why are diseases always negative? Are there diseases that have positive effects on human beings?
In: Biology
I want to add something: your body is a very complex system. It has to be how it is, for it to work. Changing it means it isn’t working. Of course there’s all sorts of changes that fit within that complex system, like you going for a walk, or reading a book. But if there is a change that it can’t deal with, that changes that balance, it’s bad.
Imagine a see-saw that’s perfectly balanced. Your question could be sort of like asking “why do all dumbbells dropped on this see-saw disturb its balance? can’t some dumbbells help it balance?”
We define a disease to be a negative and/or harmful condition. You can’t have a positive disease like you can’t have a legal crime.
If you mean to ask are there any infections that are beneficial to humans, then yes. There plenty of bacteria that live in our digestive tracks that help digest food. Some vaccines use similar viruses to train the body to fight off more serious viruses. Engineered viruses are even being looked at as a delivery method for gene therapy treatments.
Because diseases are usually caused by an organism latching on to you and taking your body’s nutrients which causes harmful effects. The harmful effect is what we identify as the disease. And the organism is the “cause” of disease.
If the effect is NOT negative, then it won’t be a disease. For example gut bacteria, there is millions and millions of beneficial bacteria living in your gut, because they don’t cause problems, there isn’t a symptom, hence its not a disease.
Hmm…maybe that deal where you wake up fluent in another language. Or elephantitis of the penis (but that is actually not as desirable as it sounds). Besides, the Republicans in the U.S. will deport the x-men back to Universal studios, where they belong.
There are a huge number of viruses and bacteria that are useful to our bodies. Our guts, for example, are colonized with a microbiome of bacteria that both help digest food and act as part of our immune system by destroying other microbes that cause disease.
Our skin hosts a similar microbiome – at birth your skin is colonized with bacteria from skin to skin contact with your mother. This forms the basis of a microbiome that eats/kills microbial life that would otherwise cause infections.
Phage therapy is a form of anti-bacterial treatment where viruses are identified that eat specific bacteria but are not detrimental to humans. If you have an infection they can identify the bacteria and inject you with a specific virus that will eat the infecting bacteria.
Along a more drastic line is pyro-therapy. An example of this was before we had antibiotics a method to treat syphilis was to infect the patient with malaria. The extreme fevers from malaria would kill the syphilis and then they’d give you quinine to cure the malaria (assuming you survive the fevers…).
Some diseases do have benefits, though they also cause damage in some way. Some examples I can think of off the top of my head:
– Sickle cell anemia provides some protection from malaria
– Some parasitic infections can reduce allergy symptoms
– Some people with severe mental disabilities are unusually gifted in music, math, etc.
There are two reasons this sort of thing doesn’t happen more often. The first is that for genetic diseases, we only call them diseases when they cause problems. Anything else would just be normal variation between different people. For infectious diseases and parasites, getting a benefit usually doesn’t happen because the organism has evolved to get only what it needs, which is to hijack our bodies to reproduce or feed. But For the bacteria, fungus, insects and so on that live in or on our body and don’t cause problems, we have no reason to call their presence a disease.
I have GPD(giant penis syndrome).
While some would say its a positive, Ive always seen it as a curse. It causes a lot of back pain and limits the pants I can buy off the shelf.
A dis-ease can’t be positive. Other than that thing that happens to people in Africa to protect them from malaria
It’s like how we define weeds. Rocket (Arugula) sure looks and tastes like a weed and will grow everywhere but when we choose to plant it in our garden it’s not a weed.
>Defn: Disease – An abnormal condition of a human, animal or plant that causes discomfort or dysfunction; distinct from injury insofar as the latter is usually instantaneously acquired
Diseases are essentially a very broad umbrella term for something going wrong with the body.
Cancer is a disease, as an example, but it’s not typically caused by pathogens (viruses and bacteria- although sometimes it is). It’s instead the result of one of your body’s natural processes, cell division, going wrong.
Diseases are by definition something going wrong with your body. Cell division is not a disease, until it goes out of control and causes cancer.
Likewise, many viruses and bacteria are not considered diseases until they cause some harm to your body. Everyone, for example, has e coli in their gut.
But it doesn’t always cause issues. When it does, they have the disease caused by e. Coli.
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