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Comment by Xoros | Hacker News Reader

I think the term "consumer base" is not heartless but in fact pretty accurate.

Why not spending the probably huge amount of money in a cure instead of monitoring devices ?

Well, because why kill the Golden Egg Goose ? Millions of people who have to take pills every day are good recurent money. If you cure them, no more cash.

(Well it's the middle of the night, I can't sleep and fill a little bit bitter...)

One more thing. I'm a bit scared with all the private companies collecting personal medical datas. But maybe I've read too much science fiction.

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Agreed about private companies and collecting of data, but in the case of Apple, none of your HealthKit data is transmitted (it's all stored on your iPhone and/or Apple Watch).

Any app that reads/writes HealthKit data is required to provide a privacy policy before it passes App Store approval.

Additionally, apps can only access that data after a full-screen permissions screen is displayed, and the user manually toggles on the categories of Health data that the app can access.

In my experience, the bar for getting apps that use HealthKit is at least slightly higher than for non-HealthKit apps.

Didn't knew about that. If true (and I trust you on this one) that's a little relief.

I think this idea is pretty odd. If someone had a cure for diabetes, you'd bet they'd charge an arm and a leg for it. The patents alone would be incredibly valuable.

From a non-monetary standpoint, dehumanizing companies is always a bit frustrating. They consist of people, like you and me. Most people aren't sociopaths and the idea that business leaders are entirely sociopathic is worth challenging. I don't think most people would want to withhold a cure for recurring revenue. Charge for it, yes, but not withhold it.

Also, withholding cure for a big disease is not necessarily a stable equilibrium on the market - the first company to release such a cure would mop the floor with their competitors.

This is only true if a one-off sale of the cure is significantly more profitable than a reliable income stream from products that help manage the disease without curing it.

For that to be true the cure would have to be more expensive than management by at least an order of magnitude - assuming monthly refills for management and an annual reporting cycle - but still not so expensive that it became unaffordable.

Can someone provide links to examples of companies withholding cures in exchange for profit? If not, the idea of this is nothing but conspiratorial.

If it's true, though, it's worth knowing.

I wasn't being conspiratorial, so much as adding some detail to a market-based model.

As in the other post below, I don't believe magic bullet cures are possible for most diseases.

Following that economic logic further, it's much cheaper and easier to produce a not-very-effective but marketable palliative than it is to aim for a Nobel-winning medical moonshot.

I don't know of any suppressed super-cures, but evidence confirming the limited effectiveness of (e.g.) SSRIs is easy to find and hard to argue with.

Similarly questionable outcomes have been noted in other fields. E.g. novel anticoagulants:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabigatran

My original statement was about how much money goes in treatment research vs in cure research. Not about some conspiracy :-)

I never said someone found it and is hiding it. I'm just a bit sad that there's probably more money that goes in treatment than in cure research.

It's economically understandable but humanly sad.

> If you cure them, no more cash

This is pretty shortsighted. Because:

- it's not like you would cure everyone at once anyway

- there are always people who will develop the disease eventually so you can always make money in the long run

- if you are the only effective treatment you can pretty much make the price you want, and collect massive profits that can be invested in the develop of other drugs or solutions.

Never heard of vaccine companies going bankrupt, for example.

You might want to look into Gensym (sp?) and their Hepatitis cure. The company got a big boost when they released the cure but now they are being pummeled by the market and analysts as the need for their cure is declining (fewer cases). There is no money in cure, money is in turning medical issues into chronic diseases. US pharma research is focused on chronic management and not cure. When was the last time a cure originated from US based research?

> There is no money in cure

That's also because state put caps as to how much vaccines are supposed to cost, which makes them less profitable than they should be. However if you were to consider the cost of a one-time vaccine versus treating some illness for the rest of your life, it's expected consumers would go for the vaccine unless it's prohibitively expensive.

I've never heard of successful vaccine companies going bankrupt.

But vaccines are an exception in medicine. Serious conditions rarely have magic bullet cures.

E.g. "cancer" isn't one condition, it's a set of loosely related problems. It's very unlikely indeed there will ever be "a cure for cancer", but not at all unlikely that specific cancers will become much more treatable.

That doesn't stop companies promising to develop magic bullet cures - or magic bullet anything - and getting huge interest from investors. (See also Theranos, etc.)

First, these things are not easily exchangeable. Yes, it is important researching for cures as well as for treatments in the absence of "cures". But with diseases, which are caused by bad habits mainly, a device like the Apple Watch can be part of the cure, if it helps preventing the disease. And, of course, as long as we don't know how to cure, we should at least optimize the treatments.

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