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Chinese scientists develop cure for diabetes, insulin patient becomes medicine-free in just 3 months (m.economictimes.com)

submitted 3 months ago by naturalgasbad@lemmy.ca to c/worldnews@lemmy.ml

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[-] UmeU@lemmy.world 20 points 3 months ago

If this were true, I wouldn’t be finding out about it on Lemmy

[-] zephyreks@lemmy.ml 44 points 3 months ago

Lemmy is a news aggregator. Why wouldn't you find out about an early-stage clinical trial on Lemmy?

Any such treatment, even if it works, would take decades to pass through the various approval stages before being released to the public.

[-] UmeU@lemmy.world 7 points 3 months ago

The headline isn’t ’early stage clinical trial starts the multi-decade process of developing a cure for diabetes’… the headline reads ‘diabetes has been cured’

Alls I’m saying is that if the headline as written were true, we would be hearing it from all news sources at once, not just some single post on a somewhat obscure news aggregator.

[-] TheObviousSolution@lemm.ee 13 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

To be fair, not much of a demand for such a permanent cure in leading profit driven health care systems where diabetes medicine is gold. How about MSN? https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/world-s-first-diabetes-cure-with-cell-therapy-achieved-in-china/ar-BB1n7cNA

Though one does well to be skeptical yet.

[-] Quexotic@infosec.pub 3 points 3 months ago

Right? Media and science do not play well together. I can't count the times I've seen amazing new discoveries or cures heralded by the media that never come to fruition because they were only ever just theoretical to begin with or they were never replicated by any other researcher.

[-] match@pawb.social 4 points 3 months ago

Maybe you should be reading Cell Discovery, then

[-] UmeU@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

How would reading Cell Discovery increase my chances of hearing about a cure to one of the world’s most pervasive afflictions on some obscure Lemmy post, and more puzzling, how would reading Cell Discovery make it more likely that some wild medical claim with far reaching implications would both be true and also absent from every other news source? What kind of magic does this Cell Discovery have?

[-] UmeU@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago

That study, which is admittedly a bit above my pay grade, says that more study is needed. It doesn’t say that diabetes has been cured, which is the headline that media outlets have chosen.

My only point was that if diabetes was actually cured, everyone would know about it, not just you and me.

[-] match@pawb.social 1 points 3 months ago

It has the paper that people are reporting on.

[+] Dirk@lemmy.ml -22 points 3 months ago

If this were true you wouldn't hear from this at all.

A permanent cure isn't something that is wanted by pharma companies. It's better for them to have something that keeps patients alive and that they need regularly and that is expensive but cheap enough for them to get.

[-] threeduck@aussie.zone 17 points 3 months ago

But why wouldn't a rival company just start up and sell the cures? Not all pharma companies sell insulin.

[-] matcha_addict@lemy.lol 1 points 3 months ago

The bar to entry in the pharma market is extremely high. You need a lot of capital to enter it, which quickly disqualifies 95% of the population.

Now of course, people without money can still get funding from investors. But those investors are already racking big profits from the continuous model of insulin treatments. A cure would be a detriment to their profits, so it's not something they're interested in funding. Not all pharma is insulin, but it's one of the bigger pharma industries.

This isn't to mention that if you were one of the 5% and managed to have the resources to find and produce a cure, that the other mega corporations (with more funds than most of those 5% individuals) wouldn't engage in anti competitive practices to shut you down. Many companies had good products but still ultimately failed.

Unfortunately capitalism does not allow innovation to flourish like many of us were taught to believe.

[+] Dirk@lemmy.ml -7 points 3 months ago

Because then the rival company would also go out of business. The pharma industry is not about absolute cure but about continuously selling things - like all industries do. Medicine that cures you entirely and is not needed afterwards forever again is nothing the pharma industry wants.

[-] absentbird@lemm.ee 27 points 3 months ago

Exactly, that's why we'll never have a vaccine for something like polio, it's too profitable to make and sell iron lungs.

[-] BarbecueCowboy@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

You joke, but that's actually a really interesting story. Jonas Salk, the developer of the first polio vaccine was adamantly against even patenting it and claimed that it 'belonged to the people'. There is some potential controversy there, but we mostly just think he was a pretty great dude. Dude's a fucking hero regardless.

I get the analogy you're trying to make, but maybe want to switch to something else.

[-] CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 4 points 3 months ago

I get the analogy you're trying to make, but maybe want to switch to something else.

Like any other vaccine?

[-] BarbecueCowboy@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

Yeah, legitimately could choose just about anything else besides polio and it would have landed pretty well.

[-] absentbird@lemm.ee 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I don't really see how that goes against it. If anything it shows that some people will totally disregard profit in favor of bettering humanity. See also: the patent for insulin.