Why is it that people who have serious chronic pain or chronic illnesses (i.e. Fibromyalgia, Endometriosis, Chronic Fatigue syndrome etc) can only be treated to a certain extent but not cured? What makes these illnesses more difficult to treat?
In: Biology
In many cases we don’t know the exact causes of these conditions (yet) but there are effective treatments.
We also don’t have pain relievers that are effective against chronic pain without having horrible side effects like addiction.
As time goes on and he pour more money into research those condition will eventually get better treatments and cures.
We take it for granted how much better medicine is today than it was.
Polio and TB have been basically wiped out thanks to vaccines
We have the technology to make an effective vaccine against COVID 19 in a matter of months.
AIDS is fully treatable now, so are many cancers.
Diabetes is treatable
And we have a miracle drug for weight loss now
So it’s not like the medical industry is sitting there with it’s thumb up it’s but
I think you have it backwards – chronic illnesses are, by definition, the ones we can’t cure. There isn’t going to be one answer to *why*, since the ones you listed affect different systems in different ways.
I think a lot of the time it’s easier to fight against a single problem that occurs once, like most diseases, but chronic illnesses are also things that stick around and thus have an ongoing cause. So like, a vital infection is one external invader that you can kill, but a hormonal balance problem? A problem with how your nerves are signaling? Those are problems that are hard to get to the root of.
The first step in finding a cure is to find the cause. Those that you listed along with many others lack a known cause so the only option left is treating the symptom(s).
I’ve had good luck with Accupuncture when Western medicine doesn’t help
One condition I rarely suffer from anymore is fibromyalgia
There are three major reasons we can’t deal with chronic illnesses:
1. The illness is the result of damage to your organs that is impossible to repair.
2. We don’t know for sure what causes the illness so there’s no possible way to describe a treatment.
3. The cause of the illness is impossible to deal with unless we do damage to your body we can’t repair that will make your life worse than leaving the illness alone.
For (1), we can’t replace every organ. Imagine a chronic illness that involves brain damage. We can’t replace your brain, so you’re stuck with that illness.
For (2), it’s something like Alzheimer’s where we’re still sorting out exactly what causes it. Until we know that, we can’t even start to think about treatments. (This does kind of work both ways, sometimes we make a guess at a cause and try treating something else to see if it affects the illness. Sometimes that actually works.)
For (3), some things are just tough to deal with. Viruses like Epstein-Barr can set up shop in cells and lie dormant for a long time, causing problems later. We aren’t very good at killing viruses and they aren’t really “alive”. The only solution might be extremes like radiation therapy to try to kill the “bad” cells, but if your particular illness is in multiple organs you won’t survive.
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The hopeful part is for most of these, we’re hopeful that we can find *something* with a technological advance. (1) is the hardest part. We can probably get better at organ transplants but the idea of replacing a brain is a really long way away for a lot of reasons. (2) is the most hopeful. By the time we find a cause of the illness a treatment might be obvious, and sometimes learning to cure one thing makes curing other things easier. (3) is similar to (2), the more stuff we learn the more likely we can find alternative treatments that don’t do more harm than good.
So with all of the examples you listed, there isn’t a specific target that we can try to hit. Without having a root cause to address, all you can do is treat symptoms as they come. Endometriosis is probably the closest we can come to treating a root cause (using OCPs), but even then stopping the deposition of the endometrial tissue in the first place is not something we’re able to do as far as I’m aware (I’m not a gynecologist so I’m not 100% uptodate on that)
With regards to chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia, another difficulty is that there’s probably a wide variety of causes that lead to a similar syndrome which makes treatment trickier. And sometimes patients don’t want to hear the appropriate treatment (therapy, exercise, that sorta thing) and interpret that as their symptoms being dismissed as for.
What you eat causes nearly all of these chronic issues and
1) Very few people are willing to make the changes necessary to heal themselves and
2) the corporations that sell those products go to great lengths to ensure you neither know what the problem is nor do you have the means (financial or accessibility) to source the food necessary to heal it
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