In an ideal world, the amount of money we spend on medical research to prevent or cure a disease would be proportional to its seriousness and the number of people who suffer from it.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
In the real world, 90% of the money spent on medical research is focused on conditions that are responsible for just 10% of the deaths and disability caused by diseases globally.
Funding that is focused on the ability to diagnose diseases precisely will just have inestimable value because that's the gate through which precision medicine has to go. Unless you can diagnose the disease precisely, care has to remain in the hands of expensive institutions and expensive caregivers.
Modern medical advances have helped millions of people live longer, healthier lives. We owe these improvements to decades of investment in medical research.
In addition to relieving patient suffering, research is needed to help reduce the enormous economic and social burdens posed by chronic diseases such as osteoporosis, arthritis, diabetes, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, cancer, heart disease, and stroke.
It's very expensive to treat chronic diseases.
Today we see a human population of over 6 billion people, many of whom have serious medical conditions, which either can't be treated or cannot be treated economically.
A doctor can save maybe a few hundred lives in a lifetime. A researcher can save the whole world.
A lot of medicines are not there to cure diseases. That's fine - drugs that keep people alive who wouldn't otherwise be alive are useful. What I object to is the drug companies' advertising, which you see everywhere in the U.S., which claims that they are curing diseases when they're not.
It is certainly important to be looking for cures to medical disorders, but it is equally important to conduct research on human health and well-being.
In health care today, we spend most of the dollars - in terms of treating disease - in the last two years of a person's life.
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