this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
461 points (86.8% liked)

Microblog Memes

7433 readers
2109 users here now

A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.

Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.

Rules:

  1. Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
  2. Be nice.
  3. No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
  4. Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.

Related communities:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ilinamorato@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago

That's just not true, and it's been shown over and over again.

The prognosis for a disease treatment that's regular enough to be more profitable than a cure over time, but doesn't cure the underlying disease (or send it into remission), is typically measured in months. For glioblastoma in particular, that average is 12-18 months.

You're not talking about bilking people out of treatment for decades, you're talking about getting maybe a year. Even the most misanthropic pharmaceutical executive (and let's be honest, they all are) would look at that calculation and say "nah, if we can cure it, we can charge way more and people will pay it. People will pay just about anything for a cure."

This is why cancer remission rates have gone up by 30% or more in the past fifty years. It's just way more lucrative to cure a disease than to try to keep people alive, but not cured. That tightrope is just too thin for them to walk reliably and make any profit.