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Asked by anon-257533 on 19 Jun 2020.
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Sarah Montgomery answered on 19 Jun 2020:
Medicine generally is about finding a way to attack or affect the disease without damaging our bodies. A lot of the time, we have to balance the positive effects of curing the disease with the possible harm or side effects. A good example is cancer chemotherapy, which damages all fast-growing cells, so it affects both cancer cells and you hair and nails.
Antibiotics are so important because we can eat them and they kill disease-causing bacteria inside our bodies without hurting us. In contrast, alcohol and bleach can be used to kill bacteria and viruses on surfaces, but they’re much too harmful to put inside the body in the necessary dose. Unfortunately, antibiotics don’t harm viruses, so we’re still looking for a good way to treat most viruses safely.
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Rachel Tanner answered on 22 Jun 2020:
Hi Ash – We have a really effective treatment for bacteria: antibiotics. But unfortunately antibiotics don’t work against viruses 🙁 We do have treatments for certain viruses like herpes and HIV, but these don’t clear the virus completely; they just control it and reduce its effects.
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Valerie Vancollie answered on 23 Jun 2020:
Hello Ash,
This is a fascinating area of science/medicine and one which is changing very rapidly at present. As Sarah and Rachel have said it depends a lot on what you have, but also what subtype of the disease you may have or *who* you are.
We are now in an era of what is called personalised medicine, because we have come to understanding not everyone reacts the same and that things like breast cancer aren’t all the same. We have now learned that there several types of breast cancer and they can’t all be treated the same as what will work against one won’t work against the other.
In the past doctors had to try each medicine one at a time to find the one that worked, this is no longer the case. They can now take a sample of the cancer (a biopsy) and have it sequenced, so to look at the genetic code of the cancer. This might tell them which of the treatments is best based on what has worked for other people with that same type of breast cancer.
Or, another fascinating alternative, is to use what are called organoids. These are mini organs grown from cells and which can have little tumors. Having these in a petri dish can allow scientists to test all of the different drugs on those tumors to see which one works best and that drug is then giving to the patient, skipping all the drugs that won’t work to go right for the one that will.
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