alt Hacker NewsIt 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.
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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 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.