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Posted 9/16/2020 1:41 AM (GMT 0)
Do you ever wonder about our scientific community?

The science community has almost unlimited funding. They are always bragging about how smart they are and how advanced they are. They have at their disposal every piece of machinery and cutting edge laboratories. They are always giving themselves awards and writing papers.

How come they're not smart enough to cure anything?
Posted 9/16/2020 1:41 PM (GMT 0)
I wonder that all the time. I chalk most of their ineptitude to human nature. Laziness and confirmation bias seem to plague every industry, science included. I have to disagree that they have near unlimited funds.

I am not on the inside of that industry, but I have seen commenters speak about how hard it is to win funding in the first place and keep the funding coming if a particular study is appearing negative or not what they were hoping for. Many investers do not like risk and sometimes only place what they think are sure bets.

Covid is a different situation. You do see more scientific "prospecting / gambling" I think because the gov't is trying to throw money at the problem.
Posted 9/16/2020 3:17 PM (GMT 0)
Yeah it's the funding that directs the flashlight. Getting science to illuminate more like a lantern is the difficult problem.

You know how dark chocolate is considered a health food now? The studies were all funded by candy makers. Not that it's bad science or anything, but if the studies showed otherwise, how likely is it that we ever find out?

With Lyme I think the lack of funding is a huge problem. I know the research on disulfiram hasn't been progressing much due to this. In fact the only reason we ever even found out about disulfiram's effectiveness was due to a grant from a NY billionaire whose wife got chronic Lyme.
Posted 9/16/2020 4:16 PM (GMT 0)
reading on the Bill recently going through government in the USA - I read that the funds that were made available - something like $50m at that time ( so still a drop in the ocean but not insignificant)
but those that were charged with distributing these funds were not getting a sufficient number of research applications from the scientific community.
this was thought to be due to the stigma attached to Lyme disease and not enough researchers in the wider scientific community were willing to put their careers on the line pursuing subjects that may not be in vogue or have a cloud of controversy around them - when there are safer bets.
that was a year or so ago so hopefully, this is changing ...
Posted 9/16/2020 9:10 PM (GMT 0)
I'm thinking that you are asking this question with Lyme in mind and obviously understand your frustration at that end.

Science has led to significant decrease in the amount of infection of terrible illnesses through vaccination. Smallpox has been eradicated. HIV/AIDS is no longer an automatic death sentence. Cancer can be put into remission if caught quick enough. Heart surgery can save lives. Imagine asthma before bronchodilators. Epinephrine can save those experiencing anaphylaxis. There is probably much more I'm missing.

Antibiotics changed the world.

"Prior to the beginning of the 20th Century, infectious diseases accounted for high morbidity and mortality worldwide. The average life expectancy at birth was 47 years (46 and 48 years for men and women respectively) even in the industrialized world. Infectious diseases such as smallpox, cholera, diphtheria, pneumonia, typhoid fever, plaque, tuberculosis, typhus, syphilis, etc. were rampant."

"The antibiotic era revolutionized the treatment of infectious diseases worldwide, although with much success in developed countries. In the US for example, the leading causes of death changed from communicable diseases to non-communicable diseases (cardiovascular disease, cancer, and stroke), the average life expectancy at birth rose to 78.8 years, and older population changed from 4% to 13% of the entire US population"

Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5354621/#:~:text=Prior%20to%20the%20beginning%20of,even%20in%20the%20industrialized%20world.


How come they're not smart enough to cure anything?

Well, I don't know. However, I'm confident in saying that medical scientists are trying to fight against nature. Nature always wins. If science could cure all ailments then why couldn't we live forever? Additionally, you just happened to be born in this time period. People of 1000 years ago would have killed to have the medical care we have. People 1000 years from now will probably look at our medical system as barbaric. It's both relative and the luck of the draw.
Posted 9/16/2020 9:34 PM (GMT 0)
I agree with Lymie24 - we have come a long way but "nature always wins." We can't expect that science will solve everything.

I knew someone that studied neuroscience - he said if the brain functions like an orchestra playing a symphony, we're only advanced enough to figure out where the stage and the chairs are. Some of "advanced neuroscience" he said boiled down to basically dumb ideas like, hey, "maybe if we throw lots of chairs on the stage the orchestra will somehow play better."

What makes me mad though is when "scientists" like IDSA docs claim certainty where there is none. I.e.,
"No evidence to support chronic infection" - haven't looked for it and repeatedly deny/discredit the studies that found it.
"No evidence that Bartonella is part of a Lyme coinfection syndrome" - translates to either didn't actually look for it, or used flawed tests for wrong strains of Bacteria.
"Review of literature shows that 99.6% of confirmed Lyme patients had a positive test" - yes, you looked at studies that mostly had a positive Lyme test as a precondition to participate, so of course, it looks like everyone tests positive.

That's the stuff that makes me upset.
Posted 9/17/2020 1:07 AM (GMT 0)
Sometimes you can't put Humpty back together again. Its hard to accept.
Posted 9/18/2020 1:57 AM (GMT 0)
I just think there should be more pressure on the medical community to actually cure illnesses. They seem to be very comfortable saying "Oh, we don't have a cure for that." "Oh, we don't know what to do about this."

I just think they don't try very hard. The amount of money and time we have given to researchers to cure cancer, and they have no answers. It's kind of sickening. They've been trying to figure out a way to cure cancer since the 60s, (if not earlier) and they have been given trillions of dollars through walk-a-thons, corporate america, ect, and they are still using chemotherapy which is a drug they developed in the 1960s. Really guys? This is the best you can do?

It's either the best they can do, or the best that they want to do. I have read about quite a few promising cancer treatments that they have swept under the rug. I have even read about people disappearing when they have found a promising cancer treatment. It's true when they say that cancer is big business.

...

Also, think about the advancements we have made in computer technology. In the early 1980s a computer was as big as a refrigerator. Now we have cell phones that have 10000x more computing power than those early 80s computer and it can fit into our pocket. If we can do that with time and money, how come we can't figure out ways to cure common diseases? Is figuring out a cure for a disease that much more complicated than building an iPhone? I don't think so. Then why are we not finding cures? I think it's time that we, as a society, stop giving the science community a pass on everything. I think we should start demanding results or start cutting off funding and give the funding to people who can find results and cures. To me, the fact that people still die seems very primitive in such an advanced society. We really should have concurred death by now. If you don't think people like Jeff Bezos are not funding private laboratories to do this work, then you're kidding yourself. He said that he wants to be the oldest living person on earth. He's not going to achieve by eating right and exercising.

Missing Key Value : en-US, 736

Posted 9/19/2020 8:19 PM (GMT 0)
to take those examples

with a smartphone - yes its an amazing and powerful piece of technology that has hundreds of clever innovations in it that is a pretty impressive achievement. but if you think about it is really an extension of earlier technologies built brick by brick from the ground up. first, there was the valve, then the transistor, then micro transistors, then many many transistors packed into a small space - each step is built on the last.
but the key thing is this is all man-made technology that we developed and we understand and we control everything about that environment.

dealing with natural existing biological systems like bacteria, the immune system, their interaction in the host, and the interplay of their genetics and epigenetics is a totally different ball game.

these are massively complex systems that someone else designed over millions of years and we are currently just chipping away at the edges and really only understand only a tiny few of the jigsaw pieces - the rest is a mystery to us - blank - unknown - confounding and when we do figure bits out it's often surprising and perplexing raising yet more questions.

so there is a radical difference between the nature of the two problems.

the funding and motivation issues certainly do exist

likewise, I think it's clear from the patents held by CDC members - that there are various malpractice and misinformation type issues in the mix with Lyme, etc as well as the sheer scale of the technical challenge i mentioned above.

these factors also interact - eg if something has a lot of negative publicity it will not attract up and coming researchers

i think that together this is sufficient to explain why we are where we are today

I thought there were some new laws past in the US that meant the government had to deliver better response to tick-borne diseases - and was going through the steps to do that - with things like the Tick Borne Diseases Working Groups ( the one Horowitz was on ?)

i was hoping that might be the beginning of a change in tack / or has it all been redirected by those with vested interests ?
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