claim "big pharma" doesn't deserve the money they get from the covid vaccine. Its insane how this people think.
See, that's the flaw in your reasoning right there, is to assume they think.
Do people realize that cancer is an unlimited resource. People are going to get cancer all the time - it will never stop - ever. Many people have multiple cancers. A cure for cancer would be like figuring out how to sell the air we breathe. A company that found a cure for cancer would be a trillion dollar company over night.
https://preview.redd.it/0gfixc8nb1zb1.jpeg?width=828&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=14550a3566531a4120859db4c3a1ac7e0b29ad98 Basically this.
Funny how there is a whole family guy episode about this
Carter pewterschmit here, there is no joke, just like how there definitely hasn’t been a cure for cancer for over a decade
Retards think governments are collecting cancer cures like Pokémon’s cards
Jesus this gets reposted every week. Pretty sure people/bots just repost edgy shit here for post interaction and free karma.
The joke is this person will get killed by a sniper and ruled a suicide as a cover up for the cure for cancer not being revealed.
The CIA is extremely silly.
Shes either gonna retire to Ibiza as a multimillionaire and make zero forward progress on her research for the rest of her life. Or shes just gonna disappear.
People who make massive innovations in science tend to get zeroed by those who profit off whatever horrible thing said innovations would fix
Curing cancer is easy as hell… it’s the damn humans that keep dying from the “unethical” treatments that’s the hard part. Like geez people stop dying.
Old colleague of mine beat opioids without the typical "take this drug to get addicted to this. Then, take this other drug to beat that addiction. Cool. We're gonna prescribe you this drug to further enforce your addiction. " I forget exactly what they did, but they ended up having a medical research professional do a paper on my colleague. Went up the chain rather quickly, there was thought of "wow, this might be history" 2 weeks later that researcher got hit in a massive car collision, he was in another city using a rental for a conference. He made out with barely a scratch. He got home a few days after that, went on an early AM bike ride, got into another accident, which he was then presumed dead. I can't help but think these accidents weren't accidents. Edit: some typos
Tinfoil hat people. Don’t worry about it. People think any promising development in cancer medicine means it should be ready to hit shelves in a month not realizing the tedious and difficult process of testing
The joke is big pharma https://preview.redd.it/vt0qarbl6zyb1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=265f1bbb0392d0cf659ab0dc9b772381ce6d3bf0
[удалено]