Untreatables

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Referring to individuals or conditions that cannot be successfully cured or managed through known medical treatments or interventions
2. Describing diseases or patients for whom standard therapies fail to provide improvement or remission, rendering them resistant to available care
3. Pertaining to ailments or subjects recognized as beyond the scope of effective treatment, often requiring alternative or palliative approaches instead of conventional cures

Etymology: The plural "untreatables" is the form of "untreatable", which is simply the prefix "un-" attached to "treatable." The prefix comes down from Proto-Indo-European through Proto-Germanic and Old English, where "un-" already meant "not," so it has been part of English since its earliest days. "Treatable" is built from "treat" with the ending "-able," meaning "able to be," so "treatable" describes something that can be handled by medical care, and "untreatable" describes something that cannot. The noun use, applying the adjective to conditions or patients as a category, is a recent convenience of medical and everyday speech. Its plural, "untreatables," therefore just names a group of conditions that medicine cannot cure.

Synonyms: incurable, intractable, unmanageable, resistant

Antonyms: curable, treatable, manageable