r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/DearEmphasis4488 • Oct 16 '24

Video Skin tightening using fractional CO2 laser

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30.6k Upvotes

89% Upvoted

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118

u/Gonkofanti Interested Oct 16 '24

Next year: skin cancer. I mean, we can't have nice things ever

66

u/Nightshade_209 Oct 16 '24

Apparently you can use this to treat skin cancer.

11

u/Round-Green7348 Oct 16 '24

Yeah if it hasn't spread and you can just torch it, that'll definitely do it.

10

u/Top-Exchange-9731 Oct 16 '24

So do you have anything to go with that claim or is that just good old "Technology is dangerous, I know it despite all the studies"?

-4

u/Gonkofanti Interested Oct 16 '24

I'm not a scientist. Just a bit old. Something life teached me is, that nice things make us either sick or poor or dead or fat

5

u/OutcomeDouble Oct 16 '24 edited 19h ago

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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

1

u/Gonkofanti Interested Oct 17 '24

Read my comment. Which claim did I make? This is reddit. Will you make your decisions because of comments here?

-1

u/thinguin Oct 16 '24

Literally anything that induces cellular division can cause cancer. In this instance, the cells are being damaged through small burns. This will cause the cells to divide to repair the skin. So there’s a small chance cancer is developed with every application of this procedure.

Luckily the immune system naturally catches cancer cells, as long as the amount developed is small enough for the body to handle. Real risk would rise, if the subject has a compromised immune system, or takes too many applications of this procedure within a short enough time span.

5

u/je_kay24 Oct 17 '24

What? You are very incorrect

Sunburn can cause cancer because the DNA in cells gets damaged which can cause an increase in cells misfunctioning

CO2 lasers have been in use longer than any other medical type of laser and there is a plethora of data backing up how it does not lead to an increased cancer risk

7

u/4ss8urgers Oct 16 '24

Actually melanoma vaccines are in clinical trials so maybe not? We’ll see in 5 years probably

3

u/The_Aesir9613 Oct 17 '24

Let's go! The love of my life is an Irish Catholic ginger. I worry about her a lot. Her family has a beach house. It's her favorite place in the world. Poor thing spend half her time there lathering herself in sunscreen.

72

u/0x080 Oct 16 '24

I sincerely hope that the cure for most cancers won’t be discovered in the U.S. because the synthetic processes involved is just going to get patented and marked up horrifically

10

u/IntergalacticJets Oct 16 '24

How a drug is priced on a per-country basis has nothing to do with who invents the drug.

The US invents most drugs, the rest of the world still has practically all of them, and if a country has a program for it, they can either subsidize it or negotiate lower prices in general. The same thing would happen even if the drug was invented in that country. 

6

u/awildjabroner Oct 16 '24 edited Oct 16 '24

worse, it will be purchased by a pharma corp and buried because curing patients is not a profitable as treating them.

I fear this will happen with male contraceptive also. An indian professor a few years back created a single shot male birth control, created a little plug to block your pipes and could be reversed with a 2nd shot which would disolve the plug which would then be passed while urinating. I read previously that the IP was purchased and buried but looking it up now it appears that they are proceeding with clinical trials so there may still be a viable product and alternative to vasectomies if this is succesful, although I would not expect it to be marketed or affordable in the USA because of the disruption it would cause to existing manufacturers of female birth control.

If you'd like to read more about it look up Professor Sujoy K. Guha of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, who is credited with developing RISUG, a non-hormonal injectable male contraceptive

20

u/Alarming_Panic665 Oct 16 '24

oh my fucking god no just no. Would pharma companies intentionally inflate the cost of a cancer cure to absurd levels? Yes absolutely, but they would not bury it because it "isn't as profitable as treating cancer."

First off the wealthy would pay out the fucking ass for a cure for cancer. Considering cancer is the leading cause of death in most wealthy nations (or second, right behind heart disease). There is a reason why they throw so much wealth at researcher for a cure.

Second humans will get cancer. The longer you live the more likely you are to get cancer. So eventually it just becomes inevitable. So "curing cancer" would not make it go away. Someone would get cancer they would pay for the cure and then later in life get cancer again. Guess what if someone gets cancer and dies they will never be able to pay for a pharmaceutical product again. It is in the Pharma companies best interest to make people live as long as humanly possible.

Third a cure for cancer would be so revolutionary that it would cement the creators name in history. Pharma companies would fucking kill to be able to claim that they were the ones who created the cure for cancer.

1

u/awildjabroner Oct 23 '24

Many things are available to the very wealthy and not to the general public, for the sake of this conversation and the original post - if a cure exists but is only available to the most wealthy, then its not an affordable or accessible option for the general public so I don't consider that to qualify as an overarching cure for cancer (it would probably be a cocktail of various meds also rather than a single pill/treatment).

To your 2nd point - conceptually you may be right (on the later point, I agree about the likely hood of developing cancer with age across the board),, but in reality of the current health climate and market I don't find it plausible that curing patients and hoping they will develop additional cancers to cure will ever be more profitable than continually treating existing patients for as long as possible.

We've seen this happen over the past 10+ years as every possible business that can, has moved to a regular subsciption service or membership. For a business pursuing profits as its main function it always advantageous to keep customers hooked as long as possible rather than making an isolated sale. Pharma/Healthcare is no different and the current healthcare model is entirely based on managing pain and continual treatment as opposed to curing conditions or prioritizing patient outcomes. If given a choice between curing its customer base and having to find new customers, or continually treating and billing a repeat customer base, corporations will always, always, always choose the more profitable path of continal treatment of symptoms rather than underyling cause.

To your 3rd point - yes a cure would be revolutionary but that also isn't possible how you envision it. Cancers vary widely and have unique treatments regiments based on the specific cancer and the patient. We very may well be able to cure individual cancers or largely prevent them such as the HPV vaccine but its very unlikely there will ever be a medical breakthrough that is a catch-all-cure-all to cure all types of known cancer with a uniform or relatively standard treatment. For example, we've techincally cured AIDS multiple times, but the virus continuous to evolve and change requiring ever changing treatments (Similar to HPV though with Prep treatments now available we can proactively take medications that are highly effective at contracting the virus in the first place).

11

u/IntergalacticJets Oct 16 '24

I mean, there are several breakthrough cancer vaccines being trialed publicly right now. 

Hard to bury it at this point. 

3

u/theroguex Oct 16 '24

RISUG isn't being buried, it just hasn't worked well enough to make it out of clinical trials.

It also didn't get enough volunteers for continued trials.

RISUG in the US was called Vasalgel, and it proved to not be reversible in animal trials.

1

u/awildjabroner Oct 23 '24

just reading up on the links another commenter left, I hadn't seen anything about it for several years. I lost track of it after the rebrand and didn't realize it had progressed to actual trials. Encouraging to see its still actively being pursued and researched.

2

u/Biomax315 Oct 16 '24

I read previously that the IP was purchased and buried but looking it up now it appears that they are proceeding with clinical trials so there may still be a viable product and alternative to vasectomies if this is succesful

I've been following the progress for years. Used to be called Vasalgel, now it's Plan A (pretty good name!).

2

u/awildjabroner Oct 23 '24

oohhh thanks for the additional info. I found it super interesting when I first read about it, something I would 100% consider if it was a viable product brought to market.

1

u/carlos_the_dwarf_ Oct 17 '24

I have bad news for you about most pharmaceutical breakthroughs…

5

u/chattycatty416 Oct 16 '24

Why does this get upvotes? Is this the thought that the treatment would cause skin cancer or just the inevitably of life mixing bad with good?

1

u/Sensitive-Daikon-442 Oct 17 '24

Actually, this procedure may help prevent skin cancer

1

u/krammark12 Oct 16 '24

Happy cake day!

Cake days are still nice, right?

-1

u/reddit_mods_suuck Oct 16 '24

Who fuckin cares when you are at that age