Medicine has zero understanding how to cure almost everything it deals with. It has some treatments that might hold a condition back but more often than not its all at a surface level of the blood work that is abnormal and a drug that fixes that in some way. Side effects are all the consequences of treating the symptom with little to no understanding of the real problem. Medicine probably doesn’t understand any of the conditions it treats.
Worse than that in research most work is not trying to understand a disease. Most of the research is just trying to work out how to control some treatable measurement to take away the “problem”. Medicine has about a 1000 years to go before it genuinely starts really curing people based on how its progressing.
We’ve got a bit of a selection bias: anything that modern medicine is good at treating (smallpox, black plague, scurvy, appendicitis, leprosy, hypothyroidism, deafness, hookworm, syphillis) eventually gets mentally kicked out of your category “things it deals with” since doctors don’t have to spend much time dealing with them.
this convinced me to remove my strong agree vote of BrightCandle.
But I still think, relatively speaking, we can cure very little. Not sure how to formalize what I mean by relative to what, but vaguely, stuff that causes degradation.
Hypothyroidism is not something we know how to cure we only know how to treat the symptoms by supplementing hormones. For deafness, we also largely don’t have real cures but only symptom treatment.
A cure would mean that you could stop treatment and the disease doesn’t come back. We don’t have that for hypothyroidism and deafness.
I would agree in many cases with this, but I think you are vastly over generalising. Saying that Medicine probably doesn’t understand any of the conditions it treats—is a bit over the top. We do understand a big deal of things, think of most surgeries for instance.
Medicine has zero understanding how to cure almost everything it deals with. It has some treatments that might hold a condition back but more often than not its all at a surface level of the blood work that is abnormal and a drug that fixes that in some way. Side effects are all the consequences of treating the symptom with little to no understanding of the real problem. Medicine probably doesn’t understand any of the conditions it treats.
Worse than that in research most work is not trying to understand a disease. Most of the research is just trying to work out how to control some treatable measurement to take away the “problem”. Medicine has about a 1000 years to go before it genuinely starts really curing people based on how its progressing.
We’ve got a bit of a selection bias: anything that modern medicine is good at treating (smallpox, black plague, scurvy, appendicitis, leprosy, hypothyroidism, deafness, hookworm, syphillis) eventually gets mentally kicked out of your category “things it deals with” since doctors don’t have to spend much time dealing with them.
this convinced me to remove my strong agree vote of BrightCandle.
But I still think, relatively speaking, we can cure very little. Not sure how to formalize what I mean by relative to what, but vaguely, stuff that causes degradation.
Hypothyroidism is not something we know how to cure we only know how to treat the symptoms by supplementing hormones. For deafness, we also largely don’t have real cures but only symptom treatment.
A cure would mean that you could stop treatment and the disease doesn’t come back. We don’t have that for hypothyroidism and deafness.
I would agree in many cases with this, but I think you are vastly over generalising. Saying that Medicine probably doesn’t understand any of the conditions it treats—is a bit over the top. We do understand a big deal of things, think of most surgeries for instance.
When it comes to most surgeries we understand a little bit, but there are a lot of effects of them that we don’t understand well.