But this thread is more the scopes of all disease and illness of the body and understanding why some are so easy to cure and others very hard too cure.
May be I’m not understanding how the human body works or how drugs work but why is some disease and illness so easy cure and others so hard?
Take bacteria or fungi mostly easy to cure but cancer , dementia , alzheimer’s , virus ,autoimmune disease ,Multiple sclerosis ( MS) neuron disease , amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and Parkinson so on very very very hard to come up with cure .
Like I say may be I don’t know enough of the understanding how the human body works or how drugs work why it so hard to come up with cure.
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If I understand past threads here the reason cancer is so hard to cure is it your own cell gone bad so the trick is to kill the cancer but not kill healthy cells.
If I understand virus like TB ,small pox , HIV ,eblola , Hepatitis all types , Measles , chicken pox , Marburg , ,Herpes simplex all types ,HPV ,Bird flu ,STD ,Typhoid fever , Influenza , SARS are so HARD to find cure is because it keeps mutating all time where bacteria or fungi don’t and that is why they have so many more cures.
I think problem with autoimmune disease is drugs work by suppressing the immune system to fix problem :o but the trick not to NOT shut down the immune system to fix problem .**
Don’t know why Multiple sclerosis ( MS) neuron disease , amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) so hard to find cure?
That’s quite a grab bag of diseases, there. Sort of like saying if they can put a man on the moon, where’s my flying car?
The easy diseases were invaders that were easily identified and that could be incubated and studied outside of the human body. Once you can do that, you can have hundreds of labs testing thousands of things until they find methods of curbing the invader without harming the host.
Relatively easy. Especially in the early days before antibiotic resistance. The hard invaders you listed are a mixed bag.
Small pox is gone. Measles and chicken pox have vaccines (which was how we got rid of small pox). So does HPV. Typhoid fever is mostly a public health problem IIRC. A check on wiki shows that there are also vaccines available, although they are only 50-80% effective. Get a working sewage system going, though, and typhoid’s gone.
HIV, ebola, SARS, etc. are new and still being studied. Research takes time. SARS has been knocked back, but probably still has reservoirs in the animal populations from which it sprang. The same is true with bird flu. Other diseases in the future will also transfer from animals, mutating in order to be able to live in humans. How long do you think it should take to define a new disease, find the virus, and find a way to fight it? And if a disease has an animal host, it will probably never be completely irradicated.
Influenza mutates, but they’re working on it. There are halfway effective vaccines available if you can guess what sort of flu you’ll be exposed to.
Marburg isn’t new, and it’s nasty. It’s only by using genetic testing that a case of Marburg can be distinguished from a case of ebola. They’ve been working on a vaccine since the late sixties. But, although the virus is from the same order as measles, mumps, and rabies, it just hasn’t cooperated as well. Neither has ebola. There’s really nothing to say besides we tried the same thing that worked with the others, and it hasn’t worked, yet.
There is a vaccine for TB, but it’s inconsistant against the pulmonary form. There’s also a treatment with antibiotics, but it’s a prolonged and harsh one. According to wiki, “due to the unusual structure and chemical composition of the mycobacterial cell wall, which hinders the entry of drugs and makes many antibiotics ineffective.” Again, folks are working on it. Cover your mouth when you cough. Avoid people who don’t.
The things you listed at the end of your post mostly do not involve invaders, at least not once they’re in motion. There is no way to remove the cause from the human body and study it in a lab. Sometimes it’s possible to find animal models of similar problems, but that’s much more indirect than studying an invader.
Mostly, understanding these disease states involves studying, on a very detailed level, how things work in the human body and how they can go wrong. This is much, much more complicated than identifying a bacteria or virus. You mentioned cancer? As genetic testing has become cheaper and faster, studies have shown that not only is the mutation in one tumor different from another, there can be hundreds of different mutations within one tumor. That’s a whole heap of complicated. Genetic testing of cancer cells may open up possibilities for treatment, but it’s just starting.
MS is suspected to be an autoimmune disease. It and ALS are not caused by invaders. Something is going wrong. Where would you start looking to try to find what that was? Yes the sheaths of nerve cells are demyelinated and scarred. At one time that was all that was known. Now researchers have some evidence that the immune system is involved, but they’re still trying to pick apart genetic, environmental and infectious factors.
For instance, if your identical twin has MS, you have a 35% chance of getting it, too. So genetics is involved, but it isn’t the entire cause. Researchers are combing the MS population looking for risk factors. Some have been identified, but no one thing is a proven cause.
And even if the cause is identified, that won’t necessarily provide a cure. If the immune system is causing the damage, how do you convince it to stop? Auto-immune diseases are treated with immunosuppresive drugs, but that’s not a cure. The cure would be convincing the system to stop doing that. As it stands, there isn’t even a diagnostic test for MS. It has to be diagnosed by symptom and history.
What is necessary for these diseases is a lot of basic research. Not look for the cure research, basic research. We need to know a lot more about the immune system and the ways it can go wrong before a systematic search for a cure can be started. Oh, and there are four different patterns of progression for MS. Why? Does that mean that we’d need four different cures? Maybe.
Instead of asking why these diseases are hard to cure, I’d ask why anyone would think they were easy. Oh, and STDs will always be with us as long as we spread them. If you create a niche, something will mutate and make itself at home.
Why with virus they go for vaccines not drug to stop the problem? You don’t have vaccines for bacteria or fungi.
You say they don’t know what causes Multiple sclerosis ( MS) neuron disease , amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)??? I thought that was autoimmune disease like Parkinson?
So why are there not drugs out there to work by suppressing the immune system to stop this if this is immune system gone wrong?
Part of the problem is how our health care system is structured. Pharma companies will not have the incentive to invest in anything other than patentable drugs, and they are a major funder of medical research.
Plus some people with chronic diseases do well with various alternative treatments. Some people with autoimmune disorders do well with probiotics and an anti-inflammatory diet as an example. But those are not really profitable medical interventions with teams of people designed to advertise them, so they are not going to get the airtime.
With influenza, you can get tamiflu for $100 that may cut 2 days off the flu or you can buy elderberry extract that will cut 4 days off the flu for $10. But where is the financial incentive? Elderberry extract does not have large amounts of capital designed to influence doctors or run ads.
Who has the money to research the diseases, and who stands to benefit from treating it. You have to look at problems like that too. Medicine is not (just) a charity or public good, it is also a business. Not every disease is profitable to treat, not every treatment is profitable. Tropical diseases could be treated far better than they are now but the people who have them are poor. Some chronic diseases of western civilization can be controlled with alternative therapies but there is no profit in it.
Part of it is that western society supports allopathy to exclusion of everything else. I would assume that with chronic disease becoming so damn expensive more and more nations are just going to take a ‘whatever works’ approach to medicine.
Here is something interesting. Of the 30 years or so in life expectancy we have gained in the 20th century, something like 25 years was due to public health and only about 5 was due to personal medicine. So all the medications & surgeries only added a few years to life expectancy. Things like sanitation, clean water, proper nutrition, vaccines, cleaning up pollution, etc. added 25 years. So in a lot of ways medicine has not done much of anything to increase lifespan. However you can argue it has decreased our rates of disability in many ways (although with the bad economy, the number of people labeled disabled is going up).
But again, it is off patent so there is no incentive to market or advertise it. So it goes unused.
Either way, I wouldn’t call drugs to suppress the immune system in an autoimmune disorder curing it. All that is is managing it. A true cure would involve preventing the immune system from attacking the body.
Antibiotics don’t have any effect on viruses. Antiviral drugs do exist but it’s much better to prevent the disease via a vaccine instead. Vaccines also exist for bacterial infections. Again, better to prevent than to cure.
Your question on suppressing the immune system was addressed.
When the immune system is suppressed, it leaves the patient wide open for ANY infection, bacterial, fungal or viral. People who have undergone transplant surgery, for example, often have to have their immune system suppressed to prevent rejection of the donor organ. They are then extremely vulnerable to potential infection.
sweat, might I suggest that your comprehension of biology would be better served by taking a basic intro to biology class, or at least skimming a textbook, rather than posting these complex questions, the answers to which seem so often to be beyond your grasp?
I don’t think the war on cancer is a failure. Many cancers are detected more quickly and much easier to treat than they were even 20 years ago. It will take more time but eventually I think cancer will basically be a thing of the past.
anti-“western medicine” drivel… which is factually incorrect (most alternative woo comes from the West) and insulting to real medical professionals from the East
“allopathic” is a pejorative invented by people who believe in magical water to describe those who don’t believe in magical water, and using it in a non-satirical manner is a red flag, like the words “sheeple” or “paradigm”
not many medicines for viruses? They’re called vaccines… you probably think they cause autism, though, right?
tired old myth about medicine taking credit for benefits of sanitation
According to this some cancers are declining, due to a mix of fewer people smoking, better detection and better treatment.
To the OP, here is something to be optimistic about. Modern western medicine really only started about 160 years ago in the middle of the 19th century with the discovery of anaesthesia, germ theory and a more developed understanding of anatomy & physiology. So we have achieved a lot in 170 years which in the grand scheme of things isn’t long. And the advances compound, the last 10 years of medicine were far far more productive than the 1870-1880 period, which were themselves less productive than the 1930-1940 period. I wouldn’t be surprised if by the 22nd century we had found meaningful cures to most of the chronic diseases we live with. It seems to me that several dozen diseases cause most of the suffering and medical problems anymore, although those can easily be subdivided many times themselves (cancer is not one disease, dementia has many forms, there are various kinds of mental illnesses with various biological causes, etc).
I don’t think any diseases were easy to cure. Tuberculosis was probably the biggest focus of medical research for decades, and the community of researchers was large.
It may be that today’s ethical standards make it harder. Cortisone, a tremendous life-saving drug, might not be approved today because it took decades to work out the best uses. The disease it was originally intended for, rheumatoid arthritis, was a poor choice. Today’s testing would have revealed it, and that would be the end of cortisone.
There have been advances in statistical methods. Maybe it all balances out, but, being a pessimist, I doubt it.
I’m guessing the slowdown stems from somewhat easier diseases having been cured first, and from bold experimentation being hemmed in by a combination of patient lawsuits and university ethics committees.
It’s not true that there are no vaccines for bacteria. There are vaccines for both cholera and typhoid, both of which are bacterial diseases.
I’m guessing that vaccine programs aren’t started for bacterial diseases that respond well to antibiotics unless they’re extremely virulent. But that’s a guess. For viruses - do you know how many ways a virus is different from a bacteria? Do you know, for instance, that they inject their DNA or RNA into a host cell, where it takes over the cell, causing the cell machinery to make more viruses? So that, unlike bacteria, you’re not targeting something moving freely in your body, you’re trying to target something hiding in your cells. And it’s not hiding as a complete virus. It’s just a strand of DNA or RNA hanging out among your own cellular RNA. One strand among many.
The wall of the cell shields it. Your blood doesn’t touch it. Your immune system doesn’t touch it. Most medicines won’t transport through the cell membrane. Yes, when your cell pops and releases the new viruses, they have to travel unprotected until they latch on to a new cell, but many are released from each infected cell and only a few of them need to find cells to inhabit to keep the infection going.
Some viruses, like herpes, can go dormant. Just waiting in your cells, not replicating, for years.
That’s a lot like saying it’s a car, why can’t you fix it? Well, what kind of car and what’s wrong with it? The human immune system has dozens to hundreds of components, each one controlled or mediated by multiple genes. It’s all very well to know that something in that system is going wrong, it’s another thing entirely to figure out which bit is doing the wrong thing and why. And if you can figure out why, then you have to figure out how to stop it. Or how to make up for it, if it turns out that a necessary protein isn’t being produced.
Rheumatoid arthritis, Psoriasis, Graves’ disease, and Type 1 Diabetes are all accepted as auto-immune diseases. But if they all had the same cause, they wouldn’t need separate names. So they’re not going to have the same treatment, even for symptoms, and they’re not going to have the same cure. And MS and ALS are suspected to be autoimmune diseases. Suspected, not accepted. They act the way autoimmune diseases do, but it hasn’t been difinitively proven, yet. That puts them several steps further away from a cure.
Oh, and Parkinsons and Alzheimers are neurodegenerative diseases. The details of what is actually happening still being researched. There is no proof of any exact cause, but they do not appear to be autoimmune diseases. They can also only be difinitively diagnosed by autopsy. They are provisionally diagnosed by patient history, by ruling other things out, and by brain scan for Alzheimers and by giving the patient levodopa to see if that reduces tremors for Parkinsons.
Others have repeated it, but let me say this loudly: SUPPRESSING THE IMMUNE SYSTEM IS NOT A CURE FOR AN AUTO-IMMUNE DISEASE - IT’S ONLY A WAY TO TEMPORARILY SUPPRESS SYMPTOMS. It’s a stop-gap that’s only tried when there is no cure and when the symptoms are severe. For MS and ALS it doesn’t work very well. A cure would mean that there was no longer a need to suppress the immune system. A cure would mean that the disease was gone.
Have you had chicken pox? Then you’ve still got varicella zoster virus (VZV) living dormant in your cells. I guarantee it. Your body has just reached a balance with the little beasties. If you’re unlucky, sometime when your body is under stress you’ll get another outbreak, not of chicken pox, but of shingles.
If you think about it, it’s a wonder that any virus infection ends. They only have to be outside a cell long enough to find another cell to hide in. And what’s usually right there next to the cell they came out of?
That’s exactly the problem. And killing off the virus generally means the immune system has to kill off the virally infected cells - which is what the virus is usually doing anyway (unless it is one that can go dormant like VZV), so the immune system’s doing as much damage to the body as the actual infection is. That’s why viral infections represent such a tough problem to solve!
It’s probably because it’s an off-label use; I’m sure that if they thought there was merit to cimetidine as an anti-viral, they’d go the loratadine/desloratadine route (or vice-versa) and create an “anti-viral” drug that either is a metabolite of cimetidine or metabolizes into cimetidine, and sell it at a huge premium as a prescription drug.
Some doctors would figure it out and just tell their old farts to go get generic cimetidine at Wal-Mart, but many others would prescribe the expensive stuff since that’s what’s labeled as anti-viral, and they’re risk-averse enough to not take a chance.
But considering that none of that’s been done, Occam’s razor would point to it not being effective enough to be worth that trouble, which considering how much herpes and shingles problems that people have, probably means that it’s not very effective.