I often wonder if scientists are working very hard to find cures. It seems that most of the studies into diseases are paid for by pharmaceutical companies. As far as I can tell, these companies make most of their money from “maintenance” drugs. We are talking about really big money here, well into the hundreds of billions of dollars. If they were to cure the diseases that they are currently maintaining, what would happen to their bottom line?

You know the drugs I mean. For example, all of the AIDS drugs are in the maintenance category. They keep you alive, but you still have AIDS. If you don’t buy the drugs, you’re going to die. Other examples are less dramatic, but amount to much the same thing. Stop using insulin, if you’re diabetic, and you are going to die sooner than later. Quit taking your Lipitor, and cholesterol may eventually kill you. Quit taking your blood pressure medication, and your heart is going to kill you. I don’t even want to start on the pantheon of men’s erectile dysfunction drugs.

What these drugs, and many other, have in common is that you are expected to purchase a supply of them every month, forever. None of them cure the problem. All of them just ward off the symptoms. Many of them have serious side-effects. Millions and millions of people are on this hamster wheel. The number gets bigger every day. The big pharmaceutical companies are making billions and billions of dollars using that tactic. We know that their major concern is their bottom line, not our health.

So what incentive do they have to do research into finding a cure?

I can’t see that they have any incentive at all. Logically, they are better off if they just keep selling you the maintenance drugs. With these companies controlling the purse strings for almost all of the worldwide experiments into diseases, why would they even consider funding experiments that might find a cure? Because they are nice guys? Because they are altruistic? You’ve got to be kidding me. We’re talking about the biggest of big business here. When was the last time big business asked how you were doing?

When is the last time you heard of a disease being cured, anyway? Polio, maybe, back in the fifties? That’s a long time without a cure.

Big government, having caved in to big money, is doing nothing to remedy this situation. In fact, government is doing less and less research on it’s own, and has pretty much quit funding research of any kind. They would obviously rather spend our money to kill people rather than cure people. So the next time you go to the pharmacy to pick up one of your prescriptions, think about being shackled to that prescription, and making the drug companies richer, for the rest of your life. That doesn’t feel too good, does it?

Maybe we need to figure out a way to start looking for cures again, and the hell with profits.