one can (never) cure cancer?

[Rynn]

Or maybe the problem is with the constant hype, the media are causing around new advances in medicine. Each new discovery is heralded as a breakthrough and then the doctors either discover a problem with the "breakthrough" and the media go silent on the story so that they don't have to discredit themselves by reporting that the breakthrough was not a breakthrough after all but another incremental step in the right direction or the "breakthrough" was not a breakthrough from the start but just got hyped up by the media. Yes, the more I think about it the more it seems that the media are the problem. Articles, which constantly talk about breakthroughs in some scientific area sell better than articles, which objectively talk about incremental advances in the right direction.

I'd say you were spot on there. I'm always trying to explain this to people when they say they heard of a breakthrough last year so where is it? There's this expectation created by the media that science progresses through a series of big Eureka! moments i.e. for ages nothing happens then one day a scientist makes a huge breakthrough. Naturally they expect products to start hitting the shelves very quickly after. In reality it's almost always slow increments.

• Articles, which constantly talk about breakthroughs in some scientific area sell better than articles, which objectively talk about incremental advances in the right direction.
  
• Medicine, which doesn't heal the patient but keeps a disease in check generates more money than medicine, which heals the patient ( ? ).
  

I don't think the last one is fair to say, there are thousands of examples of medicines that cure the patient and are profitable, from antibiotics to chemotherapy. People love to say that Big Pharma isn't interested in cures and whilst I'm no great fan of medicine for profit this isn't a universal truth. The issue is that some types of cure are difficult/impossible to make a profit from, either because of practical costs or because of regulatory issues. Take phage therapy for example; a somewhat promising treatment for bacterial infections by using viruses to kill the bacteria. Considering the problems with antibiotic resistance you would think this would be a big area of research, but aside from some work in Russia (curtailed since the fall of the Soviet Union) it gets little attention outside of basic lab work. The reason is that phages mutate very quickly so even if a company has a patent on a phage another company could simply take it, put it in a dish with bacteria and evolve a new strain that is just as good. In essence the first company has to spend all the initial R&D cost but loses out on the profit.

There are also practical concerns of course, it's certainly not a technology that's ready to hit the street, but it gives you an idea of why some things don't get taken up by companies. And from a company's perspective that's entirely sensible and logical. What we need is to not rely so much on profit-seeking companies so that we can develop and produce medicines that aren't reliant on how profitable they will be.