But that's not "saving someone's life". Try it like this:
"I decided to donate one of my kidneys to make someone's life a little bit easier for a little while".
And note that while dialysis is big business and I have no doubt that the people who are in it care far more about their profits than their patients, so are transplants. In fact transplants cost a lot more and make people a lot more money than dialysis and the only reason they're not as big business as dialysis is that there's just not enough donours, which makes a big honking red financial incentive to keep pushing for everyone to become a donour.
Meanwhile, like the National Kidney Foundation says, in my quote above, 'Having a kidney transplant does not “cure” kidney disease' and neither does dialysis. And because both treatments keep patients alive for longer than the typical five-year horizon of medical follow-up studies, they, both together, reduce the incentive to work on real "cures" of kidney disease (which, like cancer, is not one condition but many) which would make the sucking of dialysis and transplant both things of the past.
And I know this last one because I personally asked my relative's nephrologist and transplant surgeon about it and they were vague and hand-wavy, like "oh, sure, there's people working on that sort of thing somewhere".
But nobody's really trying because we can make millions keeping people tied up to machines or on immunosuppression until they give up the spirit and so who cares?
"Oh I didn't actually save the little old ladies when their nursing home burned down. I just made their life a bit easier for a little while, they still all died because they were human"
Nobody talks like this. It is understood that humans are mortal.
Yes, necessarily kidney disease cure research gets you fewer QALYs than figuring out a way to cure something we have no treatment for. But given we haven't eradicated polio it's not as though humans are very good at this whole cost-benefit analysis when it comes to medicine.
"Oh I didn't actually save the little old ladies when their nursing home burned down. I just made their life a bit easier for a little while, they still all died because they were human"
Is not analogous to this:
"I decided to donate one of my kidneys to make someone's life a little bit easier for a little while".
I am donating my other kidney to a child (1 year old with nephrosis). In any case he is living the rest of his life with this condition. I am doing this to minimize the risk of rejection during childhood. There are living people with this condition (since being babies) who are 40 years old and have families.
"I decided to donate one of my kidneys to make someone's life a little bit easier for a little while".
And note that while dialysis is big business and I have no doubt that the people who are in it care far more about their profits than their patients, so are transplants. In fact transplants cost a lot more and make people a lot more money than dialysis and the only reason they're not as big business as dialysis is that there's just not enough donours, which makes a big honking red financial incentive to keep pushing for everyone to become a donour.
Meanwhile, like the National Kidney Foundation says, in my quote above, 'Having a kidney transplant does not “cure” kidney disease' and neither does dialysis. And because both treatments keep patients alive for longer than the typical five-year horizon of medical follow-up studies, they, both together, reduce the incentive to work on real "cures" of kidney disease (which, like cancer, is not one condition but many) which would make the sucking of dialysis and transplant both things of the past.
And I know this last one because I personally asked my relative's nephrologist and transplant surgeon about it and they were vague and hand-wavy, like "oh, sure, there's people working on that sort of thing somewhere".
But nobody's really trying because we can make millions keeping people tied up to machines or on immunosuppression until they give up the spirit and so who cares?