It is true that keeping people on pills sustains the pharmaceutical companies. But it's important not to jump to conclusions based on that fact. The industry is not made up completely of self-serving individuals and there are more than enough diseases that pills can be invented for. Not to mention that the blockbuster drugs that really make money for them are not diseases like IBD, they're the common diseases like heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer, etc. That's where a lot of the profits come from. Cures for certain diseases do exist and pharm companies do make profit by making them very expensive.
I've been doing some reading around a little bit about
the history of medicine/pharmacy and really pharmaceutical companies had a golden age from the 40's to the 70's. This is when many of the drugs we use today to treat common ailments were invented. These were the safest, most effective drugs. We have solved a lot of problems with these common medicines, but it leaves people with more difficult diseases untreated.
The diseases that still don't have cures or satisfactory solutions are really complex now. We're not dealing in simple areas anymore. Fixing one factor doesn't fix many uncured diseases anymore. It's also entirely possible that many people with diseases like IBD have a different cause between each person. This makes it really hard to figure diseases out.
But there's so much we have yet to discover about
the human body in general. A bunch of scientists just found out that many autoimmune diseases aren't caused by a defect in some genes, but in the segments of DNA that turn on genes. 98% of DNA, we have no clue what it does, we're still just learning. Researchers are trying to see if Crohn's is cured via bone marrow transplants. So there's an example of a possible cure through a very expensive procedure.
I guess my point is to add some balance to viewpoint of those that think pharma would never look for a cure. While some companies engage in patent trickery and me-too drugs to keep their profits going, when patents for drugs expire, pharm companies don't make much money anymore. There's a lot of incentive to make better drugs and innovate new ways to treat/cure diseases. If you are the company with the answer, you immediately have a bigger advantage than your competitors. Even if profits are short term, that is still an attractive incentive for a pharm company. Many of them operate on making huge short term profits.
If there was a true cure for Crohn's, news of it would spread very quickly. News outlets would pick it up...it would be all over the internet.
The Crohn's MAP Vaccine people think they may have a cure, but time will tell. If they can get their research funded, we will find out very soon.
Post Edited (Tunnelvisionary) : 12/10/2014 4:16:22 PM (GMT-7)