Real "cures" of disease

Rolfe

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Rolfe
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Some time ago, Barb (Barbrae) said that the one thing she really wanted to hear was that real medicine had actually cured any diseases. Just a few diseases really curable, that was all.

Obviously, having your life saved by insulin doesn't count, because the disease is only "suppressed". Or being able to live a normal life for many years carrying the AIDS virus, so long as you take your antiretrovirals. Or even viral diseases completely eliminated from large populations due to effective vaccines (I presume that's prevention, not cure). She wants to hear about serious diseases where real medicine is indubitably responsible for a genuine return to health, with no need for continuing medication and no residual illness.

I started off with medical cures, mainly serious bacterial diseases curable with antibiotics. For example:

Tuberculosis
Scarlet fever
Gonorrhoea
Syphilis
Plague
Gastric ulcers

I'm sure there are more.

There are serious metabolic conditions which are fatal if untreated, but from which the patient may recover completely with correct treatment, I'm thinking of things like

Parturient paresis
Hypomagnesaemia (does that count, as a deficiency disease?)

Then of course we shouldn't forget the surgical cures, like

Appendicitis
PDA and other cardiac defects

Oh I'm geting hungry, and anyway, the challenge is mainly to the medics, to pick me up if I've named anything which doesn't apply, but mainly to see how many other conditions you can add to the list.

And how long it takes for Barb to let us know what she thinks about it all.

Rolfe.
 
I think we should list the posters here that wouldn't be here if it weren't for medical science.

Anyone have a really bad infection?

Lyme disease?

And what about polio?
 
I think we should list the posters here that wouldn't be here if it weren't for medical science.

Does the fact that I survived 4 incompetent doctors before having my life saved by the 5th count?

Medical science saved my life, no doubt, but the medical *establishment* basically laughed at me when I showed them Mayo clinic studies accurately describing my condition, and warning that in many such cases, chronic infections were being misdiagnosed and made worse.

I was told that the Mayo clinic wasn't a 'currently accepted' source for research.
:rolleyes:

The 5th doctor actually listened to what I was saying, ordered up a simple, inexpensive and standard test, and when it came back, promptly changed all of my medications to ones that could actually fix the problem....very likely in the nick of time.

As I said earlier, even MDs aren't immune to their own brand of harmful woo-wooism.
 
Yes, well, that's very interesting, but we're not talking about medical incompetence or even medical practice here.

Just listing conditions that would otherwise be serious or fatal (that is, not trivial, self-limiting things) which ordinary medical or surgical treatments can get rid of permanently.

Lyme disease, good example (let's hear it for doxycycline!)

Rolfe.
 
Rolfe said:
Yes, well, that's very interesting, but we're not talking about medical incompetence or even medical practice here.

Just listing conditions that would otherwise be serious or fatal (that is, not trivial, self-limiting things) which ordinary medical or surgical treatments can get rid of permanently.

Lyme disease, good example (let's hear it for doxycycline!)

Rolfe.
Click to expand...

You can't talk about advances in medical science, without talking abou the people who were killed by waiting for the old medical science to be discarded.

Lister, Salk, et al. didn't just wave a magic wand, they fought against doctors who ridiculed new ideas.

The condition I was speaking of was a fungal lung infection, which had I acquired it in the same geographic (backwater) locale, a few years earlier, would have very likely been fatal, since the *majority* of doctors there felt it was inconsequential, and prescribed antibiotics which killed off the lung's ability to fight mold as it were...

Standard treatement for the *symptoms* at the time, and the very thing that the Mayo clinic was warning about.

It doesn't do one any good for medical science to come up with a polio vaccine, of a TB shot, if most doctors won't change over to it until after you have succumbed.
 
Just a few months ago I ended up in the hospital from severe electrolite imbalance due to extreme long term dehydration. The only reason I'm alive is because my wife is an emergency room nurse and she recognized my symptoms. I ended up spending three days in the hospital before returning to my now drastically changed life. I dropped out of school for a while, the home improvement was put on hold, she even chased all of her family away for a while. It's important to know that stress can kill you, not just in the long term, but in the short term as well.

So, put me down as someone who wouldn't be here without modern medicine.
 
What about passive immunisation with therapeutic immunoglobulins for infections such as shingles and rabies (antibiotics for viruses really).

Maybe these aren't considered a cure since you could get infected again.

And anti-D injections for Rhesus negative women to prevent haemolytic disease of the newborn. Again maybe not a cure since an injection of the mother is required at each birth. But it cures the infant or is that prevention?

Factor VIII and other clotting factors? Again not a cure since you need repeated injections, but the treatments save lives nonetheless.
 
Rolfe - this really botheed you didn't it? Yes, there are many many many cures in conventional medicine. I think the point I was trying to make, perhaps not well, was that there are just as many if not more conditions for which there is no help. I akcnowledge the diseases and conditions you mention and might I say ONCE more for those who choose not to listen - I too - am grateful for modern, conventional medicine.
 
Capsid said:
What about passive immunisation with therapeutic immunoglobulins for infections such as shingles and rabies (antibiotics for viruses really).

Maybe these aren't considered a cure since you could get infected again.

And anti-D injections for Rhesus negative women to prevent haemolytic disease of the newborn. Again maybe not a cure since an injection of the mother is required at each birth. But it cures the infant or is that prevention?

Factor VIII and other clotting factors? Again not a cure since you need repeated injections, but the treatments save lives nonetheless.
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I would think the therapeutic immunoglobulins count, I was thinking about that in my original list. After all, anyone can reacquire any infection, but if the infection is cleared with no further treatment necessary, and the patient is returned to clinical normality, those are the criteria. However, can you cure shingles permanently with hyperimmune serum? Really? (I was thinking about tetanus, which I'm more confident about.) But clinical rabies? I've never heard of a case of clinical rabies being cured, and that was repeated at a meeting I was at only six days ago. Tetanus, though, I'll add that.

Maybe the Rhesus treatment is prevention? It's still a good point. It's certainly looming disaster permanently averted with no after-effects.

I don't think the clotting factors count, because they are not a cure in the same way insulin is not a cure. Probably, the homoeopaths would say they "suppress". I've even read that it's the fault of treatments such as this that homoeopathy can't cure these chronic diseases - by the time the diabetic or the haemophiliac gets to the homoeopath it's too late, and the evil allopathic treatment has destroyed their chance of true homoeopathic healing. (That was Divina/ChaChaHeels.)

Crimresearch, I'm asking for a list of conditions which are able to be permanently cured by medical or surgical treatments. If you want to talk about dead ends or mistakes, please start a new thread.

Rolfe.
 
Rolfe said:
<SNIP>Crimresearch, I'm asking for a list of conditions which are able to be permanently cured by medical or surgical treatments. If you want to talk about dead ends or mistakes, please start a new thread.

Rolfe.
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I GAVE you a ******* condition which is now curable thanks to advances in medical science...
Do you even know what the Mayo Clinic is? Do you even know how to read medical research?
If you want to keep your head in the sand over it, why don't you go over to some new age forum, instead of telling JREF posters who can and can't contribute to *your* precious threads?

Edited by darat: 
Edited for breach of Rule 8.
 
I just thought of something. Considering my problems were due to dehydration, perhaps if I had taken a few homeopathic preparations then I would have been fine. :)
 
kittynh said:
I think we should list the posters here that wouldn't be here if it weren't for medical science.

Anyone have a really bad infection?

Lyme disease?

And what about polio?
Click to expand...

Me for the first three (wouldn't be here, bad infection, Lyme's).
 
Rolfe said:
Some time ago, Barb (Barbrae) said that the one thing she really wanted to hear was that real medicine had actually cured any diseases. Just a few diseases really curable, that was all.
Click to expand...

The trouble is, not to mention the "B" word or anything, there are some problems with saying that medicine usually cures things. Surgery can remove something cancerous or infectious or just in the way or move something that is in the wrong place into a better place, but it's up to the body to heal afterward and to sweep up the fiddly bits. Antibiotics can reduce the presence of bacteria to the point where the immune system can take care of the rest. The stuff I smear on my face for rosacea kills something or does something, but it's up to my body to make the red blotches go away. Injectible insulin is really a paliative procedure and doesn't do anything about the disease.

Anyway, the "B" word notwithstanding, I think it's an important thing to keep in mind that most of the best medical procedures are really a way of pushing (or in some instances shoving) things in the right direction.
 
I wouldn't be here without modern medicine either.

Generally, I'm one of those oxes, as in, "healthy as". However, for reasons I don't think anyone was quite sure of, I would consistantly get strep throat at summer day camp every year for about three years. It got to the point where the strep bacteria took up residence in my tonsils. I was moved from penicillin to ethromycin to keep the infection under control until they could get me into surgery.

Very simple example, really, but had it not been for the antibiotics and then the tonsilectomy, a simple strep infection might have very well killed me. Instead, I'm probably the easiest person outside of the San Fernando Valley (da-dum!) to have my throat looked down and get a throat culture and after about six years of resipitory infections (lack of tonsils), I have a tendancy towards chest colds and still pretty much as healthy as an ox.

To go further back, my mother and my grandmother had opposing rhesus factors. Were it not for the research and subsequently developed treatment, my mother wouldn't be here and thusly, I wouldn't be here.
 
Re: Re: Real "cures" of disease

epepke said:
Anyway, the "B" word notwithstanding, I think it's an important thing to keep in mind that most of the best medical procedures are really a way of pushing (or in some instances shoving) things in the right direction.
Click to expand...
Couldn't agree more. In fact, I remember getting into an argument in an earlier thread when I said that the body always heals itself (no wound ever heals on a corpse no matter how prettily you stitch it), and what medicine does is take away whatever is preventing the healing (like the gap between the edges of the wound....).

I then had to spend some time explaining in what way, by my way of looking at it, giving insulin to a diabetic was actually correcting the absence of insulin which was the thing which was preventing the metabolic pathways from working properly and so on.

I just found the question of absolute there's-an-end-of-it cure of conditions that were neither trivial or self-limiting interesting, as opposed to keeping things right by permanent therapeutic management. I'm intrigued to find out how long a list we can come up with.

Barb has now said she acknowledges that medicine can really cure quite a lot of things, which is fine, we agree on that (it's just not what she said before but I can't easily find the post so we'll drop it), and nobody's disputing that there are also quite a lot of conditions which don't have easy or neat answers so we agree on that too. (I also think it's a mistake to dismiss the amazing long-term treatments which can give people with previously fatal diseases a normal life just so long as they keep taking the tablets, but that's a different argument.)

I'd still like to try to extend this list though.

Crimsearch, if you've finished swearing, can you name the fungal lung infection? Did you ever have an actual label for it?

ThirdTwin and other medics, any contributions? Any quibbles with the items I listed initially? What about more specific surgeries?

Rolfe.
 
LostAngeles said:
However, for reasons I don't think anyone was quite sure of, I would consistantly get strep throat at summer day camp every year for about three years. It got to the point where the strep bacteria took up residence in my tonsils. ....
Click to expand...
Damn lucky you didn't get Encephalitis Lethargica! :D

Rolfe.
 
Originally posted by kittynh
I think we should list the posters here that wouldn't be here if it weren't for medical science.
Click to expand...
I had a double hernia when I was two weeks old. Not sure if that actually kills people, but they fixed that up for me anyway.

I also had my wisdom teeth removed through surgery. Not exactly lethal if they hadn't done that, but it would've made closing my mouth and eating extremely difficult.

Edited to add:
Incubators didn't save my life necessarily, but they saved both my younger sisters.
 
Dragonrock said:
I just thought of something. Considering my problems were due to dehydration, perhaps if I had taken a few homeopathic preparations then I would have been fine. :)
Click to expand...
Especially if you diluted some table salt into the water.
 
Rolfe said:
Damn lucky you didn't get Encephalitis Lethargica! :D

Rolfe.
Click to expand...

Encepha... Hey, you calling me a lazy brain?! :D

(j/k. I looked it up. So that's what sleepy sickness is. Now I know, and knowing is half the battle. G.I. Joe! )
 
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