[shubble]

The articles criticism I think stems from the same feeling of discomfort I got when I understood a bit better how drugs are developed.

As a culture I think we have a certain faith in the medical system to save us from death, the same way previous generations looked to priests to save the spirit.

The inference you mention 'high HDL is associated with low cardiac arrest, therefore a drug that increases HDL might help is more vague than a layman expects. It's like saying 'I want a safe car, and German tend to be safe, therefore I will buy a German' - it's valid in the absence of a real understanding of how to specify and select a safe car, but it's more vague than you'd be comfortable with. You expect an engineering company to be able to specify a safe car based on deep knowledge. But because our understanding of the disease, and of what different chemicals can do is incomplete, a drug company can't do that. Instead, they follow as many hints as they can to select a chemical that might work, and then advance it through a series of progressively more expensive trials until they are pretty sure it does more good than harm.

That's a valid way of doing things, and at the moment it's all we can do. But it's not what a layman imagines, or certainly not what this one imagined. It undermines our sense of control - our sense that we are immortal and can get on with making an angry birds clone to get rich because there will be plenty of time to do the projects we want to after the payoff - it's not like we are going to die of heart disease, science has our back on that one!

Or maybe I'm generalizing my personal feelings too much?

[mattgreenrocks]

No, you're onto something here. Modern medicine is not all powerful. It does some things very well, and we live much longer because of it, but there is still so much we do not understand. I'm thankful that there are those that put the time and money into this research that furthers our comprehension.

However, there are plenty of conditions you can develop where modern medicine is only able to contain the symptoms, rather than fix the problem causing them. Autoimmune conditions (such as MS) come to mind here.