To my knowledge, there are no pharmacy cures to cancer, migraine, epilepsy, AIDS, diabetes and many others. I'm sure that some diabetes types can be cured with a pill or a simple surgery, I know that some types of epilepsy can be cured with non-epilepsy drugs, but the financial motivation to find out is very low, sometimes nonexistent in a ROI-based consumer-payer health market.
This is a very cynical view and I'm not sure the data supports the claim.
There have been long-term treatments for cancer for years but AFAIK nobody has stopped looking for "the cure". If someone finds a "cure" for most any cancer, there is a ready market. Some cancers (e.g., bile duct cancer) have such small markets that there may not be much drive to solve the problem, but there isn't much to treat it long-term, either. That's a problem with many diseases, however.
AIDS has been treatable for a long time, but there is still a substantial effort to find a cure, is there not?
And probably the most important "cure" of them all, antibiotics, are designed for short-term use to kill an infection, hopefully never to return. |
