Comment Re:Are you on the wrong planet? (Score 1) 204
Medicine is all about treating the symptoms...
At the onset of serious illness often the answer to that is "yes". And that's a good thing. Because the "symptoms" can kill you. A common fever from an infection can kill you, even in cases where the actual infection can be cleared by the body itself is short order. The same with anaphylaxis. The allergic reaction as such won't kill you, it's the lack of breath from your throat swelling shut, or precipitous drop in blood pressure, (with heart failure) that kills you. Treating those symptoms is 99% of "curing" the underlying cause. The body will take care of that in short order as well if it survives that long, that is.
And yes. Seizures aren't exactly healthy either, with many serious complications, including death, so even if you don't do anything else to the patient, you damn well try and control the seizures first. Everything else comes second.
The diseases are after all divided into two major groups, the self healing and the incurable. HOWEVER, that's not to say that there aren't a few very important cases in the middle. Scraping away a melanoma before it's gone too far definitely "cures" you and isn't "treating the symptoms". Even so, and in all cases first you treat the (serious) symptoms, then you see if you can stop them from recurring.
Many serious diseases, including but not limited to, having no kidney function at all, can now be managed, by "treating the symptoms" of having no kidney function. Even if we "fix" that condition by transplanting a new kidney; guess what, we then have to treat the rejection symptoms by suppressing them. And people get to live long and productive lives that they wouldn't have been able to, just a few short years ago.
By always treating the symptoms.