This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. Modern medicine is not in the business of curing diseases. It's all about disease and symptom management.
I know enough people in the field of modern medicine to know that that is hyperbole. At least in the European countries that I have lived in.
EDIT: I am sorry to hear from the responses to this that this may not be quite so hyperbolic in the US. I hope that trend will be reversed somehow.
European medicine is indeed worlds different, and the European population is far less sick, overmedicated and suffering from iatrogenesis.
While it's true that the US has a serious problem with overprescribing, it's also true that many other countries are seriously underprescribing psychiatric medication, due to a combination of cost and stigma. Mental illness represents an immense global disease burden, with depression being the single greatest problem. The disease burden of depression is higher in many lower- and middle-income countries than in the US, mainly due to a lack of treatment.
Although there has been a great deal of controversy over antidepressant drugs, we are now highly confident that they are significantly more effective than placebo. Generic antidepressants are dirt cheap, with most costing less than $2 per month at international wholesale prices. We shouldn't lose sight of these facts.
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67... http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67...
It's that insane right now.
Maps.org
> The mammalian nervous system executes complex behaviors controlled by specialised, precisely positioned and interacting cell types. Here, we used RNA sequencing of half a million single cells to create a detailed census of cell types in the mouse nervous system. We mapped cell types spatially and derived a hierarchical, data-driven taxonomy. (...) The resource presented here lays a solid foundation for understanding the molecular architecture of the mammalian nervous system, and enables genetic manipulation of specific cell types.
(you may wonder what mice have to do with human brains: on a "cellular" and "genetic" level, mice are already close enough to humans to be decent substitutes for researching quite a lot of fundamental stuff about how the brain works)
We already had an atlas of where every gene was activated in the mouse brain since 2006, but this was at the tissue level[2][3]. Only recently it has become possible to research at the cellular level which genes are activated. That has enabled the possibility of classifying cell types by gene activation. Not only that, by tracking gene activation over various stages of development, we can see how the genes interact and activate each other, and get a better insight in how the brain develops its various different cell types.
I am "merely" a programmer/interaction designer building tools for easier data exploration, and can't pretend to understand the fine details, but that sounds like it is Kind Of A Big Deal for anyone researching brains.
For example: until now, we could only see which genes are correlated with higher chances of a certain mental illness (by looking at the genetic makeup of people with and without these illnesses). But that is not the same as knowing what those genes do. Furthermore, many of mental illnesses are partially nature, partially nurture: you have to be unlucky enough to have a mix of genes that makes it possible or more likely to manifest an illness, but for the disease to truly manifest itself you also requires an environmental trigger.
When we can follow individual cell development at the genetic expression level, we can start to figure out what changes when certain genes and/or certain stimuli are present or absent.
There is an equivalent science project underway to map out all the cell types in the human body, not just the brain[4]. On top of that, the techniques that let scientists analyse the RNA expression in individual cells are getting cheaper and faster all the time[5]. My guess is that major breakthroughs in understanding how the body works, including the brain, will start coming in very quickly.
(and I'm not even talking about the implications for machine learning)
[0] https://twitter.com/slinnarsson/status/981919808726892545
[1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2018/04/05/294...
[2] http://mouse.brain-map.org/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Brain_Atlas#Mouse_Brain
[4] https://www.humancellatlas.org/
[5] http://www.alleninstitute.org/what-we-do/brain-science/news-...
The best available evidence suggests that psychological treatments are equally effective as drug treatments for most common psychiatric disorders. Psychological therapies are generally orders of magnitude more expensive than drug treatments, so unfortunately they aren't as widely available.
Psychiatry is an incredibly challenging field and there are a lot of things we just don't know. Drug companies might have a strong incentive to keep selling you pills, but insurers have an equally strong incentive to cure you outright. Single-payer healthcare systems like the British NHS have a huge incentive to use the best, most cost-effective treatments available. It's just an unfortunate fact that we can't fix everyone. There is no magic wand to cure all human misery and there's no conspiracy to keep people sick.
http://cochranelibrary-wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD0033... http://cochranelibrary-wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD0111...
Yet. Let us remain optimistic :)
Fortunately Psychedelic medicines are coming online that can allow for actual healing of the underlying patterns. They saved my life for certain.
Others have seen no progress in 50+ years and continue to have exceptionally poor prognosis.
The biggest advances in medical outcomes are virtually all based on public health, preventive measures, and improved access to fundamental care.
To say that a cure doesn't exist because they are not trying for it is 1) wrong, 2) hugely dismissive of the life's effort of tens of thousands of people, and 3) dismissive of the struggle of those using antidepressants.
If you think there are cures out there that are easily achievable, show it. Otherwise you are just perpetuating facile misunderstandings of a difficult situation.
Yes, if you read Hacker News you probably object. Not everyone does that. But making the problem just go away is the prevailing, widely spread, most commonly used mode of working.