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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

I don’t want to live with dementia either. I bet the 50 million people in the world with it would rather not have it either.

How about option B? Cure the disease!

The woman in the article is only 71. It’s crazy that in 2024 we have no idea how to slow the disease enough so she gets another 10 years of quality life.

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Nobody suggested euthanasia is an ”alternative” to researching treatment.

The problem we have right now is that there isn’t a cure and we don’t know when research will provide one. Or if it even ever will.

I didn’t suggest that anyone did. My point is that we can cure the disease by making a big effort.

Do we want to cure the disease by 2100, 2075, 2050, or perhaps 2040? Pick a year.

How does picking a year cure a disease? That's not how research works.

It’s about level of investment and effort.

And what about the myriad of cancers? Birth defects? Blindness? Parkinsons? ALS? Add to that poverty, malnutrition, starvation, wars… The problem is there is a limited amount of money, lab space, and researchers. Some pragmatism and realism is needed.

Don’t forget the $1 trillion in interest on the US debt.

The ICE Bucket Challenge raised $115 million for ALS in 2014. Maybe more events like that?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Bucket_Challenge

It’s entirely possible that dementia isn’t a curable thing, though it might be mitigable. A few technocrats who think they’re living in the Altered Carbon timeline aside, cellular aging is probably just a fact of living in a body.

> I didn’t suggest that anyone did. My point is that we can cure the disease by making a big effort.

We are making a big effort

> Do we want to cure the disease by 2100, 2075, 2050, or perhaps 2040? Pick a year.

That's not even remotely how research works. It's not like software engineering where the problem is known. We could find a cure tomorrow, or it might be in 2000 years time. We literally have no idea how long it would take.

Moreover, research into unrelated things might even be the breakthrough needed for understanding and "curing" dementia.

Curing a disease can easily take tens-to-hundreds of millions of dollars or more and up to decades of research.

For most individuals, this degree of personal financial and temporal expenditure isn’t available.

This. Time value of suffering. Certainly, we should continue to innovate, but also have the freedom to check out when we want on our terms when success is beyond our life light cone.

“In 2020, the direct costs to American society of caring for those with Alzheimer’s and other dementias will total an estimated $305 billion”

https://act.alz.org/site/DocServer/2012_Costs_Fact_Sheet_ver...

It costs a fortune to treat the disease. We’ll save a fortune by curing it.

You can’t stop treating people while we research for a cure.

And in fact both already do happen in parallel. So your point is moot.

How are we spending for research? Because we are going to spend $18 trillion for treatment by 2050.

“Cumulatively between 2023 and 2050, it will cost nearly $18 trillion (in 2023 dollars) — nearly two-thirds of which will be borne by Medicare and Medicaid.”

https://alzimpact.org/sites/default/files/2023-03/Fiscal%20Y...

So, my not so moot point is we are not spending nearly enough on research.

There is no guarantee the cure will be cheap or even cheaper compared to the current situation. Not to mention the increase in other medical conditions that are bound to occur in the added years of life and add to the total medical bill.

Also, note that this investment money is directly related to the number of working hours. All those people working on a cure in labs etc. will have a very different experience in life compared to those same people earning the same money for caring for their fellow humans. It is not a purely financial weighing.

It's all good and well making statements like that but, and at risk of repeating myself, you cannot stop treating people just because you want to spend more on research. And even if you did magic up more money to spend on research, there's no guarantee that a cure would be found by 2050. Or even if it's curable at all.

This is a pretty dumb argument.

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