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[deleted] t1_itw45be wrote

Reply to comment by lc1138 in Neema Roshania Patel, Post editor who cultivated younger audiences, dies at 35 by aresef

Yep, it's unfortunately just a limitation of medicine currently; there is not an easy way to tell "good" cells from cancerous ones without performing a biopsy. It is unacceptably dangerous to biopsy someone's stomach when they have mild GI symptoms because >99% of them won't have cancer. It's just how it is; you or I could also be walking around with advanced pancreatic cancer or an early brain cancer right now, but there isn't anything we can do about it with the current state of medical knowledge.

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lc1138 t1_itw8yug wrote

This is taking it in another direction, but do you think there’s any truth to the claim that we’ll never have a cure for cancer because the pharmaceutical industry makes too much money off it? Like just baffles me that this is the way it is sigh

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[deleted] t1_itwpw37 wrote

There has been an explosion in neat novel anti-cancer agents that are basically synthetic antibodies that target specific cell receptors on cancer cells, exorbitantly expensive for the most part of course. Patients generally aren't on the same cancer drug for years at a time. It's more profitable to try to discover some new drug that actually cures them so you are selling the $400,000 first choice drug whenever a patient has melanoma with a certain gene mutation for example. You need to "win" outright and kill essentially all of the cancer cells so the patient goes into remission; if the tumor starts to resist the drug or develops a bunch of new mutations, the oncologist will need to switch to something else if your drug is clearly not working.

The real pharmaceutical scam is meds for things like GERD and hypertension where you find a new drug that is debatably 2% better, market it directly to patients on TV, then charge Medicare 10 times as much as the old drug while 20% of the US population takes it.

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