The Hill News

The National Institutes of Medicine is proposing to launch a new federal research Center to help develop medicines. Dr. Francis S. Collins, the Director of the NIH, told The New York Times that the “drug industry’s research productivity has been declining for 15 years, ‘and it certainly doesn’t show any signs of turning upward.’” Dr. Collins should know since he directed the Human Genome Project for years, at the epicenter of new drug development.

Launching the Center misses the mark on what’s needed to reform healthcare.  Certainly new treatments for cancer, Parkinson’s, and pain, are important. More important are better strategies for truly caring for patients - helping patients have better lives and live with the illnesses and infirmities that afflict them. An axiom of clinical medicine is that drugs don’t cure patients, but doctors - good practitioners providing good medical care do.

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