Cortizone

Although [cortisone] is the universal symptom-reliever par excellence, it achieves alleviation by a mechanism which indiscriminately suppresses adaptive phenomena. It suppresses many of the responses to injury: the desirable as well as the undesirable, the reparative as well as the destructive. As a result of this indiscriminate action it tends to mask the course of the basic disease in such a way that the physician is left completely in the dark on what is going on. No other drug used for symptomatic abatement is more dangerous from this point of view ... Cortisone provides mainly symptomatic and occasional supportive relief and it cures nothing ... It is possible that the future will offer still better agents of this type, but regardless of the basis of their superiority, as long as they operate by suppressing universal and fundamental biologic phenomena the response of the organism to stimulation and basic protective reactions—the inherent disadvantages of cortisone will not be eradicated by molecular manipulation.—Walter Modell, 1961