Anyone can mix chemicals in a test tube and claim it’s the cure for something. That’s the easy part. Proving it’s safe and effective, that’s what requires a lot of capital expenditure.
This statement is a drastic characterization, but you could say “half a dozen PhDs can form reasons to believe they may have found a cure for something”, and the paragraph would end the same.
>Drawing up such a dossier is a profession in itself. An important detail: the EMA is asking for around €350,000 to assess the book.
My sweet summer child, this is nothing. I have worked on dossiers that took 200 man-years at 400k per person. This is the development part of pharma R&D. The dossier might be a thousand pages submitted, but that can easily be 100,000+ pages on the backend.
There's a reason that even billion dollar companies crumble and fail under the documentation complexity.
That's interesting. I was just reading about how high dose IV vitamin c can induce cell death in a wide variety of cancers, but somehow, despite this being known for decades, nobody has done rigorous research on it.
From what I can tell there are several things like this - that have promising anti cancer effects, that just don't really get that much attention because there's not a patent possible.
Really makes me think much less of medical science. Even if you couldn't patent any thing you'd think you could get fame and fortune by devising a useful therapy.
When my wife was alive, some people in her group tried it. There's not much evidence.
>> that have promising anti cancer effects
I don't know why people gravitate towards the "simple" remedies for cancer, or pose that money making is a barrier for these remedies. Remember, research costs money! DO the funding yourself if you think there's a miracle cure here. (hint: there's not.)
> That's interesting. I was just reading about how high dose IV vitamin c can induce cell death in a wide variety of cancers, but somehow, despite this being known for decades, nobody has done rigorous research on it.
Sigh. Vitamin C quackery again.
Vitamin C at high doses is cytotoxic, so it works against rapidly dividing cells. Cancer cells also preferentially concentrate vitamin C because they are under oxidative stress.
However, just like with most of other generally cytotoxic treatments, cancer cells quickly evolve resistance to it. And the overall toxicity of vitamin C makes it uninteresting as a treatment.
One must wonder if the therapy works if it's as trivial and simple as you say.
Rarely are these things straightforward and clear cut.
That being said, I recently broke my ankle, and found that the protocols still often include 6 weeks off it, despite modern evidence largely showing zero downsides (and some benefits, especially in terms of early recovery) to weight bearing immediately - Probably costing possibly billions of dollars in lost productivity and unnecessary PT every year.
I probably shouldn't get too high on my horse about random unexplored therapies - plenty of things in medicine that are just done some way because that's how it's always been done.
Medical trials to prove its safety in human subjects -- pretty essential -- is a lengthy, multi-stage process that is extremely expensive to carry out.
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.
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.
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.
This statement is a drastic characterization, but you could say “half a dozen PhDs can form reasons to believe they may have found a cure for something”, and the paragraph would end the same.
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