It sounds callous to dismiss any improvement to medicine as trivial, but frankly I grew up under the assumption that humanity would cure diabetes, cancer, blindness, deafness and perhaps death itself by the end of the millennium.

It's much more noteworthy to me how little medicine has changed than how much.

I guess I grew up in 'then', and that sort of 'assumption' is so depressing. But I get that some people only want to see medicine, and by extension science, as black-and-white.

"We haven't cured diabetes" (only made massive strides in control and management and came up with whole new classes of drugs that attack root causes). "We haven't cured cancer" (except the ones we have cured, the ones we came up with vaccines to prevent (HPV), and came up with all sorts of innovative and less unpleasant treatments extending lifespan with less side effects), "Haven't cured blindness or deafness" (except for the types we have cured).

And haven't cured death...well, I guess you got us there.

But, yeah, it's low hanging fruit from the anti-science playbook to focus on what hasn't been done, and pretend that means nothing has been done.

I agree with you that we’ve made progress. To me, the most impressive achievement has been nearly curing cystic fibrosis and our array of tools for dealing with HIV. And yet I think it’s important to be honest. The age-adjusted diabetes mortality rate per 100k has been pretty much flat for thirty years. Life expectancy growth has been meager and the US has fallen far behind Europe. Overall health/physical fitness/mental health seems to be on a steep decline. 90s and 2000s optimists had high hopes for the world. They would have good reason to be horrified at things today.

If we’re lagging behind Europe, that doesn’t seem to be an issue of progress, right? If they are ahead, then the tech must be here ready. And we’re a bit richer than them, so we could presumably afford to implement whatever policies they are doing. Living just seems to be a higher priority over there…

Meh, it’s just a reflection of there not actually being much medical progress and lifestyle becoming the dominant tie breaker as the few breakthroughs we do have spread through the world.

“We can’t fix most damage to any organ so follow a lifestyle that minimizes it” is not a meaningful medical advance IMO.

Thanks to modern weight-loss drugs (many of them repurposed diabetic meds) lifestyle might become less important.

That reaction to my comment seems like a pavlovian response - like a response to past interactions with social media culture warriors.

It's not a sound assumption that everyone must either be "impressed by the progress of medicine within my lifetime" or "anti-science".

>But, yeah, it's low hanging fruit from the anti-science playbook to focus on what hasn't been done, and pretend that means nothing has been done.

Good comment until here. This is a strawman.

There is a huge gap between the vision of what medical advances might have brought us with technological breakthroughs and what has actually materialized.

Cloning and stem cell research was supposed to let me grab a new organ whenever I needed it. Instead I’m still waiting for a poor person to get in a car wreck and be declared brain dead so they can scoop out whatever is useful.

Cancer is still killing half of my family members, just different kinds after a cancer breakthrough helped them with an earlier kind. Others are hit by strokes, heart failures, and the occasional horrific Alzheimer’s.

50 years I’ve heard doctors saying “it was just their time” as an excuse for some old person dying. The field barely has a grasp on human biology and we’re barely making inroads.

I was talking with a historian of medicine who surprised me with the observation that the age of cures was past, and that we lived in the age of management. Antibiotics gave us cures, and vaccines eradicated diseases, but those advances had their limits: there is no penicillin for viruses or cancer. Advances since the mid-twentieth century have been more about managing conditions, which is much more profitable. Cure syphilis, and the patient goes away happy; treat AIDS, and the patient will keep buying more treatments as long as he lives.

>treat AIDS, and the patient will keep buying more treatments as long as he lives.

This is oft-repeated but it doesn’t pass the smell test. All it takes is a single principled academic to blow the whistle if there was any active suppression of cures or even research on cures.

In order for that quip to hold water, literally everyone involved in medical research would have to be a corrupt monster maintaining a worldwide conspiracy to keep sick people coming back for more treatments.

There's no conspiracy to suppress cures, but research funding is more attainable the larger the eventual profit.

> Antibiotics gave us cures, and vaccines eradicated diseases, but those advances had their limits: there is no penicillin for viruses or cancer.

We are actually working on vaccines for viruses and for cancer.

Well, we were.