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July 13, 2015

The Cure Culture: Our Obsession With Cures That Are 'Just Around the Corner'

Slashdot: Science - Fetched: July 13th, 2015, 12:00pm UTC
citadrianne writes: Cures for major disease always seem just a few short years away. We constantly read about promising new treatments for cancer, diabetes, HIV, ALS, and more. While the prognosis for these diseases has improved over the years mdash; sometimes greatly mdash; we still focus doggedly on the cure. "The idea of a cure is simpler, it's more appealing as a fantasy." This article takes a look at so-called "Cure Culture" mdash; the focus on reaching for a cure when our scientific efforts may be better expended attacking a disease in other ways. It asks, "Why are we telling our children, our friends, and our family members that we are going to cure them? ... What does it mean to be cured of a disease that is encoded within your DNA from the moment you become a zygote until the moment you are dead? ... And why are we eschewing or overlooking treatmentsmdash;real, honest-to-god treatmentsmdash;that can let patients lead longer, more normal lives?pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;" a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=The+Cure+Culture%3A+Our+Obsession+With+Cures+That+Are+'Just+Around+the+Corner'%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F1O0Kmvk"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a a class="slashpop" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F15%2F07%2F13%2F1344237%2Fthe-cure-culture-our-obsession-with-cures-that-are-just-around-the-corner%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a class="nobg" href="http://plus.google.com/share?url=http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/07/13/1344237/the-cure-culture-our-obsession-with-cures-that-are-just-around-the-corner?utm_source=slashdotamp;utm_medium=googleplus" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href,'', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"img src="http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png" alt="Share on Google+"//a /div/ppa href="http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/07/13/1344237/the-cure-culture-our-obsession-with-cures-that-are-just-around-the-corner?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/HE_s6kaibHs" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

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