Why I am choosing to do this.

How much of your $ gets to those finding a cure?

Why We Fail to Cure?

Ask yourself, do you know anyone with a chronic disease? When was a “cure” last developed?

If you can’t remember, it’s ok, most of us weren't around in 1928. Once upon a time, in the year 1928, Alexander Fleming discovered the potential of Penicillin and its ability to treat and cure bacterial infections. Since then, pathologies are being managed. Take Malaria for example, it killed 660,000 in 2010. Diabetes, Cancer, AIDS, Multiple Sclerosis and ALS, just to name a few, kills progressively today and every day.

Our strategy of management has cost societies by draining resources away from nutrition, education and social amenities. The cost of Diabetes is in excess of $500 billion for the United States. This expense will reach one trillion by 2020. The cost to manage chronic diseases, in the US and elsewhere, is not sustainable.

If you are like me, you know the costs are not monetary only. Management alone compromises the quality of life for the sick and their families. Burdening them psychologically, physically and monetarily.  

There is no singularity in explaining social failures to cure. But there are certainly factors worth considering.

·       Nationally, scientists spend over 40% of their time applying for funding rather than conducting research. This funding process is trivial and politically charged.

·       The sequestration of the 2011 Budget Act has eliminated over a billion dollars for scientific research.

·       The majority of Non-Profits are inefficient in appropriating research funding. A simple web search would identify CEOs of Non Profits with salaries from the hundreds of thousands to millions.

·       In the United Sates, it costs $750 million to $1.5 billion to bring a drug to market.

·       Information bottlenecks/protectionism plagues science. In a world of Facebook and Twitter, researchers continue to operate in isolation. Unlike the rest of us, researchers do not tweet or “Like” one another’s work. Annual conferences and monthly or quarterly journals continue to serve as information conduits.

The global healthcare establishment has failed its true stakeholders, the patients, family and researchers who have dedicated their lives to heal.