I mean the actual medicine part. When I think about it, there are still no cures for the major things that ail us (e.g. cancer, etc.). China cured that one guy from his diabetes, but I haven't heard anything beyond that.

The "promise" of stem cell technology from 20 years ago still hasn't amounted to anything that your average person can get (and there are all sorts of shady overseas places that give ppl "stem cell" injections, but honestly we should have figured out that shit by now).

If you tear a ligament/tendon, guess what, that shit will never heal back to 100%, and the "oh just rest and do physical therapy" shit is annoying because you're only really working around the problem and not solving it.

On top of that, as you get older it's harder for your body to heal from injuries, sickness, etc. and I've yet to see any legit progress on anti-aging. If your heart is damaged or arteries clogged, I don't see any way to reverse it.

And after covid, it's all been fucked. How many people have long covid and the medical establishment just throws it's hands up shrug-outta-hecks basically treating an entire segment of the population as though it was a bad crop yield ("I guess there's always the next batch!!).

And doctors themselves are often the biggest dipshits out there. They are high off their own supply because they're "smart" and lack the empathy to actually listen to patients. Either they're older conservative types or younger lib dipshits. And there are so many horror stories about nurses that talk shit about patients. It's just dismal.

The common reply is that "biology is hard" but honestly that's a WEAK excuse. So many advances were made in the past, and there are so many more to be made. An actual concerted international effort, unhindered by profit motives and fucking insurance, hospital, pharmaceutical industries, etc. would almost certainly yield results. I mean look at Cuba coming up with a lung cancer vaccine and curing HIV in an infant. Look at China curing diabetes in that one guy. These advances are possible, but honestly they aren't coming fast enough. If you're suffering from a terrible disease/ailment, the "promise" of a new drug that still may be 10 years away is just terrible.

So even if we had 100% socialism now with free healthcare, there are still so many things that need to be addressed. I can't help but think that had the Soviet Union not fallen, we would have had cures for many things. Hopefully xi-beard can do something about this, but overall I'm still super bummed that the future we dreamed has not materialized.

  • hypercracker
    ·
    3 months ago

    The common reply is that "biology is hard" but honestly that's a WEAK excuse.

    lol

      • BeamBrain [he/him]
        ·
        3 months ago

        Speaking from experience, this has the same energy as the clueless boss of an IT department setting absurd deadlines and feature requirements because they don't understand what is and isn't actually computationally feasible

        • bidenicecream
          ·
          3 months ago

          Speaking from experience, this is the same energy as the clueless boss of an IT department setting absurd deadlines and feature requirements because they don't understand what is and isn't actually computationally feasible

          And yet many here, perhaps even you, want Xi to press the xi-button for communism, so I don't see the hostility towards dreaming of actually achieving something instead of being a downer about it.

      • hypercracker
        ·
        3 months ago

        It isn't. There's a good book you might enjoy called The Machinery of Life by David Goodsell, who is well known for doing really great illustrations of cell-level stuff. It will give you an appreciation for how fucking complicated it is. Idk I know people whose entire existences are subsumed in studying a single molecule and they don't even understand everything that it does.

        • bidenicecream
          ·
          3 months ago

          Sure but lots of things are "hard." Or "complex." That's what zionists say about Israel ("oh it's soooo complex!") when we know for damn sure it's not. So I dunno, I guess I just disagree with you on that one I guess.

          • hypercracker
            ·
            3 months ago

            Zionists lie about how complicated it is to neuter critique from liberal nuance-fetishists. That has nothing to do with how complicated human biology is. Like, just google "Roche biochemical pathways wall chart".

            • electricaltape [none/use name]
              ·
              3 months ago

              I don't know, I kinda agree with OP. Every time something seems impossible there's always a breakthrough. Why should we believe it would be any different for this?

              • Sulvor [he/him, undecided]
                ·
                3 months ago

                Medical research stands on the shoulders of giants. Do you think these breakthroughs just happen randomly or when it's convenient? People pour their lives into advancing a small amount of our shared knowledge, and will never see recognition or thanks.

                I am so confused by what is getting upvoted here, you people have no experience in medicine or research.

                No investigation, no right to speak.

                • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
                  ·
                  3 months ago

                  I am so confused by what is getting upvoted here, you people have no experience in medicine or research.

                  It's just a bunch of people angry at the world upvoting what they would like to hear over the truth of the matter/situation. Seems to be an ever increasing theme on hexbear, I think people want to even ban "doomerism" now, whatever that means.

                  • DefinitelyNotAPhone [he/him]
                    ·
                    3 months ago

                    There's definitely been a trend of growing sentiment against any sort of authority under capitalism combined with general anti-intellectualism here. The threads full of people screaming that 9/11 was an inside job because jet fuel can't melt steel beams was absurd, no matter how many people wander in pointing out that's not how that works and that, yes, you should generally trust structural engineers even if they exist within the framework of capitalism, or threads like this full of people saying that (the very real) systemic racism within healthcare means that doctors have no clue what they're talking about in any context and that you should just self medicate instead.

                  • whogivesashit@lemmygrad.ml
                    ·
                    3 months ago

                    Medicine is hard, I don't think anyone said it isn't. What they said is that it's a bad excuse.

                    The point is that there's a lot more factors that go into what gets researched and what treatments are readily available for the public etc.

                    When people say "holy shit how have we not made more progress on some of these things", replying with "it's hard" is a weak ass excuse when we have pharma companies pouring toms of money into making analogs of drugs so they don't lose their patents.

                  • Sulvor [he/him, undecided]
                    ·
                    3 months ago

                    I feel pretty vindicated cause it turns out 3 accounts in this thread were sock puppets, check the modloog.

                • bidenicecream
                  ·
                  3 months ago

                  Medical research stands on the shoulders of giants. Do you think these breakthroughs just happen randomly or when it's convenient?

                  Yes, they do stand on the shoulders of giants. AND, the breakthroughs often, perhaps usually, overturn the current "consensus" of the day, and often those breakthroughs are mocked by the current establishment consensus (there are plenty of examples on this, e.g. doctors legit thought that washing your hands before surgery didn't matter, physicists used to believe in the eternal/steady state model of the universe, physicists thought that physics was basically "done" and then the quantum revolution happened). So I don't know what you're talking about.

                  No investigation, no right to speak.

                  This might actually be you, but who am I to say shrug-outta-hecks .

                  • Sulvor [he/him, undecided]
                    ·
                    3 months ago

                    This might actually be you, but who am I to say

                    I have a doctorate in a medical field

              • hypercracker
                ·
                3 months ago

                And that one's so out of date that they took the original source website down as they're in the process of overhauling it! https://biochemical-pathways.com/

            • bidenicecream
              ·
              3 months ago

              I guess I'm just gonna have to shrug-outta-hecks disagree

          • gay_king_prince_charles [she/her, he/him]
            ·
            3 months ago

            The human body is simultaneously the most complex chemical plant ever created, the most advanced piece of machinery and the greatest computational device in existence. It's a miracle that we understand how a quarter of it works.