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
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.
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