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by Doug Thews.
Original Post: What Bothers Me About Drug Research
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I was reading an article on medical drug research and something hit me like a bullet. The real barrier to finding cures for things like cancer, alzheimers, etc - is the drug companies themselves.
Sure, they tell us how they're researching new ideas, but the fact is that they're putting the majority of their research dollars into other areas. You might ask, Why? The reason is simple economics. For example, billions more dollars in research dollars were spent on male enhancement research a few years back than cancer research. Why? Because the drug companies deemed that there were more customers for that product, and therefore more dollars to be earned.
The sad fact is that patients with the most serious diseases do not make good customers. Whereas drugs for other trivial "life improvement" areas (like male enhancement, plastic surgery, weight loss, etc) have hunderds of millions of customers who won't go away anytime soon. And these "life improvement" drugs need to be taken constantly - the perfect revenue generating machine.
Unfortunately, this means that until we can make research more appealing (via tax breaks or something that helps the bottom line for a company), research money for trivial quality of life improvement drugs will far exceed the money allocated to finding solutions to our most serious diseases.
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