Why Computers Work and Health Care Doesn't

[alex3619]

Well beaverfury, there would be an advantage to us. However I can imagine what they would say: "Stop poking me!"

We would really need to track the recovery over time for maximum information. To do that we would need a large long term study of patients over years and decades. There is not much effort at that - no money for it as far as I am aware.

Testing a fully recovered patient might not tell us anything. If they come up normal, would it be because they got better or because they were still testing the wrong thing?

Testing almost recovered patients would make things difficult. The problems are likely to be less detectable.

Personally I would like to see more studies of the very severe and severe patients. The sicker a person is, the easier it should be to find something wrong. Testing mildly sick patients who can travel distances regularly to get to the study may actually be making things much harder in terms of testing - their problems might be less obvious.

Bye, Alex

PS On the other hand doing genetic comparison testing between recovered and nonrecovered patients might tell us about genetic bias to recovery.

 

[richvank]

Hi, all.

I'm with xchoc on this issue. The fundamental problem is that the incentives are not in the right directlon to make real progress in healthcare. There is no financial incentive to finding the root causes of chronic diseases and curing them.
The financial incentive is to keep people ill, but to try to prevent them from dying, so that they will remain customers for treatment. Coupled with this is the patent laws, which produce incentive to develop unnatural treatments that can be patented, thus receive a monopoly for a few years, even though the body views them as toxins and tries to eliminate therm to avoid their adverse effects.

I don't know how to change this picture, but I believe it is a major factor in the issue raised in this thread.

Best regards,

Rich

 

[user9876]

Well beaverfury, there would be an advantage to us. However I can imagine what they would say: "Stop poking me!"

We would really need to track the recovery over time for maximum information. To do that we would need a large long term study of patients over years and decades. There is not much effort at that - no money for it as far as I am aware.

Testing a fully recovered patient might not tell us anything. If they come up normal, would it be because they got better or because they were still testing the wrong thing?

Testing almost recovered patients would make things difficult. The problems are likely to be less detectable.

Personally I would like to see more studies of the very severe and severe patients. The sicker a person is, the easier it should be to find something wrong. Testing mildly sick patients who can travel distances regularly to get to the study may actually be making things much harder in terms of testing - their problems might be less obvious.

Bye, Alex

PS On the other hand doing genetic comparison testing between recovered and nonrecovered patients might tell us about genetic bias to recovery.

I've often wondered about the value of just having a big database of many patients, test results, genetic bits, etc and looking for patterns within this. There are now some very sophisticated data mining, analysis and search systems that can find patterns within data. It would be a very different approach from the conventional medical scientific process but where a disease is complex analysing vast data sets could help gain a better understanding.

 

[alex3619]

Hi user9876, there are several projects in the works to create such a database, including here on PR. Go to Forums, look at the bottom and find:

http://forums.phoenixrising.me/index.php?forums/create-a-patientslikeus-me-cfs-treatment-program.51/
http://forums.phoenixrising.me/index.php?forums/patient-data-repository-treatment-review-project.52/

Data mining was one of the things I started getting interested in during my IT days. I am sure its come a long way in the last 20 years.

Bye, Alex

 

[WillowJ]

I sympathize with parts of the OP in that I agree that there are perverse regulatory barriers to swift and efficient development of new treatments and regulatory barriers preventing inexpensive treatments from becoming recognized (vitamin B, for instance, is known to treat carpal tunnel syndrome in some patients, potentially forestalling a need for surgery, but it is not recognized because there is not sufficient revenue to justify 'proper' studies as required for recognition).

And with Rich that patent law can also create perverse incentives (which can lead not only to introducing, for instance non-identical hormones, but also to animal misery).

But I also agree with Alex that it's most likely that in most cases, pharmaceutical companies would happily make and sell cures if they could. And that there is a role for government, if we could induce them to be rational, in preliminary research.