An ideal healthcare system cures every type of medical condition an individual may have. However, healthcare professionals have always had to judge whether they can cure a patient or simply manage their condition to provide a better quality of life.
Many pharmaceutical interventions and treatment options are designed to manage people’s illnesses, not necessarily cure them. This increases the cost of healthcare – particularly as people live longer and the proportion of illnesses that are manageable rather than curable increases – as do the requirements for long-term care.
Some conditions have proven particularly hard to cure, such as diabetes and high blood pressure, leaving no choice but to manage and monitor a condition across an extended period. However, this is costly and poses many challenges to medical and clinical resources … read more