Health is improved by finding better ways of dealing with painful and distressing diseases. There are four main ways of doing this. The first, the best of all, is to prevent diseases from happening in the first place. So scientists study the best ways to keep animals and people healthy. The second way is to find better cures for diseases so that animals and people can recover from them completely or with very few ongoing problems. The third and fourth ways are to find ways to effectively manage incurable diseases. Thus, scientists have helped us to find better ways to control incurable diseases, and for those incurable diseases that cannot be controlled, scientists have found better ways of making the effects of the disease less nasty or unpleasant —they have devised so-called palliative treatments to do this.