In real medicine, you use symptoms to help you discern a cause, which then helps you pick a treatment. You take fever, fatigue, swelling, and so on as indicators of, say, a particular virus, and then you attempt to deal with the virus. If you can’t discern the cause or if you can’t decide between two or more causes, you run more tests and, while you are trying to identify the cause, you do things you know are likely to help relieve the symptoms.
In the meantime, as you seriously look for the cause, you work to reduce the pain or bring down the fever. You are reducing the pain and bringing down the fever while you continue to investigate what is actually causing the fever and the pain. You do not focus all of your efforts on reducing the pain or on bringing down the fever. You continue your investigations. You are trying to figure out what is going on. Your job isn’t merely to treat symptoms.
One of our neighbors recently suffered from terrible stomach pains. For a long time, on the order of two months, no conclusive diagnosis could be reached among the four contenders vying as the cause of her affliction. Finally it was conclusively determined that it was cancer located in a certain stomach valve. Treatment began immediately. All along she was being given relief for her symptoms—relief for the pain, help with her inability to keep food down—while the cause was being determined. Treatment for the actual affliction could only commence once it was identified. That is how medicine works.