have been ill
Jul. 30th, 2006 07:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flamingswordNow that I actually have an immune system, getting sick is a strange thing. It happens a lot less, for one thing, and for the next thing I get fewer symptoms of being sick. Which is cool and all, but makes it really hard to identify what kind of sick I am. These last few days it has been joint and muscle aches with limited spinal mobility, and this hazy out-of-it feeling like someone turned the volume down on the world or my ability to pay attention to it. No fever, mild antipathy to food, mild irritability- but nothing unusual in those areas.
My point: I think medical science assumes that symptoms are the same from person to person for the same disease. It's like math to them, or computer science: if A -> then B. But what happens when you have a basically healthy person with a recently acquired illness who's mostly asymptomatic? Now that sanitation is common and health care is becoming so, you have a higher baseline from which to start measuring. So the same illnesses will appear differently. Is medical science working on ways to measure the relative health of different bodily systems, and ways to tell if there's been a recent change to those systems? Let's hope.
Doesn't sound like a big deal, and in many ways it's not. But here's my worry: there are viruses whose impact on the body directly correlates to how long they've been present in the system. So damage is being done before the patients even knows they're sick. Now that there are fewer people who will become immediately symptomatic, the period between someone becoming sick and knowing they're sick will be longer and much more likely to spread infection. All this leads up to my other point: what if one day all viral infections become like AIDS?
It's kind of a sci-fi concept, but also kind of inevitable.
My point: I think medical science assumes that symptoms are the same from person to person for the same disease. It's like math to them, or computer science: if A -> then B. But what happens when you have a basically healthy person with a recently acquired illness who's mostly asymptomatic? Now that sanitation is common and health care is becoming so, you have a higher baseline from which to start measuring. So the same illnesses will appear differently. Is medical science working on ways to measure the relative health of different bodily systems, and ways to tell if there's been a recent change to those systems? Let's hope.
Doesn't sound like a big deal, and in many ways it's not. But here's my worry: there are viruses whose impact on the body directly correlates to how long they've been present in the system. So damage is being done before the patients even knows they're sick. Now that there are fewer people who will become immediately symptomatic, the period between someone becoming sick and knowing they're sick will be longer and much more likely to spread infection. All this leads up to my other point: what if one day all viral infections become like AIDS?
It's kind of a sci-fi concept, but also kind of inevitable.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-08-02 08:30 pm (UTC)Ta!
no subject
Date: 2006-08-03 06:35 pm (UTC)Back to an earlier point, yes, medicine is beginning to adjust the diagnosis of symptoms to the "filter" or "canvas" that the patient provides. IE: an immunodeficient patient will obviously manifest earlier and show more symptoms to disease, as well as contracting diseases that would be suppressed by a healthy immune system. However, medicine is *not* mathematics, and thus never an exact science. (different variants of the same disease, different patients, etc.)
As to the point that all viral infections will be retro-viruses that attack the immune system itself; not likely. There are far too many viruses out there, and they're all evolving in their own way.
Also, I would point to the concept of humans vs. dogs and how they react to certain types of microscopic blood worms. Not an exact comparison, but it serves the purposes of this argument:
Humans, being a relative newcomer to the Terran gene-pool, have yet to evolve any resistance or immunity to most "floating in the blood" parasites. Dogs, however, having gone around the block a few times, chronologically speaking, can live with various kinds of blood-borne organisms without developing any form of illness from it.
Thus, in the long term, anyway, time may very well be on *our* side, not disease's. (of course, this goes for existing diseases only. Viruses of the future will find new and interesting ways to survive in us. And, they all won't be retro-viruses or even necessarily attack the immune system at all.)
no subject
Date: 2006-08-03 09:15 pm (UTC)I do hope that our immunity keeps pace with the progress of disease, though. Otherwise, it would suck to be human history.