Looking through the forum, I keep wondering why there doesn't seem to be a definitive cure for AF and associated conditions. Judging by the posts here, the remedies offered by traditional medicine - nitro, diltiazem, Botox, LIS and advancement flap surgery - are only partly successful at best, and are mostly palliative rather than curative.

I know that the received explanation is that posters who have successfully healed are the vast majority, but they don't return to the forum, and so we don't get to hear from them. Forgive me for saying so - that's a hypothesis, not a fact.

With all the advances that have been made in 21st century medicine, it seems strange that what's effectively a small tear in connective tissue remains so resistant to medical intervention.

David

i was thinking the exact same thing yesterday.

I posed that same question about 25 years ago, when I first started having issues in the rear and then realized that there are so many, many, many conditions that the medical community cannot fix. I had always sort of ASSumed that modern medicine had everything under control, but there a lot of things that they can only "manage" in a very small way. People are not cured of arthritis, migraines, IBS, diabetes, Crohn's, psoriasis, etc. and people suffer through these illnesses (sometimes) every day of their lives. I was actually very shocked when I realized how little that doctors can fix (broken bones, some infections, etc.). Think about it. I'm sure that you'll come up with a lot more issues that medicine can do little (or nothing) about.

On the other hand, while the list of incurable diseases is admittedly still a rather long one, many diseases that were formerly thought incurable have turned out not to be: nasty things like peptic ulcers, gonorrhoea, TB, measles, mumps and so on can all be treated successfully. It's really too bad that something as physically minor yet potentially life-altering as anal fissure can't join the second group.

What really saddens me is that the illness is still surrounded by a social stigma so universal that there's an almost complete silence on the subject of AF - people just don't want to talk about it in public. One wonders if this may also be one of the reasons why the condition has not found a cure.

There's a paradox in the fact that, in Britain at least, most GPs are so poorly informed about AF, and that they believe that the palliative treatments available are actually solutions to the problem.

indeed.

David