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The issue is perhaps we should send most of the funding to FIGURING OUT HOW TO FIX THE PROBLEM FIRST.
So all these studies mentioned above shouldn't have been made? Chronic illness, severe mental illness and alcoholism are all very difficult (if at all possible) to treat. Many treatments are just symptome reduction - important, yes, but far from a cure.
Also, if I had to guess, most money does go towards finding treatments. Studies investigating effects are - I believe - many orders of magnitude cheaper. They can be as simple as a survey with 100 or so participants. Now compare this with the cost of a clinical trial for some treatments.
There is no need to study the attractiveness of someone in relation to an illness they are suffering. It's a completely inconsequential metric that's ableist by design. Additionally, all 3 things you listed can have cures. Starting with the most obvious, many alcoholics are able to reach long-term sobriety, though studying methods to achieve higher success rates is obviously of importance. "Severe mental illness" is incredibly vague. Let's take one example, one that is notoriously difficult to treat: Borderline Personality Disorder (which I even happen to have). You can cure personality disorders, just not with medication. It requires you to spend lots of time in extensive therapy to essentially rewire the way your brain works. A quick search tells me that despite being classically cited as the "most painful mental illness", and one if the hardest to treat, between 50-70% of those with BPD achieve long-term remission from treatment. Given that it's a personality disorder, the definition of "cured" is not exactly clear, but remission brings patients below the requisite number of symptoms in the DSM to constitute diagnosis. Chronic illness is also a vague category, but there's progress being made on cures for many chronic illnesses. For instance, recent developments in Chimeric Antigen Receptors and inverse vaccines bring potential cures to a wide array of autoimmune disorders. These are chronic illnesses that were once thought to be incurable, but we're here sitting in research showing that these cures can work. That is the research we need, not some ableist BS about how people with chronic illness may be less attractive to other people.
As for your assumption about how funding works, there is only a limited amount of funding that goes into scientific research. The less that is wasted, the more opportunity there is for funding going to research that makes a difference.
Fair points, though I will say chronic illness is usually classified by being resistant to treatment. Cancer (generally) isn't chronic because either it kills you or you kill it. HIV is chronic because you cannot get rid of it (except for a handful of cases which underwent a risky bone marrow transplant but that's 'cheating' – it's like 'treating' chronic knee inflammation with an amputation).
One of the studies with chronic illness in the title I now read the abstract from mentioned Alzheimer and Parkinson so I doubt they referred to curable diseases currently.
Also, I wouldn't be so quick to judge research as ableist if the results are ableist. Provided the studies are neutral, wouldn't it generally be beneficial to know how much people suffering from certain illnesses are affected by ableism? (Also the study found people suffering from endometriosis were more attractive, which could at worst be mysoginist instead of ableist I believe).
As to your last point, I agree - to limited extent. My main gripe is: Who gets to determine what research is wasteful? Should someone studying a super niche math topic with no real world use case (like ultrafinitism) not get funding? And how do you determine whether something is worth exploring (or not) if you don't yet know the results? Hell, even showing there is no correlation between two things can be useful data because it allows researchers to rule stuff out.
The fact that the premise was proposed at all makes me think someone noticed a correlation and wanted to assess whether there was causation. As proving that could ultimately help with fixing the problem.
Maybe they discover that the "attractive" group largely consisted of subjects with any of traits A, B or C, and what do you know, there's a very high correlation between trait A and endometriosis.
Maybe some years later it's discovered that trait A and endometriosis have a common cause, some specific gene perhaps. That would be key for fixing the problem.
I'll save you the click as someone with many medical issues myself. The answer requires only surface level thinking: if I'm too depressed, sick, or otherwise impaired, I will have less energy to take care of myself. Pretty easy to conclude that. You know where that money could be better spent? Helping solve the problems causing the issue. The reason these studies exist is to justify ableism. The people conducting and funding this research want an excuse to validate their belief that people with disabilities are unattractive. The real-world value of this research doesn't extend beyond that ableist justification.