Soon we’ll cure diseases with a cell, not a pill

This summer, I watched a TED talk titled “Soon we’ll cure diseases with a cell, not a pill”,
given by a cancer physician, Siddhartha Mukherjee. The dominant way of viewing medical
treatment comes in the form of “have disease, take pill, kill something”, as described by
him. However, he questions the effectiveness of this dominant method, about whether this
process of lock and key and kill would work on all forms of disease, and whether the medical
community’s insistence on following this way would hinder progressions in the medical
world. For example, how would this work on chronic diseases such as diabetes when there
is nothing harmful to kill?

It can be applied to the problem of leukaemia: there has been chemotherapy that targets
and kills the rapidly dividing cells; however, now there has also been more advancement to
approaching such diseases using the immune system. More specifically, using the capacity
of the organ and the environment it has been problematic in.
Another example he delivered was curing depression: there are pills that try to turn off
molecules such as serotonin and dopamine which operate between the nerve cells. This has
proved to cure depression till a certain limit. However, another methodology is changing
physiology of the brain, which in this context includes ‘talk therapy’. Studies have shown
that a combination of pills and talk therapy has proved to be more effective than either
alone, which highlights the importance of reframing the mainstream thinking about
medicine.

I thought it was very captivating that Mukherjee was speaking against the dominant view of
medicine. It was not something I was expecting based on the title, but rather something
about the ineffective effects that can be experienced with pills. This TED talk was given 4
years ago, but we do know that stem cells have a very promising role in science, such as
Stargardt’s disease and retinal stem cells which we have learned about. This explores

He ends the talk by saying that society often states that the scientific community hasn’t
made much of a transformative impact recently due to the fact that there aren’t powerful
enough drugs, but this notion can be challenged by the idea that perhaps, they do not have
powerful enough ways of thinking about medicines themselves. And this idea can be applied
to other disciplines of science as well, where sometimes following a traditional way of
discovering something may not be effective, and there is a need to break out of the box and
approach the matter in a different way.

Overall, I really enjoyed watching this as it was very informative about the role of pills in
medicine, and also gave additional information, such as how medical professionals aim to
help cure depression (which is a topic that mainstream media has recently began to raise
more awareness about as well). But most importantly, it had a strong underlying message
about how many times it is necessary to approach global issues from different perspectives.