Cure in the context of Baldness

Health care, or healthcare, is the improvement or maintenance of health via the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, amelioration or cure of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in people. Health care is delivered by health professionals and allied health fields. Medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, midwifery, nursing, optometry, audiology, psychology, occupational therapy, physical therapy, athletic training, and other health professions all constitute health care. The term includes work done in providing primary care, secondary care, tertiary care, and public health.

Access to health care may vary across countries, communities, and individuals, influenced by social and economic conditions and health policies. Providing health care services means "the timely use of personal health services to achieve the best possible health outcomes". Factors to consider in terms of health care access include financial limitations (such as insurance coverage), geographical and logistical barriers (such as additional transportation costs and the ability to take paid time off work to use such services), sociocultural expectations, and personal limitations (lack of ability to communicate with health care providers, poor health literacy, low income). Limitations to health care services affect negatively the use of medical services, the efficacy of treatments, and overall outcome (well-being, mortality rates).

Medication (also called medicament, medicine, pharmaceutical drug, medicinal product, medicinal drug or simply drug) is a drug used to diagnose, cure, treat, or prevent disease. Drug therapy (pharmacotherapy) is an important part of the medical field and relies on the science of pharmacology for continual advancement and on pharmacy for appropriate management.

Drugs are classified in many ways. One of the key divisions is by level of control, which distinguishes prescription drugs (those that a pharmacist dispenses only on the medical prescription) from over-the-counter drugs (those that consumers can order for themselves). Medicines may be classified by mode of action, route of administration, biological system affected, or therapeutic effects. The World Health Organization keeps a list of essential medicines.

Radiation therapy or radiotherapy (RT, RTx, or XRT) is a treatment using ionizing radiation, generally provided as part of cancer therapy to either kill or control the growth of malignant cells. It is normally delivered by a linear particle accelerator. Radiation therapy may be curative in a number of types of cancer if they are localized to one area of the body, and have not spread to other parts. It may also be used as part of adjuvant therapy, to prevent tumor recurrence after surgery to remove a primary malignant tumor (for example, early stages of breast cancer). Radiation therapy is synergistic with chemotherapy, and has been used before, during, and after chemotherapy in susceptible cancers. The subspecialty of oncology concerned with radiotherapy is called radiation oncology. A physician who practices in this subspecialty is a radiation oncologist and practicing radiographer are therapeutic radiographer.

Radiation therapy is commonly applied to the cancerous tumor because of its ability to control cell growth. Ionizing radiation works by damaging the DNA of cancerous tissue leading to cellular death. To spare normal tissues (such as skin or organs which radiation must pass through to treat the tumor), shaped radiation beams are aimed from several angles of exposure to intersect at the tumor, providing a much larger absorbed dose there than in the surrounding healthy tissue. Besides the tumor itself, the radiation fields may also include the draining lymph nodes if they are clinically or radiologically involved with the tumor, or if there is thought to be a risk of subclinical malignant spread. It is necessary to include a margin of normal tissue around the tumor to allow for uncertainties in daily set-up and internal tumor motion. These uncertainties can be caused by internal movement (for example, respiration and bladder filling) and movement of external skin marks relative to the tumor position.

Terminal illness or end-stage disease is a disease that cannot be cured or adequately treated and is expected to result in the death of the patient. This term is more commonly used for progressive diseases such as cancer, rather than fatal injury. In popular use, it indicates a disease that will progress until death with near absolute certainty, regardless of treatment. A patient who has such an illness may be referred to as a terminal patient, terminally ill or simply as being terminal. There is no standardized life expectancy for a patient to be considered terminal, although it is generally months or less. An illness which will result in premature death, even if that death may be many years away, is called a life-limiting illness. An illness which is lifelong but not life-shortening is called a chronic condition.

Terminal patients have options for disease management after diagnosis. Examples include caregiving, continued treatment, palliative and hospice care, and physician-assisted suicide. Decisions regarding management are made by the patient and their family, although medical professionals may offer recommendations of services available to terminal patients.

Chemotherapy (often abbreviated chemo, sometimes CTX and CTx) is the type of cancer treatment that uses one or more anti-cancer drugs (chemotherapeutic agents or alkylating agents) in a standard regimen. Chemotherapy may be given with a curative intent (which almost always involves combinations of drugs), or it may aim only to prolong life or to reduce symptoms (palliative chemotherapy). Chemotherapy is one of the major categories of the medical discipline specifically devoted to pharmacotherapy for cancer, which is called medical oncology.

The term chemotherapy now means the non-specific use of intracellular poisons to inhibit mitosis (cell division) or to induce DNA damage (so that DNA repair can augment chemotherapy). This meaning excludes the more-selective agents that block extracellular signals (signal transduction). Therapies with specific molecular or genetic targets, which inhibit growth-promoting signals from classic endocrine hormones (primarily estrogens for breast cancer and androgens for prostate cancer), are now called hormonal therapies. Other inhibitions of growth-signals, such as those associated with receptor tyrosine kinases, are targeted therapy.

The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a retrovirus that attacks the immune system. Without treatment, it can lead to a spectrum of conditions including acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). It is a preventable disease. It can be managed with treatment and become a manageable chronic health condition. While there is no cure or vaccine for HIV, antiretroviral treatment can slow the course of the disease, and, if used before significant disease progression, can extend the life expectancy of someone living with HIV to a nearly standard level. An HIV-positive person on treatment can expect to live a normal life, and die with the virus, not of it. Effective treatment for HIV-positive people (people living with HIV) involves a life-long regimen of medicine to suppress the virus, making the viral load undetectable.

Treatment is recommended as soon as the diagnosis is made. An HIV-positive person who has an undetectable viral load as a result of long-term treatment has effectively no risk of transmitting HIV sexually. Campaigns by UNAIDS and organizations around the world have communicated this as Undetectable = Untransmittable.

Curative care or curative medicine is the health care given for medical conditions where a cure is considered achievable, or even possibly so, and directed to this end. Curative care differs from preventive care, which aims at preventing the appearance of diseases through pharmaceuticals and such techniques as immunization, exercise, proper eating habits and other life style issues, and from palliative care, which concentrates on reducing the severity of symptoms, such as pain.

Renal replacement therapy (RRT) is therapy that replaces the normal blood-filtering function of the kidneys. It is used when the kidneys are not working well, which is called kidney failure and includes acute kidney injury and chronic kidney disease. Renal replacement therapy includes dialysis (hemodialysis or peritoneal dialysis), hemofiltration, and hemodiafiltration, which are various ways of filtration of blood with or without machines. Renal replacement therapy also includes kidney transplantation, which is the ultimate form of replacement in that the old kidney is replaced by a donor kidney.

These treatments are not truly cures for kidney disease. In the context of chronic kidney disease, they are more accurately viewed as life-extending treatments, although if chronic kidney disease is managed well with dialysis and a compatible graft is found early and is successfully transplanted, the clinical course can be quite favorable, with life expectancy of many years. Likewise, in certain acute illnesses or trauma resulting in acute kidney injury, a person could very well survive for many years, with relatively good kidney function, before needing intervention again, as long as they had good response to dialysis, they got a kidney transplant fairly quickly if needed, their body did not reject the transplanted kidney, and they had no other significant health problems. Early dialysis (and, if indicated, early renal transplant) in acute kidney failure usually brings more favorable outcomes.