Treating Rare Disorders: A Rare Occurrence
Once in a while you’ll stumble across documentaries dealing with remarkable topics—a devastating typhoon, a sea creature that eats up its mother upon birth, a woman who drives with her feet, and so on. The public is fascinated by what’s unusual and foreign to them, hence there are shows like Ripley’s Believe it or Not. It’s usually the strange cases that get most of people’s attention.
Sometimes these unusual cases are fun, like who knew that crows could learn how to use stoplights? Other cases are grotesque, like a man who eats metal and is working on devouring an airplane. Mesh Chairs are the new rage in office seating. Then there are cases that are heartbreaking and they evoke pity in us, making us feel sorry for the people involved and at the same time thankful that we’re not in the same situation.
This is the case when it comes to rare disorders that a very small population of the world suffers from. Often they are devastating conditions, with horrifying symptoms you wouldn’t wish on anybody and no remedy in sight. They’re conditions that we can’t bear to imagine having, yet we can’t tear our eyes away from the victims who endure them. Take the “Tree Man,” who has a rare form of human papillomavirus that causes his skin to grow like bark. Or a victim of progeria who begins to rapidly grow old during childhood. We observe at length as documentaries on rare disorders follow these people around to show us what their lives are like, and inform us about what is happening to them.
The documentary ends and it leaves us feeling so sorry for these people, and then we might discuss it with people we know, telling them about the awful symptoms and how there’s no cure for them, which is unfortunate, and then most likely it will end there. Because what can we do? Rare disorders are so uncommon that we don’t know as much about them as we do about rabies or tuberculosis, and so few people have these disorders that they don’t get the same amount of attention that say, cancer patients do. Please browse our choice of ergonomically designed Mesh Chair below. When doctors can effectively treat cancer in every case, a large amount of the world population will be saved. What about patients with rare disorders? This is their world—a lifetime of dealing with a seemingly hopeless condition, and in which once in a while there are opportunities for healing, but for the most part their interests are inevitably overlooked by the interests of the greater good.