Targeted chemotherapy appears to annihilate all solid tumors
Targeted chemotherapy appears to annihilate all solid tumors
I am guessing about $1300 a year goes from my taxes to health care
That is far less than the average American insurance plan and those include co-pays and deductibles. I hate living in the U.S.
My wife and I each pay a little into our work health plans but that’s mostly to cover dental and a few other things we really don’t use.
Here’s an example of that coverage: I pay about $20 a month into my work plan. That covers pretty much all our dental work.
I occasionally have to pay out of pocket for some stuff (CPAP machine, dental implant) but get compensated after submitting paperwork (no deductible).
I worked in the US for a bit in a kitchen and was always worried about getting injured. At the time I couldn’t buy muscle relaxant over the counter which I thought was nuts (I get back spasms) until I realized requiring a prescription was one more was to squeeze people for a doctor’s visit.
I agree there’s more money in just treating symptoms and EOL care than actually eradicating cancer, but future treatment/eradication is certainly glamorous. Just think of all the celebrities that keep dying from cancer that could come out and say I was saved by X.
Patric Swayze, Steve Jobs, David Bowie and Peewee Herman just to name a few.
Would he go the crazy route is there was an established treatment with 100% success rate though?
How many people you know that drink diluted shit to treat rabies? You just go get your shots like a good boy and live to get bit another day.
Eh, it’s an issue and it may get worse than it is today, but it will never be as big of a deal as cancer.
The nightmare scenario of antibiotics one day becoming useless because all bacteria are resistant to them is just not realistic. First of all, antibiotics aren’t new. Many of them weren’t invented, they were discovered. Which means they existed in fungi or other bacteria for millions of years and were used to fight unwanted bacteria. Penicillin is named after the Penicillium mold, for example.
Antibiotic resistance is a survival strategy for bacteria that are under a lot of stress from antibiotics. This happens in hospitals, nursing homes or farms where antibiotics are used en masse. In these places, resistant bacteria have a clear advantage over normal ones, so they can quickly replicate without much competition. But as soon as you take away the antibiotics, that advantage disappears and suddenly they have to compete with the normal bacteria again. Plus, maintaining the antibiotic resistance is effort. They have to produce special proteins or change the ones they normally use, which can make them less efficient.
So most likely, antibiotic resistance will mainly be a problem in places where lots of antibiotics are used all the time. As soon as we reduce usage, resistance will go down. There are certain antibiotics that haven’t been used in decades due to side effects, such as Colistin, which can now be used to treat multi-drug-resistant bacteria because they haven’t been exposed to it for so long. Other antibiotics like quinolones are currently falling out of favor, so they may be the magic bullet of the future.
One more aspect is that antibiotics don’t make a lot of money for pharmaceutical companies, because they’re usually only taken for days or a few weeks, while other drugs such as heart medication are taken lifelong. That’s why there’s not a lot of (private) money going into antibiotic research. But if the situation gets bad enough, this may chance and it will likely mean that a lot more new antibiotics are developed.
Might be worth waiting for some news outlets you’ve actually heard of to start carrying the story before you break out the balloons.
This feels like a cynical ploy for funding, like almost every “miracle battery” story carried over the past ten years.