Like I notice there is a huge push for prevention, which is fantastic, but that kind of feels like taking all the people who are already suffering from intractable conditions and throwing them under the bus.

Like when are we gonna actually get lab grown kidneys, livers, tendons, and all that shit that would immediately help so many people? I remember at the beginning of this century stem cells were all the rage, but I haven't seen anything groundbreaking. Every "promising" study said that treatments (perhaps cures) were "5 to 10 years" away.

We can send a probe to the south pole of the moon but if you have back pain then it's basically "fuck you here's some pain meds but we're not gonna actually fix your issue... maybe try to do some physical therapy and get out of my office" kind of shit. Or "You got diabetes? too bad no cure here's some $8k insulin." And "Oh you tore your miniscus? Well just 'take it easy' and do some leg exercises and I'll do some surgery on it, but it'll never be back to 100% so get the fuck out of my office and here's a bill for $3k." Or "oh it seems you have carpal tunnel and some tendon/ligament damage... i guess you could do some surgey and some 'hand exercises' but it'll never be the same as it was before, oh btw here's a bill for $5k."

Even something not as critical like hair loss (which is psychologically damaging for men and especially so for women) still relies on the good old "go to Turkey to get a hair transplant. oh you want to actually grow your original hair back? too bad, even though we should have figured out that shit using stem cells by now."

That's not even mentioning the people suffering from things like chronic fatigue or long covid. They are basically tossed aside like a bad batch of vegetables. "oh yeah this batch is fucked, oh well maybe better luck with the next batch!"

I know I'm just venting here, but what's the fucking deal? Are we actually going to have legit regenerative medicine? Or will it always be "5 to 10 years away" for the rest of eternity?

  • NoLeftLeftWhereILive
    ·
    1 year ago

    A social science nerd looking at medicalization and medical hegemony here and will just say that capitalism and medicine as business does play a huge part in this. Also gendering, racial and other factors. Pathriarchy and capitalism love each others company and this particular profession and the industries/sciences tied to it have huge hegemonic power starting from validating illnesses to treating/not treating them.

    Many drugs that work well are not manufactured if it isn't profitable enough. Many less common conditions aren't getting funded for research if treating them will not be profitable enough. Other things get manufactured (self-measuring as a business, wearabless, the neoliberal self-monitoring patient and all yhe stuff this comes with).

    Cuba has basically solved lung cancer, yet this is not made available to everyone.

    The promising nasal vaccines for covid struggled to get funded as they would be too cheap to produce (bad for profits).

    Hospital and clinical research has to meet the expectations of the free market most times.

    Womens pain treatment and gendered medical issues lag behind due to historical narratives and treatment. Certain conditions like fibromyalgia are just treated badly due to this.

    A lot of promising research gets scrapped if it isn't easy enough to monetize.

    Yet we get things like gagdets to monitor our heart rate variables at home that in reality is information that is not necessary in any way.

    Developed medicine that would truly solve a problem for good in capitalism would be like selling people shoes that never break, there is no profit in that and it would cost a lot to come up with it. I think we won't have anything like that on a mass scale within the scope of capitalism. (Looking at the non-willingness to address longcovid, this kind of hits home. It will get addressed when enough working bodies can't work anymore and apparently we are not there yet.)

    Also the way the idea of a "cure" has been sold to us and illness been framed as something very alien is fairly new in human history, being sick in some way has been the human condition and only in the last century thanks to vacciness and antibiotics have we gotten used to the idea that we can just buy/consume our way to a long healthy life.

    But our individual bodies do have a best befofe date that I am pretty sure we can't fully override with science. It however has very effectively been sold to us as an idea that capitalist medicine can do this. When it actually has a smaller role in lifespan/life quality than many other social conditions (food, housing etc.)