[villedespommes]

Because it was in many ways, the same as a generation before that and one before that.

40+yy ago, HIV was still a death sentence, lung cancer slid to the 3-4th position in CODs caused by cancer. Late 90s saw the introduction of gene therapies. New drugs for diabetes and heart disease came to the market. These aren't small incremental QoL improvements; these advancements saved millions of lives since then.

All this progress should be celebrated, not trivialized

[thomassmith65]

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.

[Telemakhos]

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.

[kjs3]

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.