Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

It's the same with diseases.

I meet some guy I was a grad student with he tells me he is working on cures for cancer at his startup and I think he's a Poseur, now if he was working to cure Tourette's syndrome I'd take him seriously.

Joe Biden has a personal reason to advance Nixon's "War on Cancer", but let's see a government or private effort to cure chronic pain -- it is such a tragedy to see people dying left and right from opioid addiction which comes from a lack of safe and effective treatment for non-cancer pain.

You can go after it after the fact with addiction treatment, law enforcement, etc. but it is much better to catch that horse before it leaves the barn.

View on HN

Chronic pain, fibromyalgia, chronic uticaria, essential tremors.

Every week my great aunt looks for some news about essential tremors. Extremely common, affects walk, hands, throat, sometimes head movements. All there is to treat is deep brain stimulation, or treat the symptoms with stuff like beta blockers. Giant hammers but no looking into the underlying causes. We know so little.

This is always going to happen given the nature of democracy. For afflictions that have a well-defined demographic (HIV, breast cancer) you get an easily-organized voting bloc, and diffuse costs across a broad population. But when the afflicted are themselves more diverse, it's much more difficult to mount the same activism.

I don't mean to get political, but this is a danger of governmental involvement in health care. Given scarcity of resources, it's necessary to prioritize their allocation. Somebody's got to decide where that funding goes, and this is the kernel of truth that was exaggerated into the "death panel" meme.

Private organizations can feel the pinch from activists too.

I think also some groups are better or worse at marketing and/or lucky vs unlucky. For instance, diabetes is a diverse condition and the American Diabetes Association is right up there with the Breast Cancer Industrial Complex. We even see medical clinics in our area that are working pretty hard to figure out how to treat medicare patients with that condition both properly and effectively even though it has taken a long time.

So far as politics goes, chronic pain is connected strongly with disability and pushing it back could get a lot of people off disability and back in the workforce again.

Yeah, I remember reading an article about AIDS being the hip, high-investment disease in Africa, while diarrhea kills way more people.

Cynically, AIDS leaves Africa. Diarrhea doesn't.

It left India for me. Fwiw Vietnam too 10 years later. Some people never learn. (I get what you were getting at tbough)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com