Why a One-Time Cure Terrifies an Industry Built on Daily Pills
What does a cure really cost?
In modern medicine, we rarely ask that question. We celebrate innovation and breakthroughs, yet we often blur a critical distinction: ending a disease versus managing it indefinitely.
A cure ends the story.
Most drugs simply make it livable.
True one-time cures do exist. In recent years, gene therapies such as Zolgensma (for spinal muscular atrophy) and Luxturna (for inherited retinal dystrophy) have demonstrated that correcting the root genetic defect can dramatically alter the course of disease — often with a single intervention. These therapies come with staggering price tags, roughly $2.1 million for Zolgensma and $850,000 for Luxturna, but biologically, they do something rare: they remove the need for lifelong medication.
(FDA approvals: 2017–2019; peer-reviewed follow-up studies show sustained benefit in many patients.)
Contrast this with the dominant pharmaceutical model: lifelong treatment.
Examples are everywhere:
Type 2 diabetes: metformin, GLP-1 agonists, insulin — often escalated, rarely stopped
Hypertension: daily antihypertensives taken for decades
Hypercholesterolemia: statins prescribed indefinitely
Autoimmune diseases: biologics and immunosuppressants requiring ongoing injections or infusions
Depression and anxiety: SSRIs and related medications often used long term
Osteoporosis: antiresorptive drugs taken for years, sometimes for life
These medications can be life-saving and absolutely necessary — but they are management tools, not cures. Once stopped, symptoms or disease activity often return.
Even in infectious disease, where medicine has historically excelled, the distinction matters. Hepatitis C is one of the rare modern examples of a true pharmaceutical cure: short-term antiviral regimens can eliminate the virus entirely, with no further treatment required. This remains the exception, not the rule.
Why are cures so rare?
Biology is one reason. One-shot cures work best when a disease has a single, identifiable cause, such as a missing gene. Most chronic diseases are multifactorial, emerging from a complex interaction between genetics, environment, metabolism, inflammation, and cumulative exposure. There is no single switch to flip.
Economics also play a role. A therapy that works once must absorb decades of research, failed trials, and manufacturing risk into a single price. A drug taken daily spreads that cost over years — and sustains an entire healthcare system built around long-term use.
This is not a moral failure of medicine. It is a structural reality.
My Take: Reduce the Load, Don’t Just Add More
From a biohacking perspective, this distinction is essential. While waiting for one-shot cures for complex chronic diseases, the most powerful lever we have today is load reduction.
Lowering inflammatory burden, reducing toxic exposure, improving metabolic flexibility, supporting mitochondrial health, and restoring circadian and hormonal balance do not “cure” disease in the pharmaceutical sense — but they often reduce the need for escalating medication and slow biological aging itself.
In other words, if medicine excels at managing disease, biohacking aims to change the terrain in which disease develops.
As advanced therapies evolve, the future of health will likely live in the middle: targeted medical interventions when necessary, combined with aggressive reduction of the biological noise that keeps the body trapped in chronic dysfunction.
Because in the end, the most expensive medicine is not always the one with the highest upfront price — it is the one you need to take for the rest of your life.
Valérie Orsoni
Biohacker since 1998 | Longevity Expert
Instagram : @valerieorsoni
My fave brands + super promo codes here ==> ValerieOrsoni.com
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