While a healthy young person may think that medical science is well on the way to understanding and curing most diseases, the truth is that many common conditions have causes that remain a mystery. Oddly, these conditions may also have benefical treatments that operate in unknown ways. This compounding of unknowns may make it difficult to unravel the truth behind the workings of both disease and medicine.
I recall reading an article about a man who specialised in working in the margins of two or more scientific areas. He would become an expert in various areas, and because of his knowledge in multiple disciplines simultaneously he could make connections that specialists in one area could not. Are there medical researchers doing similar work, becoming experts in multiple disconnected fields, spotting links for the first time?
My interest in the subject was piqued by noticing that many of the recent innovative treatments for the inflammatory bowel disease Crohn's, such as those mentioned in the Crohnology blog, are drugs that have previously been used to treat other conditions.
Most straightforwardly, corticosteroids which reduce inflammation throughout the whole body are used to treat many conditions. For example, whereas Crohn's is inflammation of the intestine, asthma is inflammation of the airways. Both may be treated by corticosteroids such as predisone, though in neither case is this ideal because of its general nature.
Methotrexate, a drug that has been used against cancer since the 1950s has more recently been accepted as a valuable treatment for Crohn's, rheumatoid arthritis, and possibly asthma too.
Naltrexone is widely known as a medicine for reducing dependence on alcohol and opioids. Low dose naltrexone is now thought to be useful for treating Crohn's and multiple sclerosis.
As a final example, recent research has indicated that the famous impotence drug Viagra may also help treat Crohn's.
Initially, I'd love to see a medicinal version of the musicplasma / liveplasma site, incorporating diseases and their treatments, in the hope that innovative new connections would become immediately obvious. The data could initially be automatically parsed from the Wikipedia, and manually appended to as the result of research.