Sometimes it’s not even that easy to tell whether someone is sick since what’s normal for one person could be bad for someone else. But generally speaking there are many ways to get sick which are almost certainly a problem for everyone. Two main categories of sicknesses are those caused by a different organism, such as an infection, and those that aren’t related to an infection.

Infection based diseases are generally due to bacteria, viruses, and occasionally more complicated organisms known as parasites. Bacteria can release chemicals that interfere with our body and most of them can be killed by antibiotics. The way viruses reproduce naturally kills cells which makes us sick and the best way to get rid of them is to let your body’s defenses destroy them. The way we instruct our body how to deal with a virus is through a vaccine. Parasites are more complicated, such as worms or the parasite that causes malaria. Since they’re more complicated, there are general drugs that can usually get rid of them.

Parasites are most common in parts of the world where people don’t have much money (poor countries) and don’t live in clean conditions. A second broad category of sicknesses are those that don’t have anything to do with another organism. In these cases, the sickness is generally due to something in your body not working right or something that has broken down. An example of this would be Type II Diabetes where someone’s cells don’t respond to insulin as well as they should which causes a lot of problem. Another example would be cancer where a single cell gets mutated so much that it starts growing like crazy which kills normal cells. There are many, many diseases in this category since every system in the body that works, can break down, and does break down in some people. Generally, to get rid of these types of sickness, you need to either fix the parts of the body that are failing or somehow deal with the symptoms or results of the disease. There are a lot of diseases that we can’t do much about since we either don’ know what’s wrong, can’t fix what’s wrong, or can’t deal with the symptoms of the disease. There are about 30,000 known diseases and we can effectively treat about 10,000 of them. So it would take a very long time to talk about all the ways we can get sick! Also, keep in mind that with so many diseases that we can’t treat, there’s going to be opportunities for doctors and scientists to try and work on these problems for a long time.

There are innumerable ways that humans can get sick, and each one has its own ways to be cured (and some of them are incurable).

What a great question! This is a big one!

There are quite a few ways a human can become sick. This includes;

· Bacteria
· Viruses
· Fungi
· Parasites
· Animal toxins
· His/her own body

Now, how to get rid of these gets a little more complicated. We usually use medication for every single way the human body can become sick. We have:

Antibiotics - help the body's immune system to destroy bacteria.
Antivirals - help kill viruses
Anti-fungal - to help kill fungus infections
Antidotes - these help neutralize toxins from eukaryotes (spiders/snakes/etc.) or to neutralize toxins from fungi such as certain poisonous mushrooms!
Chemotheraphy/anti-cancer/immunsupression drugs, etc. - these methods help get rid if illnesses that the body has when the body malfunctions.

I wish I could say there was a cure-all drug. However, every category has its own difficulties. Bacteria can multiply really quickly and thus their biology changes rather quickly as well. We have antibiotic resistant bacteria that will not respond to medicine. Not all viruses have anti-virals that help against them. We have the common flu shot but that is the best guess that the scientists believe will be prevalent that year. The common flu can come in so many different strains that the flu shot might not protect you against it, but scientists do their best with statistics and knowledge to pick the most plausible choices for the year. Cancer is a huge one as well. There is no "cure-all" for cancer as cancer can be caused by so many different pathways inside of the human body.

I hope I answered your question!