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Comment by lebuffon | Hacker News Reader

We have so many "bandaids" but very few cures these days. Perhaps AI systems will allow us to find root causes of these insidious diseases.

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We stopped people dying from easy things so now they die from hard things.

We have so many cures that we simply forget about many diseases entirely.

Depending on how they are counted there are between 10000 and 70,000 different human diseases, and treatments only exist for around 500 of them. Further, the overwhelming majority of these treatments are not cures, i.e. treatments that end medical conditions in an individual.

Reminds me of GERD. It's a disease that affects a sizable group of people. It's a mechanical issue that is very well studied and known.

Yet, the main two treatment options are "workaround/hacks" or a very invasive operation.

There's only one [1] potential nobel "curing" treatment which is just gaining traction.

But innmy opinion with current technology, stuff like GERD or chronic bowel incontinence (due to mechanical failure of anjs sphincter) should be 100% solved.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4624249/

Scientific-ideological blindness, the kind that benefits General Mills et al., is a significant limiter. AI will not change that, if anything, only reinforce it.

I mean, we have a pretty decent understanding of the causes and mechanisms behind Crohn's and colitis. The problem is that "your immune system is going nuts" is a hard problem to solve once it gets started, and the human immune system loves to go nuts on a moment's notice.

Genuinely asking, do we? Like, we might understand the mechanism but do we actually understand the cause, the "why" behind the mechanism? It was my understanding that there's practically infinite variety in which foods cause symptoms for different people, and that the specifics of each were still largely unknown

Well, for one, foods aren't the only thing that affect symptoms. And a lot of food issues are related to (1) which parts of your GI tract are affected and (2) what's wrong with them. People with strictures usually need to eat low-fiber diets, for example, but people without structures can actually benefit from some fiber.

The "why" is a little less clear, but it's likely a mix of genetic factors and environmental/infectious triggers. Plus good old-fashioned stress :)

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