Diseases and their treatment

Old school medecine.

Let’s take the example of a patient with rhinitis and a blocked nose. The physiology will teach us that the obstruction comes from a congestion of the mucous membrane of the nose. The histological study shows that the contractions of the muscle fibres present in the little arterioles of the mucous membrane regulate the blood flow.

We thus have a solution to treat our patient’s congestion: administer locally a substance that will induce the contraction of the muscles of the dilated blood vessel walls. In the case of a patient suffering from asthma, it is the contrary: a drug likely to relax muscles of the bronchial wall will be administered, and the patient will breathe! In short, the classical treatment consists in giving the patient a drug that will interact with other chemical or biochemical elements of the human body so as to soothe such or such symptom. But the patient realises after several asthma attacks that he is still sick, and that the medicine only prevents asthma attacks without curing their underlying causes.