The CURE for Chronic Illnesses...by Logan Lentini

Today, Logan posted this on Facebook and I think it is worthy of a blog post...

Incurable, it’s a word that some of us are far too familiar with, and quite frankly I am tired of hearing it. Obviously there are countless diseases that are incurable; diabetes, arthritis, lupus, fibromyalgia, cystic fibrosis, and many cancers, currently have no cure, just to name a few. For many chronic illnesses, symptoms are manageable, but in other cases the symptoms can be lethal. 

When health professionals verbalize that a disease is incurable it can do one of two things. From a patient’s perspective, hearing that word can potentially eliminate all aspects of normalcy from their life. To a non-patient, hearing that something is incurable can stir up a whirlwind of emotions, especially if the non-patient personally knows a patient battling chronic illness. However, saying that chronic illnesses are incurable is simply false. Though there may not currently be a cure for a specific disease, that doesn’t mean that there is no cure at all. 

This is amazing news; if you think about it, there is, in theory, a cure for every chronic illness known to man. All it takes for a cure to be discovered is the right person conducting the right research. The cure could lie in alternative medicine, or genetics, or somewhere else, but there is a cure. We are on the right track as a society to finding these cures too; many chronic illnesses are now manageable through pharmaceuticals, and various other methods. Knowing how to manage the symptoms of chronic illnesses is the first step to understanding them on a cellular level, which in turn will eventually lead to the discovery of a cure. 

Now I’m not saying that every chronic illness will have a known cure over night, or even over the next ten years, but I do believe that in this century we will find the answers that we are looking for. There is a solution to every problem, and there are cures to chronic illnesses. As long as we stay hopeful, and advocate for ourselves, the right person will eventually come to the table and make the discovery that we have been waiting for; the discovery that will change the world.