| ▲ | ben_w 13 hours ago |
| IIRC medical research is really expensive, hence money-seeking is to fund it within capitalism. Also IIRC the rewards are oversized compared to the costs, but that doesn't change that the costs are also huge. Does mean I'm generally in favour of getting every government to quadruple public spending on this though. Whatever the current spend is, we can do more. |
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| ▲ | adamredwoods 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Rare diseases fund research through philanthropy. And let's not forget Biden's Cancer Moonshot program! https://www.whitehouse.gov/cancermoonshot/ |
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| ▲ | ALittleLight 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I don't see how something like high dose vitamin C IV is very expensive. I would assume a handful of oncologists could do the whole thing themselves. We get X patients a year, we randomly suggest the vitamin C IV to half, the half with vitamin C did better or worse by these metrics. Vitamin C is not expensive and they have to collect the outcome data for everyone involved anyway - so where is the expense coming from? If it has benefits then more doctors will start to do it and more data will become available. If not, onto the next thing. |
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| ▲ | ericmay 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm not a physician and not in the medical field, but I would hazard a guess that a lot of the expense comes from just doing the work. What specific doctor will administer the vitamin C and monitor the patients? How do you isolate that the vitamin C dosage increase is effective? Who is going to create the vitamin C in the proper dosages? Who is going to write about it to make sure that it's legally approved? The human body is very sophisticated. The trials have to be done in a scientific way, following the established procedures of ethical medical treatment, peer reviewed, etc. And let's say you start giving vitamin C to some of these patients and they start having bad reactions and it makes their disease worse? Who covers the hospital stay? Who pays for their care? Just looking at a few things there I'm guessing that's a few million dollars at the very least.. and even so you have to look at opportunity cost. Is this the best and most promising path of research for the physicians and researchers? Are there more promising compounds? Etc. | |
| ▲ | cen4 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It happens already. You just have to find the docs who do it. Which usually means attending conferences which focus on specific diseases. | | |
| ▲ | andy_ppp 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | You mean the sort of conferences that attract charlatans and conspiracy theorists? |
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