It's amazing what you can find on late-night television. Flip through the cable channels after midnight and you'll find a nice selection of infomercials and their tone is curiously hopeful; many seem to have been written specifically for that time period, when they know people who are watching are up because something is worrying them enough to make them lose sleep.
The majority offer quick and easy ways to get out of debt by selling silly knick-knacks or real estate. One suggests that by taking some supplements, the size of your ever-shrinking bowel movements will quickly return to "normal," a topic that can't be talked about enough, apparently.
Then there are the ones about the "secret cures" that "they" don't want you to know about, "they" being the medical profession.
Appealing to the most ardent of conspiracy theorists, these folks claim that there are already cures for virtually every known malady but that the doctors and drug companies are conspiring with Congress to suppress that information so you'll keep buying their pills. They make a convincing argument for a while, but then things begin to unravel.
Let's think about this for a second: what do you do when you get a common cold? For most of us, the answer involves turning to the old standbys: orange juice, chicken soup, lots of rest. Zinc tablets have entered the picture in the last few years and they seem to be shown to reduce the length of time you'll deal with the symptoms. There's no magic pill that will cure the cold in one maneuver.
But let's suppose that there were such a pill.
Don't you think that everyone would buy it? I suspect that far more people would buy that medication than ever buy current cold remedies, since they know that at best, the current options will only reduce the time they have to deal with the annoying symptoms. Plenty of people I know who get colds just deal with them.
And because the cold is caused by a virus, and because viruses can mutate and become resistant to different kinds of pills, there's no guarantee that this particular "magic pill" will be all magical for long. Each mutation could require a unique forumulation.
Even if the cold doesn't change, if the virus that causes the cold you get this December is the exact same one that caused the cold you had last December, your body will not necessarily have automatically built up a total immunity to that particular strain, even with the pill. So you get another cold from the same strain, and you run right back to the pharmacy and buy more of those same pills.
Because it's a cure, there's no debate about whether to buy it: you just do.
Now consider cancer: all instances of cancer are not fatal. Some grow so slowly that nothing short of a total lack of attention will cause them to reach a fatal stage. Others already respond so well to treatments currently developed that they go into remission never to be heard from again.
Let's imagine a pill that successfully erases lung cancer. We've lost so many good people to this one that the very idea is of great appeal.
You get diagnosed with lung cancer and you go buy the pills. You take them and your cancer is gone. Does that mean that you'll never get lung cancer again? No. It means that you are currently cancer-free. Ask any woman who has ever dealt with the threat of breast cancer and beat it whether she's confident that she'll never face this miserable enemy again. Cancer sometimes comes back, even with the most agressive treatment.
And if there were a cure, you'd have to take that cure every time the cancer came back. For the rest of your life.
With lung cancer being one of the largest killers of human beings, the development of a successful cure that patients would be depending on for the rest of their lives and that those who haven't had lung cancer would be ready to buy in a heartbeat if they ever got it, the doctors and drug companies could conceivably make much more, not less.
This is because everyone would take the cure. There'd be no question of going south of the border to some hidden clinic that suggests lots of organic veggies and fruit smoothies. There'd be no appeal of "faith healers" who put on a great show but seem to mostly do little to treat the actual disease. And even non-Christians would get a kick out of suggesting that there would even be no need for prayer requests! Just let the pill do all the work and be done with it.
Remember, we're not talking about a preventative, like Vitamin C tablets that people take for a while then eventually forget to take. There's no "out of sight, out of mind" when it comes to dealing with a potentially-fatal illness. No one would get "out of the habit" of taking that magic pill, if it existed.
They'd take it. Every time the disease struck. Every time. For life. That's a pharmaceutical company's dream if there ever was one.
That's why the whole "conspiracy theory" about suppressed cures seems so illogical. And it's why, during occasional periods of insomnia, when I happen upon an infomercial selling books about the secret cures "they" don't want you to hear, I just laugh and keep on changing the channel in search of something to watch that at least makes sense.
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