this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
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Chronic Illness

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A community/support group for chronically ill people. While anyone is welcome, our number one priority is keeping this a safe space for chronically ill people.

This is a support group, not a place for people to spout their opinions on disability.

Rules

  1. Be excellent to each other

  2. Absolutely no ableism. This includes harmful stereotypes: lazy/freeloaders etc

  3. No quackery. Does an up-to date major review in a big journal or a major government guideline come to the conclusion you’re claiming is fact? No? Then don’t claim it’s fact. This applies to potential treatments and disease mechanisms.

  4. No denialism or minimisation This applies challenges faced by chronically ill people.

  5. No psychosomatising psychosomatisation is a tool used by insurance companies and governments to blame physical illnesses on mental problems, and thereby saving money by not paying benefits. There is no concrete proof psychosomatic or functional disease exists with the vast majority of historical diagnoses turning out to be biomedical illnesses medicine has not discovered yet. Psychosomatics is rooted in misogyny, and consisted up until very recently of blaming women’s health complaints on “hysteria”.

Did your post/comment get removed? Before arguing with moderators consider that the goal of this community is to provide a safe space for people suffering from chronic illness. Moderation may be heavy handed at times. If you don’t like that, find or create another community that prioritises something else.

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The recent publication of the 2024 results of the multinational Merck, which operates as Merck Sharp & Dohme (MSD) outside the United States, has revealed an unprecedented figure in the history of the pharmaceutical industry. Sales of the drug Keytruda, a monoclonal antibody indicated for several types of cancer, reached $29.5 billion after growing 18% last year. Never before has a drug reached such levels, shattering the record — once considered unattainable — of $19.95 billion set by Abbvie’s Humira in 2022. To put the figure into context, Keytruda has a turnover as high as the fashion giant Zara or the gross domestic product (GDP) of countries such as Senegal and Iceland.

“It’s a drug that has forced us to rethink how we fund some treatments in the public health system. The system wasn’t prepared for a therapy that could reach this magnitude,” says Sandra Flores, a member of the Spanish Society of Hospital Pharmacy (SEFH) and head of this service at Virgen del Rocío Hospital in Seville. One of the keys to the success of pembrolizumab — the name of the active ingredient in Keytruda — is its ability to act against various tumors. This has led the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to approve 30 indications for 15 types of cancer, 18 of which are currently funded by the public health system.

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