Anybody who suffers from herpes, whether it is HSV1 or HSV2, sometimes wonders can herpes be cured.
Cold sores or genital herpes sores and blisters cause great discomfort, both physically and emotionally.
When you are having an outbreak, they are also highly contagious.
That leads to additional stress - wondering whether you will pass the virus along.
So can herpes be cured? That really depends on how you view a cure.
Currently, there is no way to eradicate the herpes virus from your body.
The primary reason for this is that the virus resides deep in your nervous system.
In this location it is invisible and undetectable by your immune system, so your immune system doesn't even know that it needs to be fighting the virus.
When you have an outbreak, some of the virus surfaces close to your skin wherever you were infected by the virus.
This is typically either in the area of the mouth or the genital area, but it can be elsewhere also.
But the key is that only a portion of the virus surfaces, causing the outbreaks.
Your immune system tries to fight the piece of the virus that surfaced, but is still not attacking the dormant piece which is still hiding in your nervous system.
After a few outbreaks, your immune system will build antibodies which can better attack the surfaced virus, which is why over time you may have fewer outbreaks and they may last a shorter time.
This is not always the case, but it generally is.
But it doesn't matter, because there is still the dormant virus which can surface anytime and cause another outbreak.
Science is not totally sure what causes the body to activate the virus, but it is believed that stress, tension, low immunity, and physical trauma are some of these triggers.
That still doesn't answer the can herpes be cured question! But let's think about a cure a little differently.
What if you were to never have an outbreak again? Would you consider that a cure? There are natural and homeopathic steps you can take to diminish or eliminate the impact of the triggers, and thus force the virus to remain dormant.
Essentially, you are creating an environment which is unwelcoming for the virus as it attempts to surface, which tends to force it back into dormant state.
This reduces or avoids outbreaks, which for now is the closest thing there is to a cure.
Only when conventional medicine develops a method to force the virus to surface in its entirety so that the immune system can attack the whole virus at once will there even be a medical cure!