As someone who recently used `ameliorate` in an abstract(!), let me make the case for it. `Target` sounds active and vigorous, but it is quite vague in that co

As someone who recently used `ameliorate` in an abstract(!), let me make the case for it. `Target` sounds active and vigorous, but it is quite vague in that context. You can target a diseased brain region (for stimulation, surgical removal, etc) or a mutated gene for deletion, but it's not clear to me what "targeting" something abstract like a disease would mean. `Ameliorate` means "to make something better". It has the added implication that the situation is quite bad, but the intervention won't totally restore things to normality. This is exactly what I meant: we don't think this intervention is a silver bullet that will reverse the disease, but it seems like it should help--and our proposal is cheap and easy, so...consider it. This also keeps Reviewer #2 from busting your chops over how effective the proposed strategies might be, which you'd be inviting with a stronger word like "cure." Here, you could also use `treat`, which feels like an intermediate-strength claim. "Manage" might work too though that comes with implications of its own too: to me, managing a disease suggests that it is temporarily being held at bay, or the negative consequences are averted without fixing the underlying problem. I learned `ameliorate` in junior high--and was writing for people with PhDs--so I went for it.