We live in a capitalist society. Drug companies exist to make a profit not to make people well. Unfortunately the two objectives are rarely the same. If there is a choice between a treatment that will cure a condition and a treatment that will maintain a condition for years or even decades then the current profit driven model will choose the maintenance therapy every single time. This is not a malfunction of the system, this is the system operating exactly as designed. In fact if a company chose to prioritise anything other than profit then they would be criminally responsible to their shareholders. Just think what a complete disaster it would have been for pharmaceutical companies, after spending billions of pounds on vaccines, to discover that the condition could be treated effectively with cheap drugs. We don’t know what the truth is because we are not scientists and I don’t pretend to know the answers. But the drug companies own the media that cover the health stories and they fund the politicians who make the decisions about funding involving billions of dollars. We are at a disadvantage because we are not scientists and we don’t have all the information they have at their disposal. But we can recognise the situation we are in and the powerful interests involved in securing certain outcomes and making sure certain perspectives prevail.
Personally I think the way forward for individuals is to look to community collaboration using sites such as “stuff that works” which aggregates the health experiences of thousands and millions of people to try to work out from the grass roots which treatments are effective and which are not effective. I believe the drug companies and governments could do the same thing more effectively, in particular harnessing the powers of the latest artificial intelligence, but it is not in their financial interest to do so.