why are diseases always negative? Are there diseases that have positive effects on human beings?
In: Biology
It’s in the name really. The prefix Dis- refers to being “away” and then there is ease. In the medical field, a condition that takes a patient away from ease, or from the “normal” state of the body, is considered a disease. So any condition considered a disease, is by definition, not going to have a positive effect on the body.
Its a matter of definitions. Theres countless of bacteria and other microorganisms “infecting” you without doing damage.
A lot of them are quite necessary. Bacteria in your intestines are very helpful for your digestion. The microorganisms which normally live on your skin keep actually harmfull ones off you.
We just only call it a desease if its harmful.
Probably because of the definition of a word disease.
“Disease, any harmful deviation from the normal structural or functional state of an organism, generally associated with certain signs and symptoms and differing in nature from physical injury. A diseased organism commonly exhibits signs or symptoms indicative of its abnormal state.”
In one of the James Bond movies the villain had a bullet that was slowly traveling thru his brain that gave him super strength and he didn’t feel pain. He also cut the ear lobes off a woman that he kidnapped and then made her fall in love with him. Also it had helicopters with giant chainsaws!
There a viruses that we’ve modified to do good things but I don’t know of a naturally occurring disease that’s a positive for humans. Anti aging technology now a days is looking in to modified viruses to inoculate people with whatever they want to. Crispr and other gene editing technology also uses viruses to deliver what they need.
sickle cell anemia prevents malaria
I think some of the commenters are answering the question from a linguistics perspective. Pf course disease means something that makes things worse. The question is why dont we have “eases” like a virus or bacteria that you can catch thats very nice?
Likely because its not always the virus itself causing the symptoms you experience when sick, but your own body’s response to fighting a foreign particle in your system. Your body is killing anything that isn’t its own cells, so, good or bad, you wouldn’t really know unless your immune system failed you.
I took a fun class called Mind and Medicine, and that’s one of the key points they talked about. A disease is considered so because of the effects that either put people in pain or restrict them from the environment that statistically ‘normal’ people can navigate with ease. In the case of pain, disease is easy to pin down. A patient hurts and tells us so. But in cases of say, physical disability or mental illness, there are a lot of societal factors at play. If every building we built were designed around wheelchair travel or crutches then maybe a disease of the legs wouldn’t be a disease. If ‘normal’ people are not expected to fulfill certain social roles, then maybe moderate depression wouldn’t be categorized. I’m not saying, by the way, that mental and physical disease are not real or valid, just that there are medical, societal, and environmental factors that determine what is and is not a disease.
As a silly example, let’s say that one percent of humans could fly. Would the 99 percent be considered diseased? Or would the one percent. If half the population could fly, it might just be considered a natural distribution like eye color. If all but one percent of humans could fly, the ones that couldn’t would likely be considered diseased. If only 0.01 percent of humans couldn’t , they’d be very likely to be considered diseased. The ‘disease’ in question could shift from one to the other depending on what is seen as normal
By way of an example of a ‘beneficial’ disease…
Cowpox conveyed immunity to smallpox. Being nearly the same virus, but for cows, it didn’t make a mess of humans, but the immune system would recognize either, from then on. Cowpox is what we eventually eliminated smallpox with.
Previous to that, someone would infect your skin with pustules/scabs from someone with smallpox, and about 3% of people died from that, but 97% *didn’t*. So it was better than randomly getting smallpox, which killed 30% of people who caught it.
And previous to *that*, smallpox would come around, everyone would catch it, and 30% would die, and many of the survivors would be horribly scarred.
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