Why can you not treat viruses?

Answer 1

It isn't so much that you can't treat viruses, it's that you can't cure them. I mean, think about AIDS. There is no cure, but the people who have it need to take a lot of medication. Then again, the treatment of viruses is often localized to managing the symptoms.

Anyway, the reason viruses cannot be cured is because they aren't really alive. They can carry out functions, like infecting hosts and all of that, but they don't demonstrate some of the characteristics of life. Why does this matter? It matters because so much of our dynamic towards treating illness focuses on antibiotics. Antibiotics kill and eradicate LIVING things. That's why they're so effective on bacterial illnesses (though bacteria have been known to adapt and evolve, and now certain strains are immune to certain antibiotics.) The point is, since viruses aren't really living, antibiotics don't do anything, and that's really all we've got today.

Thankfully, for most viruses, your body's immune system can handle it. That's why when people get colds, they generally don't have them forever, and they generally don't kill them. With AIDS, however, the immune system is detrimentally weakened, elevating colds to lethality.