This forum is for the discussion of anything to do with Prostate Cancer. There are only four rules:
No fundraisers, no commercials (although it is OK to recommend choices of treatment or medical people based on your personal research; invitations to participate in third-party surveys are also acceptable, provided there is no compensation to YANA);
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Opinions are OK, but please provide as much factual evidence as possible for any assertions that you are making
Failure to abide by these simple rules will result in the immediate and permanent suspension of your posting privileges.
Since this is an International Forum, please specify your location in your post.
Political discussions are banned on most forums because they usually evoke emotional reactions that can quickly spin out of control and result in a ‘flame war’ that does not help anyone a bit. Same thing goes for any attempt to discuss religion – and even a comparison of state/socialist and capitalist medical systems seems to bring out the worst in folks.
It’ll be interesting to see if there is any reaction to your post – and how temperate it is. I must say here and now that if it gets out of line I’ll remove the thread.
Terry is absolutely right to keep politics and religion off the site and to guard against flame wars. This is about the best site for prostate cancer info there is and Terry is the most level headed moderator you can get.
Speaking for myself I can't stand reading all the "God Bless yous" and religio stuff on this site or any other. If politics gets added to that then I'm off, guys.
But Pat just think. You live in a country that I think statistics show has the best survival rates for most cancers (including breast and prostate). Our state health service here in the old UK comes in somewhere below most East European states and that's a fact. Depending on your post code (zip code) you can't get certain meds here. (A lady with colon cancer died here last week after the Health Service refused her a drug widely available in all countries but not in her zip code AND refused to allow her to mortgage her house to buy it!)
You say that in the US "health care is being approached from what makes the big pharmaceuticals maximum profit instead of research into what works." But think about it : what works is what makes them maximum profit, that's why they work on it!
As for Iraq : we really shouldn't get started, but even that war costs a tiny fraction of the United States gross domestic product. Welfare and other US expenditure dwarfs it.
The grass really isn't greener on the other side Pat. (And by the way, the partially successful robotic surgery I had, which is still relatively new here in Europe was developed by those Big Pharma guys in the U S of A where they have been using it for years before us).
And by the way! Even a trillion trillion ain't going to cure cancer. The reason "they" (Big Pharma? Guys in universities?) haven't found a cure is because there are so many missing links and so many different types of cancer. In fact of course huge progress has been made in survival rates for many cancers but by no means all.
When Fleming discovered penicillin it wasn't on the back of trillions of dollars of state funding. He had a lucky accident and then (here comes the genius), he knew what to do with that accident. Anti-biotics followed and the rest, as they say, is history. (Another accidental discovery close to our own hearts, boys, would be Viagra of course. Good old Pfizer pharma!)
I guess knowledge is heirarchical: you find a step and build the next one on to it. The mobile phones we use now couldn't have been invented 30 years ago because all the other stuff like micro chips and digital technology and so on wasn't there to build on. You could have given Leonardo da Vinci a trillion of state funding and (despite what some people say), he wouldn't have invented the helicopter or the motor car coz he needed someone else to come up with the first step in the heirarchy: the internal combustion engine. And that needed steel and oil which he also didn't have.
It isn't just a question of taxpayers' money being poured into research. We all see what governments do when they get hold of large wedges of OUR money and it's not a pretty site!
Rest assured, there is a guy in a lab somewhere in Big Pharma in the US or Switzerland, most likely,plugging away at something quite different, who will discover a cure or successful treatment for prostate cancer. Perhaps even more useful would be if he discovers a way of telling if the cancer they can now find so easily is even one that needs treatment. When he does I hope he and his company makes millions. They will deserve every penny.
