The Pharmaceutical black hole

Remember that drug commercial where they say "Got so and so disease? Take so and so and you're CURED!" Can't remember it? Well, it hasn't been on television, and I doubt you'll ever see it. What you will see are countless ads for drugs that MANAGE the symptoms of disease but never just cure them. It's easy to imagine why. Where would you're profits go if you sold something that eliminated your customer base? So, no, my friends, you will not see such commercials because the drug companies have no vested interest in curing you of anything. Millions of dollars will be spent each year developing these drugs, and even more will be spent marketing them to you, even suggesting that you run to your doctor and ask him if so and so drug "is right for you". They don't even bother telling you in the commercial what the damn drug is for, they just infer that pestering your doctor to prescribe something for you might improve your life, and I suppose there are enough hypochondriacs out there who are doing just that. And you wonder why precious few antibiotics are left that are effective against any of the new strains of bacteria that can kill us should our immune systems weaken in the slightest. So go ahead and rush out and buy all those anti-bacterial soaps and cleansers to sterilize your household with; all you are doing is breeding drug resistant super-bugs, right there in your own kitchens and baths.
Now, I really hate to suggest that all the miles you good people are putting in "walking for the cure" is merely keeping a lot of somewhat intelligent people employed slaving away year after year in research labs looking for a cure for various kinds of cancer, but haven't you wondered why more hasn't been accomplished for all the money that's been spent? Do you really have any idea exactly HOW the money you've raised so charitably has been applied to the problem? Perhaps tracing one dollar of the money that has been collected for the cause might be sobering if you could see exactly how it is spent. Perhaps if more transparent accountability of where all this cash was going was demanded, we might not be too pleased with the truth. All I know is that what we don't know might not exactly hurt us, but it might not be helping us, either.
President John F. Kennedy announced that we would put a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth within that decade, and turned the goal over to a community of results-oriented men who took X-amount of money and did just that.
Perhaps we need that same spirit in our medical research community, as well as the same transparent effort it took to make the Apollo project the success it was. It's your money, it's your hope. Start asking questions.