What is the hardest disease/cancer and etc. to heal.

Question: What is the hardest disease/cancer and etc. to heal.
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Asked by anon-287539 on 8 Mar 2021.
- Jesko Koehnke answered on 8 Mar 2021:
  
  Simple answer: The one we know the least about.
  There are many diseases that are complicated to treat, and something like cancer certainly brings a whole bucket of challenges with it. But usually, the more we find out the closer we get.
  Take HIV for example. We have been working towards a vaccine for a few decades now, and are still not quite there. And as far as I know there is no cure. But at least we understand the problem well enough now that we can manage the infection with medication so that people can live a lot longer with it.
- Zahra Rattray answered on 9 Mar 2021:
  
  Rare diseases such as rare genetic disorders are some of the most difficult to treat because not enough money has been invested into researching these diseases. Usually more money is invested in diseases that are more common.
- Martin McCoustra answered on 9 Mar 2021:
  
  I suspect that the common cold is perhaps one of the hardest. The virus that causes the cold mutates very easily. That’s why no-one has found a cure since the virus was identified. One hope is that COVID isn’t the cold.
- Kate Gilbert answered on 10 Mar 2021:
  
  Great question! The first thing that springs to mind is any type of cancer – cancers happen when cells are unhealthy. The tricky part about curing cancer is that you need to target only the unhealthy cells, but these look very similar to healthy cells, which you definitely don’t want to hurt.
  There are many diseases that are difficult to treat such as Alzheimer’s disease, often because not enough is known about the disease and its causes. Science is progressing incredibly fast though, and it’s exciting to me that we may solve some of these issues in the next few decades.
- Phil Thorne answered on 10 Mar 2021:
  
  As others have said. Any disease you know little or nothing about is the hardest. The symptoms you see (phenotype) may not indicate what the actual underlying cause is.
- Zuzanna Konieczna answered on 10 Mar 2021:
  
  Any disease that we know little about! It might be because it’s rare, and not much research has been done into it, it might be because it’s complex and we have no idea what’s going on there. I think Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s are good examples here – whilst we now have some understanding on what goes wrong (enough to relive symptoms and offer medication/therapies that could help with quality of life), we don’t know enough to be able to cure it (reverse the effects, or in fact act early, before the disease develops to stop it running its course). The more research we do (and understanding we build), the closer we can get to that though!

Question: What is the hardest disease/cancer and etc. to heal.

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