Life's Pleasures Quote by Mort Kondracke

The line lands like a weary shrug at the modern news cycle: Parkinson's, a disease defined by slow progression and hard limits, gets covered as if it were one good headline away from being solved. Mort Kondracke, speaking as a journalist who has watched (and helped shape) the rhythms of health reporting, points to a particular kind of media optimism that isn’t exactly dishonest, but is structurally misleading.

“Practically every day” is the tell. It’s not a statistic; it’s an indictment of frequency-as-importance. Breakthrough becomes a genre tag, not a scientific milestone. The subtext is twofold: first, newspapers have incentives to repackage incremental findings as turning points; second, the public is trained to read “new drug” as “near cure,” collapsing the long timeline between a promising mechanism, a mouse study, a Phase II trial, and an actual therapy that changes lives.

Kondracke’s phrasing also hints at the emotional economy behind these stories. Parkinson’s patients and families live on hope, and editors know hope sells. The cruelty is accidental but real: each “breakthrough” raises expectations that clinical reality can’t match, setting readers up for whiplash when the follow-up story never arrives or arrives as quiet failure.

Contextually, this reads like a corrective from inside the machine. It’s less anti-science than pro-honesty: a plea to treat medical progress as a grind, not a parade, and to stop laundering uncertainty into certainty just because certainty fits better on a front page.