• disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      Corporate medicine owns lives as a whole. Big pharma is only one brick in the paywall to life and the pursuit of happiness.

      • whithom@discuss.online
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        18 days ago

        There is no road to happiness. Only the acceptance of your place. Corporations see to that.

    • Hugin@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      People die of old age, car accidents, etc. Those are hardly big pharma’s fault.

    • JWBananas@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      There are an average of 488 deaths per day from excessive alcohol use in the US alone. Big Pharma can’t grow a new liver for you.

    • seaQueue@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      They lobby for public health and investment spending that will guarantee their own income rather than actually curing health conditions.

      Why invest in curing a health condition when you can sell symptom management for a person’s entire lifetime instead?

    • AmidFuror@fedia.io
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      18 days ago

      Are you saying that small pharma is responsible for many of the life-saving medicines we use?

      • ArtieShaw@fedia.io
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        18 days ago

        That’s an odd question without an easy answer. And the question is vague enough that it probably doesn’t warrant a serious answer.

        “Small pharma” plays many roles. One of the most basic is working with “big pharma,” whether in research or manufacturing commercial products.

        But I’m going on 30 years on the scientific side of this business, so I’m trying to avoid going into a whole spiel on the topic.

        • AmidFuror@fedia.io
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          18 days ago

          I think that answers it well enough. Big pharma buys a lot of leads from small pharma, but I think small pharma could fill the pipeline pretty well without ruthlessly exploiting it quite as much.

          I wasn’t sure if you were a natural remedy type nut. I now take your statement to be hyperbole since a lot of people die from car accidents. Only some of those can be blamed on big pharma making a treatment too expensive or getting the other driver addicted.

    • Novice_Idiot@lemmy.wtf
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      18 days ago

      Funny story, was working at an event for Johnson & Johnson. Most of the people working there were super nice and normal. Was kinda surreal to think that I was chatting with some of the people playing medical gods

  • randon31415@lemmy.world
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    18 days ago

    Strangely, medical privacy is the reason anyone still dies from HIV. For the cost of 10 cents per person, we could test every human in the planet and make that information public. The transmission rate goes down (1/10th) if the infected person knows, and goes down further with the right immunosupressents (by a factor of 1/100). Publicly available data might even push that to 1/1000. The transmission rate is around 1, so that means it would be cut to 1 new infected per 1000 cases.

    Within the standard life expectancy of a hiv carrier, we would go from 40 million to 40 thousand cases.

    • frustrated_phagocytosis@fedia.io
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      18 days ago

      Even an incredibly accurate tests would result in thousands of false positives that would now be public knowledge. As difficult as it is to correct anything involving government records, you can imagine the fallout from that. Plus some with medicated HIV won’t show as HIV positive in blood tests anyways.

      • chingadera@lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        /theydidntdothemath

        Whatever percentage of positive tests would have a second and possibly tertiary test to confirm and rule out false positives for a whopping (guessing here) 10.03 cents per person

    • leisesprecher@feddit.org
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      18 days ago

      Privacy is almost always a double edged sword here.

      Making all medical records of everyone available to science would catapult us 200 years in the future…

      … but it would also lead to extremely widespread discrimination against a whole bunch of people, throwing us back 200 years.