Insurance Companies Should Invest In Cures

wcelliott

18th November 2007 - 05:44 AM

Our health care system has a BIG PROBLEM.

If a pharmaceutical company finds a *TREATMENT* for a disease, like AIDS, for which it can charge $1000/month to keep an HIV+ patient alive indefinitely, then they end up making a thousand dollars PER MONTH for every HIV+ patient from now, on.

If a pharmaceutical company finds a *CURE* for a disease, like AIDS, for which it can charge $1000/month to CURE an HIV+ patient with ONE DOSE, then they end up making a thousand dollars PER HIV+ patient, PERIOD.

Without sounding too paranoid about conspiracies to suppress CURES, it's actually more a matter of how pharmaceutical companies spend their R&D money - All for TREATMENTS, none for CURES.

Likewise, the NIH institutes similarly are more interested in STUDYING a disease FROM NOW ON than they are in FINDING A CURE, because once they find a CURE, they have to look for new jobs next year.

THERE IS A SOLUTION.

Insurance companies make more money than the rest of the Dow Jones' Industrials COMBINED. What do they do with all their investment capital? They invest it in the STOCK MARKET. But it's the insurance companies that have to pay-out the thousand dollars PER MONTH for these TREATMENTS, when they COULD be investing some of their money in FINDING CURES.

Insurance companies should start their OWN PRIVATE RESEARCH INSTITUTES dedicated to FINDING CURES for the diseases that are costing them the most money in TREATMENTS.

There *are* promising potential CURES out there for the most-dreaded diseases, but it isn't in any of the current players' vested interests in FUNDING the research needed to bring them to the market. It costs an estimated $800million to get a new drug/treatment/cure approved by the FDA, and unless a company can own the patent for that drug/treatment/cure, that's $800million down the tubes, so some CURES are simply "orphaned", discovered to be effective (usually by some university), then ABANDONED.

Of several promising CURES, one example is nanosilver hydrosol, which has been demonstrated to be effective against a wide range of pathogens, including MRSA and HIV-1 (as reported in PhyOrg not too long ago). Nobody can own a patent on nanosilver hydrosol, though, because it's essentially identical to Colloidal Silver, which you can already buy from the internet for $70/gallon, or make, yourself, with a couple silver coins, some distilled water, and a 9V battery.

Its effectiveness isn't limited to MRSA and HIV, but it also is routinely used instead of chlorine to keep algae from growing in hot tubs. We've also seen reports of people dying from algal infections in the brains of people who swam in swampy water. There's no reason to think colloidal silver *wouldn't* work in those patients, yet who's going to try treating them with a non-FDA-approved drug? Nobody.

If the Insurance Industry would pull its head out, it'd toss a few percent of its profits at getting CURES funded so they could reduce their insurance pay-outs. But part of the problem, there, is that it's in the Insurance industry's vested interest to keep ordinary people scared to-death of coming down with these dreaded diseases that deplete life-savings in a matter of months so that everyone who can afford it will be willing to pay ridiculously-high health insurance premiums. (And insurance companies invest heavily in pharmaceutical companies, so they don't exactly lose their outlays for those expensive treatments, the money basically comes from the average guys' wallets and gets swapped back and forth between the insurance companies and the big pharmaceutical companies.)

Still, you'd think that there'd be a few smaller insurance companies willing to invest some of their obscene profits to help find CURES for diseases, if only because even rich people get sick eventually, themselves.

This would be a prime candidate for government intervention, if it weren't for the reality of the situation, namely that INSURANCE COMPANY LOBBYISTS are among the biggest campaign contributors to politicians, so even that approach is an uphill battle.

Let's use this thread to post the most-promising POTENTIAL CURES for DREADED DISEASES that we know about, and maybe we can find a politician who isn't already corrupted by insurance/pharmaceutical company lobbyists or perhaps an upcoming insurance executive who isn't already corrupted by greed to help bring some of these CURES to the market.

El_Machinae

25th November 2007 - 05:45 PM

The insurance companies have a mandate (and desire) to maximise their profits. Biotechnology is a horrible money suck, and so they're financially better off investing in markets which show a return.

However, you're very right that they should think a lot more about funding 'sure thing' or 'nearly sure thing' types of research. These would be well after all the breakthroughs and tests are done: but they could easily invest in companies that aid the distribution and marketing of actual cures and treatments. If only from a profit perspective, this has to pay off.

Research is a societal good, which is why the government funds so much of it. It doesn't pay off with as many breakthroughs as we'd like, but it has a side benefit of having an educated and entrepreneurial population. So, if you want to help reap the benefits of scientific research, the trick is to become involved in your own way: learn the science and apply it in your own life, make inventions if you think of them, and help educate others in the science

wcelliott

30th November 2007 - 11:55 PM

For the record, I was Director of BioEngineering Research for two different start-up companies, and I've received grants from NIH for a couple of my ideas.

A guy I met at NIH (MD/PhD-Stanford) gave a talk about an integrated circuit he'd designed, built, and tested on rats where the rats' nerves were allowed to grow through tantalum-plated thru-holes in the chip, and he was able to sense and stimulate those nerves electrically via the chip. The experiment lasted a year, with no degradation of the nerves or the implanted chips.

He said in his presentation that with sufficient follow-up research, this technology could cure (at least partially) paralysis within ten years. So far as I could tell, he was being conservative, I figured it could be done in about five years.

The head of that NIH department (NINDS) stomped on him with both feet. He ordered him to make a full retraction of his statement under penalty of never receiving another dime of federal research money from any source for the rest of his career. He complied.

The point that he'd overlooked was that the head of NINDS funds a LOT of researchers who've approached paralysis research from a completely different angle (angles guaranteed to be fruitless), and if, by some miracle, paralysis was cured overnight by an outsider, like him, then that would leave the head of NINDS with egg on his face.

That research into the chip-nerve interface was abandoned. That was in 1990, IIRC.

In the biomedical research community, if you build a better mousetrap, every professional mouse-catcher will arrive at your door to burn-down your house.

wcelliott

25th December 2007 - 06:18 AM

Also reported right here in PhysOrg is the study showing that a common lab chemical called "DCA" might very well be a cure for cancer.

http://www.physorg.com/news88194392.html

One problem, though, is that no one can patent the chemical or regulate its use, as it's so commonplace.

One guy created a website selling it on-line to cancer patients, along with instructions on how-best to use it.

The FDA shut him down, naturally, threatening legal action against him.

prosilver

17th August 2008 - 07:47 PM

QUOTE (wcelliott+Nov 18 2007, 05:44 AM)

Our health care system has a BIG PROBLEM.

If a pharmaceutical company finds a *TREATMENT* for a disease, like AIDS, for which it can charge $1000/month to keep an HIV+ patient alive indefinitely, then they end up making a thousand dollars PER MONTH for every HIV+ patient from now, on.

snip

Of several promising CURES, one example is nanosilver hydrosol, which has been demonstrated to be effective against a wide range of pathogens, including MRSA and HIV-1 (as reported in PhyOrg not too long ago). Nobody can own a patent on nanosilver hydrosol, though, because it's essentially identical to Colloidal Silver, which you can already buy from the internet for $70/gallon, or make, yourself, with a couple silver coins, some distilled water, and a 9V battery.

snip

Let's use this thread to post the most-promising POTENTIAL CURES for DREADED DISEASES that we know about, and maybe we can find a politician who isn't already corrupted by insurance/pharmaceutical company lobbyists or perhaps an upcoming insurance executive who isn't already corrupted by greed to help bring some of these CURES to the market.

Some corrections needed:

QUOTE

Of several promising CURES, one example is nanosilver hydrosol, which has been demonstrated to be effective against a wide range of pathogens, including MRSA and HIV-1 (as reported in PhyOrg not too long ago). Nobody can own a patent on nanosilver hydrosol, though, because it's essentially identical to Colloidal Silver, which you can already buy from the internet for $70/gallon, or make, yourself, with a couple silver coins, some distilled water, and a 9V battery.

Fist of all there is already a patented elemental nanosilver particle, in colloidal suspension. This patent is held by American Biotech Labs. It is their 3rd patent, and to my knowledge, it is the first ever patent issued for a silver particle. It was issued in November, 2006.
United States Patent 7,135,195 http://tinyurl.com/yceqd6

The vast majority of colloidal silvers advertising themselves as "nanoparticle" are in fact ionic, as are all of the low voltage, do it yourself home made colloids. You cannot produce a nanoparticle silver colloid with a 9v battery or a small generator, coins and grocery store distilled water.

The process discovered and utilized by American Biotech Labs involves a 75 gallon sealed reaction vessel with 8 very high purity silver electrodes. Each electrode has its own independent 10,000 volt, alternating current power source. It takes approximately 36 hours to react a batch of 10 ppm nanosilver hydrosol. The 30 ppm batches require 6 days to react. This indicates to me that they are using a very low amperage, but this appears to be a closely held bit of proprietary information. It is not discussed in the patent.

There is no physical comparison to conventional ionic silver preparations and the new nanosilver hydrosols. They are molecularly completely different animals. Dr Rustum Roy, who heads Penn State University's Materials Science Department, led a 4 year study conducted by 8 prominent materials scientists around the world. It was peer reviewed and published. This study wound up focusing primarily on the silver sols from American Biotech Labs, due to their never before seen physical properties. This study was the basis for the above particle patent. http://tinyurl.com/277bkt

Much of the password protected science available at the American Biotech Labs website can be accessed here: http://www.lifesilver.com If you visit this site, be sure to read the Congressional Testimony, given by the ABL President, and also look at the Appendix section following the transcript. There are endorsements from powerful politicians, oncologists and the retired Surgeon General of the USAF.

Still, these products cannot catch a tailwind in mainstream medicine. A few years ago, when the African hospital malaria studies (over 1000 full cures, to date, with no treatment failures, for less than $5.00 per patient) were sent to the WHO and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation there was a frosty silence.

Most recently, a well funded "citizen's grassroots" organization (nanoaction.org), with pricey offices in Washington DC, has taken it upon themselves to attack all things nanosilver. They claim that silver impregnated clothing, food storage containers, Samsung nanosilver ion generating appliances, etc, are going to harm our waterways and reservoirs and are appealing to the EPA to shut them down. A good many companies removed all mention of their germ killing properties to comply with this dubious threat. It seems that you can sell these products, you just can't claim that they kill germs. This will somehow save our water supply. Their focus is exclusively on products that may at some point discharge silver ions into the environment.

To compound their duplicity, they issued a list of over 200 companies targeted. Of this list, only one was a manufacturer of silver colloids - and its products are NOT even ionic, but pure elemental silver, American Biotech Labs. Nanoaction.org has also failed to note that a great many municipal water companies have been using silver ion discharge filters to purify our city drinking waters for decades, without incident. My guess is that nanoaction.org is wholly funded by pharmaceutical company interests, or taxpayer money expended at the behest of the pharma lobby.

It's going to be an uphill fight all the way for any silver supplemental product, which clearly demonstrates it broad spectrum effectiveness, to be allowed public exposure. The threat that these products pose to the obscene profits generated by big pharma and the sickness industry will not be tolerated.

To date, I have been taking the American Biotech Labs products for almost 10 years. The only side effect has been zero infection, of any kind, in that entire time. I have also not consumed, or needed, any pharmaceutical antibiotics during this period. This is a far better track record than I had when I was making and consuming my own colloidal silver.

SteveA2

17th August 2008 - 09:00 PM

Insurance companies would need locked in policies for such investments to work because the medical cures would lower medical costs and insurance would be less desirable and receive lower payments.

wcelliott

17th August 2008 - 09:31 PM

Thanks for the additional info.

It's my understanding that even the "ionic silver" products have *some* particles in the 1-10nanometer range, which seems to be the best size for disabling HIV-1, according to http://www.jnanobiotechnology.com/content/3/1/6 , and I figure that other viruses work similarly, and are similarly subject to the same range of silver nanoparticle sizes.

It seems likely to me that other sizes might work better against other types of pathogens, maybe fungi are more vulnerable to smaller nanoparticles and maybe bacteria are vulnerable to larger ones.

There was a recent article here in PhysOrg that stated that nanoparticles of silver created in a vacuum tended to spontaneously form stable "superatoms" of silver when they had specific numbers of atoms in the cluster, having similar chemical properties to silver itself. The authors of the study said it opened up a third dimension to the Periodic Table, and I think they're correct. If 37 silver atoms form a stable "superatom" of silver, then what characteristics does a superatom made up of 36 or 38 atoms have?

Cyrus Clops

17th August 2008 - 11:36 PM

QUOTE (wcelliott+Nov 30 2007, 11:55 PM)

For the record, I was Director of BioEngineering Research for two different start-up companies, and I've received grants from NIH for a couple of my ideas.

A guy I met at NIH (MD/PhD-Stanford) gave a talk about an integrated circuit he'd designed, built, and tested on rats where the rats' nerves were allowed to grow through tantalum-plated thru-holes in the chip, and he was able to sense and stimulate those nerves electrically via the chip. The experiment lasted a year, with no degradation of the nerves or the implanted chips.

He said in his presentation that with sufficient follow-up research, this technology could cure (at least partially) paralysis within ten years. So far as I could tell, he was being conservative, I figured it could be done in about five years.

The head of that NIH department (NINDS) stomped on him with both feet. He ordered him to make a full retraction of his statement under penalty of never receiving another dime of federal research money from any source for the rest of his career. He complied.

The point that he'd overlooked was that the head of NINDS funds a LOT of researchers who've approached paralysis research from a completely different angle (angles guaranteed to be fruitless), and if, by some miracle, paralysis was cured overnight by an outsider, like him, then that would leave the head of NINDS with egg on his face.

That research into the chip-nerve interface was abandoned. That was in 1990, IIRC.

In the biomedical research community, if you build a better mousetrap, every professional mouse-catcher will arrive at your door to burn-down your house.

This is a very interesting topic. I have always wondered how many breakthroughs and cures have been squandered in the name of hiding incompetence and guaranteeing long term financial gain. I keep coming back to the thought that our societal mindset may be partially at fault for even the existence of this possibility. People will always seek to maximize profits, that cannot be avoided and personally I'm not sure that we should try to avoid it, but the incompetence factor can be avoided. The example that you have is perfect for my point. Why do heads have to roll in situations like the one that you described? When someone makes a breakthrough their success is often coupled with the punishment of those who did not succeed. Instead of rallying around the achievement we seem to feel the need to exercise our anger at the discovery for taking so long.

I'm not suggesting that we reward incompetence, but I think that in many cases it is not incompetence that is punished in situations like the one you described. Don't you think that we are hurting ourselves by creating an environment of fear? The superiors of those who make the discoveries should not be afraid of punishment because they didn't make the discovery themselves. I may be off base with these comments but I am interested to hear your opinions.

wcelliott

23rd August 2008 - 06:44 PM

My opinion is that bureacrats are more afraid of being embarrassed than of anything else. This is a combined effect of the nature of bureaucracies and human nature. If you've spent $200million/year funding rat-brain-in-a-blender research projects, and a 33-year-old kid walks in and says he can cure what others haven't even come close to curing, he (the guy who funded all that worthless research) just wants the kid to disappear. Otherwise, the guy ends up having to explain to his boss and colleagues why he spent a billion dollars over the past five years on worthless research when the answer is so obvious that a 33-year-old kid could figure it out.

The fact that the kid has a PhD in electrical engineering and an MD, both from Stanford, is small consolation to the top-level bureaucrat, who didn't get in that position by talent alone, ambition had to contribute something, and usually whenever you find ambition you also find ruthlessness.

I don't know how to fix human nature, or bureaucratic ambition/ruthlessness, but I figure that there's a fix that appeals to greed, and it would be in insurance companies' own vested interests to fund cures for diseases, as cures are cheaper than treatments in the long run, and insurance companies tend to take the brunt of the cost differences. If an enterprising young insurance company executive reads this post, this would be a good idea to take to the board, a little up-front investment in cures, and a lot of people get well cheap that otherwise would've cost the insurance company hundreds of thousands of dollars getting treated.

Win-win.

wcelliott

23rd August 2008 - 06:48 PM

My opinion is that bureacrats are more afraid of being embarrassed than of anything else. This is a combined effect of the nature of bureaucracies and human nature. If you've spent $200million/year funding rat-brain-in-a-blender research projects, and a 33-year-old kid walks in and says he can cure what others haven't even come close to curing, he (the guy who funded all that worthless research) just wants the kid to disappear. Otherwise, the guy ends up having to explain to his boss and colleagues why he spent a billion dollars over the past five years on worthless research when the answer is so obvious that a 33-year-old kid could figure it out.

The fact that the kid has a PhD in electrical engineering and an MD, both from Stanford, is small consolation to the top-level bureaucrat, who didn't get in that position by talent alone, ambition had to contribute something, and usually whenever you find ambition you also find ruthlessness.

I don't know how to fix human nature, or bureaucratic ambition/ruthlessness, but I figure that there's a fix that appeals to greed, and it would be in insurance companies' own vested interests to fund cures for diseases, as cures are cheaper than treatments in the long run, and insurance companies tend to take the brunt of the cost differences. If an enterprising young insurance company executive reads this post, this would be a good idea to take to the board, a little up-front investment in cures, and a lot of people get well cheap that otherwise would've cost the insurance company hundreds of thousands of dollars getting treated.

Win-win.

Augusta

27th August 2008 - 03:00 PM

sorry i dont have much information about it but i will try and than give some information about it... THanks..

Ovarian Cysts No More

MjolnirPants

27th August 2008 - 04:03 PM

QUOTE (wcelliott+Nov 18 2007, 05:44 AM)

Without sounding too paranoid about conspiracies to suppress CURES, it's actually more a matter of how pharmaceutical companies spend their R&D money - All for TREATMENTS, none for CURES.

There's no such thing as too paranoid in this case.
Drug companies have the means to icrease the number of treatments coming out each year while decreasing the number of cures to.
They have the motivation to do so.
They have a reasonable chance of getting away with it.

Anytime throughout history that large groups of people have had the means and motivation to commit some tragedy, along with a reasonable chance of getting away with it, we've seen large groups of people commiting tragedies.
It's just a shame that conspiracy theorists focus on the least likely conspiracies, because the world is full of real life, believable and plausible conspiracies that might benefit from the sort of attention that gets payed to UFOs and black ops.

BUT!
(of course, there's a but!)
Drug companies have an incentive to develop cures to drugs that their competition markets treatments for. Even after generics become available, name-brand drugs can still fetch a high price, and still sell.
The effectiveness of the current system (I'm not saying it's perfect or even close to it, just that it's reasonably effective) is due to this. It's always in the interest of one drug company to make a cure to a disease that their competition sells a treatment for, not just due to the market takeover, but also due to the positive PR that comes from it: "Look, we're interested in CURING people while our competition is only interested in selling drugs..."

The problem with that is that the drug company researching a cure for a disease their competition markets a treatment for often markets a generic version of the competition's treatment, themselves. And of course, there's no incentive other than positive PR and the fear of government involvement to market a cure for a disease treated by another drug that company patented.

wcelliott

1st September 2008 - 06:28 PM

Just to make my position perfectly clear, I'm not saying that known cures are deliberately being suppressed, only that potential *treatments* for chronic conditions have a higher Return on Investment than potential *cures*, and as such, tend to get more R&D funding by pharmaceutical companies.

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