Reply #13: I don't buy that.

[megatherium]

Pharma executives get cancer too. The reason we don't have a cure for most cancers (if your cancer is metastic, usually your prognosis is very poor) is because the biomedicine of cancer has proven intractible. The only tools we have that make any real difference for most cancer is prevention and early screening. If a cancer is caught early, surgery will be used if possible to effect a complete cure. A colleague of mine had prostate cancer; they removed the gland and ever since, no cancer whatsover.

A good example of how medicine works is provided by the fight against AIDS. In the mid 1990s, powerful new antivirals (an unprecedented medical advance) became available and had an immediate and dramatic impact on the disease. People spoke of the "Lazarus effect," where patients close to death regained their health. This provided a new model for treating AIDS: a chronic disease that patients can live with, similar to diabetes. Was this a conspiracy by the drug companies to turn AIDS patients into a big cash cow? No -- various logical paths to clearing the virus from the body of patients were tried, unfortunately without success. The virus splices itself into the genes of various kinds of cells. It was shown in the late 1990s that the new antivirals can only clear the virus completely from the body if all the infected cells die, which they will in time. But certain kinds of cells now known to be infected by HIV live for decades. Note some of this research (both on the original protease inhibitors and this work) was done by government researchers; some by big pharma.