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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

Are you saying that people are not trying to cure diseases? And instead they are only trying to manage them? If so, that is unequivocally wrong and misinformed.

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They are trying to cure symptoms of underlying diseases, and even that, only in ways that will require lifetime intake of drugs and followup tests.

That's just human nature. We can say the same about programmers. They just want to fix the apparent problems, not write a better program.

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.

I would assume the best intentions for the vast majority of individuals working in the health system. But the economy of that system is one that favors treatment over cure/prevention. I'd like to believe that is a mistake of circumstance and not a design of human greed.

Not entirely. Whichever company comes up with a cure first will gain nearly 100% of the market, and can charge a TON to insurance companies for it. It cuts off long term profits, but investors reward quarterly growth primarily.

Most developers want to rewrite every app they meet. What they write as usually sales driven features. The system is the problem not human nature.

That's not what any doctor or scientist is trying to do, they'd all prefer a cure. They'd prefer to have treatments that work better, and are continuously working to improve them.

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.

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