I think the word “cure” is used far too casually in the media.

I especially find this to be the case when discussing neurological disease and cancer. Upon thinking some more about neurological disease and how it is often oversimplified and misunderstood, I thought it might be worthwhile to talk a little about how I think medicine has dealt with major challenges in the past, and how it will have to change to deal with future challenges. This is just a brisk overview with overlapping major points. I will skip over details and perhaps omit things others would consider significant, but it will convey the point that there are different challenges for which one approach alone is not necessarily appropriate.

I find that medicine can be divided into eras with the following major goals: tackling acute diseases and curing infections, managing chronic diseases and keeping degenerative processes at bay, and learning to delay the effects of aging and other (sometimes iatrogenic) byproducts  of our medical successes. Each of these challenges is further complicated for both detection and treatment must be made accessible to an ever increasing and changing populations that might be affected by a disease.

Figure 1: Change in causes of mortality throughout the 20th century.

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A former co-worker introduced me to this compilation of documentaries on the HBO website that centered around Alzheimer’s disease. HBO has put together some amazing images with an excellent introduction to what Alzheimer’s is and what scientists are doing in order to study the disease and either halt or reverse it’s progress. The films go from the personal aspects of living and caring for someone with Alzheimer’s to the academic scientific advances. HBO took a very realistic view of disease with this, it exemplifies how a most disease is not a one-dimensional problem to solve, but rather a multifaceted set of challenges that sometimes have no permanent solutoin for those involved with it.

Coverage of this sort would ideally be more common for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, for the media all too often portrays these diseases as having a cure just around the corner. The current sort of exposure unnecessarily romantizes the disease and the science behind it in unrealistic ways and eventually desensitizes the public as no real cure is found time and time again.

There is also a brief yet insightful TED talk on the upcoming neurological epidemic, which brings to light how neurodegenerative diseases will be the next “scientific frontier” in medicine. Ultimately the problems we are fighting are all linked to aging, but that shall be left for another post.