There are two ways to treat an infectious disease. One is to reduce the effects of the disease and the other way is to kill the cause of the disease. For example, we can take the medicines that bring down the fever, reduce pain or loose motions. We can take bed rest so that we can converse our energy. This exercise will enable us to focus on the healing. However it will not make the pathogen to go away, so the disease will not be cured. For that we have to kill the microbe.