I might ask, just on the concept of “successfully treated”, if a disease is diagnosed by a symptom as opposed to by objective testing, how do we know whether the treatment was the effective cause of the success or whether the success was a result of something else?
I come at this from asthma, where I just spent the last four years and where we have some objective lung function testing, not well used by respirologists or doctors. We have a symptom-based disease, and we are never exactly sure whether the treatment was really efficacious or if it was something else.
How do you prove “successfully treated” as opposed to functional or something? How do you measure that?