“It Didn’t Happen.”

Do you know someone who has been cured by a chiropractor? Maybe you, yourself, have been cured by a chiropractor? What happens after a chiropractor cures your illness? You’ve been cured. Your chiropractor cured you. But nobody else cares.

A few weeks ago, I was having coffee with a friend, Dee. After catching up on friends, family, and old co-workers, the topic of chiropractors came up.  Dee’s voice changed a bit, and she began “I’ll tell you a story.“

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“About a year ago,” she said quietly, “I went to my doctor because I couldn’t raise my left arm.” 

She lifted her arm to about chest level, to demonstrate, and continued, “The shoulder was jammed and painful. When I tried to lift my arm any higher – it was very painful and not possible.“

She continued: “I went to see my doctor. He listened to my problem, and said ‘I could prescribe some anti-inflammatory medicines, but they won’t address the cause. I’d recommend you see a chiropractor.’ “

“I was surprised that a doctor would recommend a chiropractor,” She raised her eyebrows a bit, “When I visited the chiropractor, he manipulated my arm and shoulder, movement was improved, but not perfect. There was much less pain. The chiropractor gave me a series of exercises for my arm and shoulder.“

She concluded with a satisfactory smile, “I did the exercises, over the course of a few weeks. The problem went away.“

I noticed that Dee didn’t say “cure“, she didn’t say “I was cured” or “the problem was cured“, instead she said “it went away“.

I suspect, if I talk to the chiropractor, he wouldn’t say “I cured her” either. Claiming to cure can be dangerous.

And… if she talked to her doctor, a similar waffling phrase “The problem went away” might be used, rather than “The chiropractor was able to cure it.” Any doctor who suggests a chiropractor “cured” someone would risk serious admonishment by their peers.

Was Dee cured? Did the chiropractor cure Dee? Did the doctor’s recommendation cure Dee? These thoughts swirled in my mind, as Dee began again, thoughtfully.

“I think I know what happened,” she continued, “A few weeks before the problem, I was wearing a very tight one-suit.  I had to take it off quickly to go to the bathroom. I twisted my shoulder taking it off.  At the time, it was just a bit sore and I brushed it off.  Gradually, over a few weeks the problem got worse and worse.  So I decided to go to the doctor.” She was surprised to learn that the doctor made no attempt to cure her.

Now maybe you’re thinking “but that’s just an anecdote“.  After all, it wasn’t a clinical study, it’s just an anecdotal story. Know this. Every cure is a single case.

Every cure is an anecdote. Most clinical studies do not contain a definition of cure, and cannot document a cure if it occurs. Cancer research studies measure the positive effects and negative consequences, or risks of “treatments”. No study of a cancer treatment contains a definition of cured.

What happens after a chiropractic cure? It goes away.

The same thing that happens after any cure. It goes away. The illness goes away and the cure as well.

There are no cured statistics for any disease. If you had a common cold, or the flu, cured by health – “it went away“. Conventional medicine says “There is no cure for the common cold (influenza, measles, etc.)” There are statistics for influenza and measles, for deaths caused by influenza or measles, but none for influenza or measles cured.

If you get a sliver in your hand, and it gets infected, health fights the infection. Usually, “it goes away“, cured by health. If it doesn’t go away, you might visit a doctor, and be prescribed an antibiotic. If the antibiotic cures – the infection “goes away“. If you check the medical reference texts – and the product labels – for your antibiotic, you seldom find the word “cure“. Antibiotics are “treatments” for infections. There is a medical test for an infection cured, the dangerous bacteria is gone. But the word cure is rarely used. There are no statistics for infections cured.

And chiropractors? There are no scientific or medical tests for any medical condition cured by a chiropractor. When a chiropractor cures, the problem “goes away“. Was it cured?

Cured is not defined for frozen shoulder. A doctor might diagnose frozen shoulder, but they can’t diagnose “frozen shoulder cured”. There is no cure documented in current medical texts. WebMD documents Frozen Shoulder – exactly as it was experienced by Dee (except for the bathroom run). WebMD recommends treatments, anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen or aspirin or “a stronger medication“. WebMD says “Your treatment might also include going to a physical therapist for strengthening and stretching exercises to improve your range of motion.” But the word “cure” is not used. WebMD does not suggest visiting a chiropractor.

WebMD does not use the word “cure” for frozen shoulder. The word cure appears once on the WebMD page – in an advertisement offering “Shoulder Joint Pain Cure”, which leads to ads for chiropractors, naturopaths, and even aromatherapists. Can any of them cure?

The Mayo Clinic documents “Frozen shoulder, also known as adhesive capsulitis“. They also suggest a physical therapist – but not a chiropractor.  And the word cure is not mentioned. The Mayo Clinic documents symptoms, diseases and conditions, but not cures and not cured cases. What happens after a physical therapist cures a case of frozen shoulder? It disappears. Exactly the same thing that happens after a chiropractor cures one.

No authoritative medical reference documents a cure for frozen shoulder. No authoritative medical reference text documents a cure for any medical condition cured by chiropractors.

Of course there are lots of critics claiming that chiropractors are fake doctors and the practices of chiropractors are pseudoscience.  Is there any truth to these claims? Who can we ask? We might ask some major league baseball teams, like the Baltimore Orioles, the Boston Red Sox, New York Mets, and the New York Yankees, or some top level basketball players like Micheal Jordan and Derrick Rose, or football teams like the Dallas Cowboys, the Denver Broncos, the Greenbay Packers, the Miami Dolphins and more, who have chiropractors on staff. These teams, many with values in the billions of dollars – choose to pay chiropractor salaries – for chiropractic results, for chiropractic cures.

What happens after a chiropractor cures a basketball player, or a baseball player? What happens to they cure? It goes away. The medical condition goes away.  The person goes back to their life. The sports superstar gets back onto the field of play. But, according to the official medical view, it wasn’t cured by an approved medicine or treatment, so it’s not important. The cure goes away as well.  It wasn’t really there.  It never happened. Nothing to see here. Look away. Look away.

A New Theory of Cure documents the three basic cures for any medical condition. Frozen shoulder requires two cures – exercise to stretch and transform the shoulder to a healthier state, and healing, aided by exercise, to repair the damage that occurs as a result of the injury and the transformation. The third type of cure – a causal cure, is not needed because frozen shoulder has no ongoing cause creating the injury.

When we study cures, it’s easily understood. But, our medical systems prefer treatments over cures, document treatments but not their curative successes. Many medical dictionaries do not contain the word “cure”.  No medical reference text defines cure, much less providing a scientific definition.

So cures disappear.  They “go away“. Undocumented. Their causes are also undocumented. And the patients? They go on with their lives. And the doctors? They go on to the next patient. Nobody cares about the cured once a cure has been accomplished.

to your health, tracy
Author: A New Theory of Cure

Have you ever been cured by a homeopath?

Do you know anyone who has been cured by a homeopath? What happens after a homeopath cures your illness? You’ve been cured. You care. Your homeopath cares. Maybe your family cares. But officially, nobody else cares. Officially, homeopathic medicines are “just water.”

What does the science say? We can find homeopathic cures in medical science, but, we need to look beyond treatments. Most clinical studies measure “treatments that don’t cure“. We might want to believe researchers are searching for “cancer cures“. But no. Cancer cured, for example, is not medically defined. We have no test for a case of cancer cured.  Of over than 70,000 current and past cancer clinical studies listed at ClinicalTrials.gov, not one contains an accepted, testable, scientific, medical definition of cancer cured that can be used in medical practice. When a clinical trial encounters a cured case – no cure can be recognized. Cancer clinical trials measure treatment benefits, but not cures.

Some clinical trials do contain tests for cured. Some clinical studies of homeopathic treatments find cured patients. What happens after a homeopathic cure is found?  It disappears. Over time, it disappears even more. But, let’s look at a simpler disease, warts.

Cure for Warts?

Is there a cure for warts? Conventional medicine has no cure for warts. Tests for warts cured are weak and inconsistent. However – we do have a clinical study that tested for warts cured.

In 1996 the clinical study Homoeopathic versus placebo therapy of children with warts on the hands: a randomized, double-blind clinical trial. treated 60 children with warts. According to the published research, 6 patients were cured in the study. Five of the cured were treated with the homeopathic medicine.

What happened to all of the cures?  What happened to the cures from homeopathic treatments? They disappeared.  The scientific, peer-reviewed, published research study conclusion simply ignored the cured, stating: “There was no apparent difference between the effects of homoeopathic therapy and placebo in children with common warts under the conditions of this study.”  Five cures (16 percent of patients) in the homeopathic treatment arm of the study were ignored.  There was no further analysis.  The same is true of the cure in the placebo arm of the study. No medical researchers made any attempt to understand the cause of any cure. The cures, the presence and number of cures – were at odds with the study conclusions, apparently at odds with the study goals, so they disappeared.

Disappeared Again

Two years later, homeopathic cures were more disappeared — is that possible? In 1998, some of the same researchers undertook and published a second study.  The same number of participants. The same homeopathic medicine. The same placebo arm. And the results? How many patients were cured?  We don’t know.

In the second study, designed – in scientific theory – to test if the results could be replicated, cures were not counted.  Cures not part of the study parameters, and thus did not appear in the published results. All cured cases were simply ignored.

What happens after a homeopathic cure?  Patients might be cured, but the cures disappear from the medical view. It’s not just warts. Cured is not defined scientifically for any disease cured by homeopathy. Warts cured are not medically defined for any disease cured by homeopathy.

It is possible to cure an infectious disease, and prove it was cured by testing for the infection after treatment. But…. those cases can be cured by an approved medicine. The test for cured is: treat with an approved drug, retest for infection. If the infection is no longer present – it’s a cure. But homeopathic medicines are not approved for infections, so the test is not valid. If an infection is cured by a homeopathic medicine, it doesn’t count.

It’s not just homeopathic cures that disappear. No doctor, clinic, hospital, or medical system COUNTS infections cured by any treatment. Cures are counted in clinical studies – but in actual practice, they aren’t counted. There are no statistics for cured of any disease, so there are no statistics of homeopathic cures. Patients can be cured, but their cures don’t count.

The clinical trial Homeopathic medicinal products for preventing and treating acute respiratory tract infections in children, published in 2018, clearly illustrates the confusion around the word cure in clinical trials.  This was a meta-study. Most studies found were excluded due to poor quality or poor fit for analysis. Although the study objectives are to evaluate treatments, the word cure occurs over 80 times in the report.

Cured was defined several different ways, depending on the study being evaluated. The following quotes, from the meta-study illustrate the different functional definitions of cured the researchers encountered.

• Cure: defined as the reduction or resolution of symptoms of ARTIs (fever/body temperature, cough, pain, malaise/feeling of illness, rhinorrhoea, etc.) in the short‐ (up to 14 days) and long‐term (up to 3 months).
• Cure was defined as no severe persistent fever or pain after 24 hours and no moderate persistent fever or pain after 48 hours.
• Cure was defined as a symptom score of zero and a Tympanic Membrane Examination score of zero.
• Jacobs 2001 defined cure as no symptoms or a significant reduction in symptoms.
• None of the time points for cure were the same across the two studies (Jacobs 2016; Sinha 2012)
• Sinha 2012 provided long‐term cure data for day 21 of illness, and Jacobs 2001 for week 6 of illness.
• in Jacobs 2001 the cure rate was higher among children receiving homeopathy, while in Sinha 2012 the cure rate was higher in children receiving conventional treatment.

It is interesting that researchers use the word cure but not cured to define the cured state.

It’s clear that there is no independent definition of cured. Cure is defined independently by specific researchers in each study.

We have no scientific definition of cured.  Conventional medical bureaucracies have no Theory of Cure. Phrases like long term cure and cure rate have little or nothing to do with the condition of the patient, their disease, or its causes. Use of the word cure, rarely references any present cause of illness. Instead, cure tests measure signs and symptoms – consequences of illness.

Most clinical trials of homeopathy measure treatments that do not cure. This is the standard for almost all clinical trials. Cured is rarely defined and cannot be tested. We, for example, research into Homeopathy for treatment of irritable bowel syndrome. Cured is not defined for irritable bowel syndrome. If a cure occurs – it cannot be recognized and thus cannot be documented. Cures, when they occur, disappear. They are outside of the scope of the study.

Cured is not defined medically for any non-infectious disease. When any cure occurs for non-infectious diseases, no cure can be documented. The cured illness simply disappears.

Homeopathy is not the reason for this blindness. It’s just another casualty. No clinical study can find a cure for irritable bowel syndrome – until cured is medically defined.

Although the common mantra of homeopathy is “like cures like” (similia similibus curentur), cured is not defined in homeopathy either. Most use of the word cured in homeopathic research refers to symptoms, not disease. For example, “Symptom distribution according to predefined classes (common symptoms increased in intensity and/or duration-, cured, old, new and exceptional)” – is a nonsensical homeopathic definition of cured.

Unfortunately, conventional medicine also has no definition of cured for most diseases. Therefore, it cannot rebut homeopathic claims of cured. Instead, conventional medical practitioners, researchers, and their followers claim “homeopathic treatments cannot possibly work“. Works, in medical science, generally means helps with signs and symptoms of disease, but does not cure. If it cures, we could use the word “cure”.

What diseases do homeopaths cure? 

Homeopathic doctors don’t rely on “just water,” but those who criticize homeopathy only focus on claims that the water cannot cure. Actual cures are simply ignored. We simply don’t know what diseases or medical conditions might be cured by a homeopath. We don’t even know what diseases or medical conditions have been cured by homeopathy. When a homeopath cures a patient’s illness – the cured status and the cause of the cure are ignored by conventional medicine. The cures are ignored by homeopathic medicine as well. We have no statistics for cured by homeopathy.

What happens after a homeopathic cure?  It disappears. Cured is not medically defined for most diseases treated with homeopathic medicines.  The cured status disappears from the view of conventional medicine. It also disappears from the view of homeopathic medicine. Homeopathy aims to cure symptoms, not illness, not disease. Cures, accomplished by homeopathic treatments, are not even counted by homeopaths.

When a cure occurs in most clinical trials, the cure disappears. Cures in clinical trials of non-infectious diseases disappear, because cured is not medically defined for any non-infectious disease.

In conventional medical practice cured cases disappear as well. It makes no difference if the medical practitioner is an oncologist, a psychologist, a dentist, an obstetrician, or a general practitioner. No conventional medical practitioner counts cured cases.

When a cure occurs in a chiropractic medical practice, the cure disappears, even though many chiropractic cures are trivial to prove cured. The cure disappears.

So, when a homeopathic cure occurs, the cure disappears, but it’s not about homeopathy, it’s about cured.

To find scientific answers about cures by homeopathy, or by any other conventional or alternative medical treatment, we need to study cure, cures, curing, and cured. Attempts to measure the non-curative effects of homeopathic treatments vs placebos or vs conventional medicine, only asks the question:

“which treatment FAILS TO CURE better”

It’s a nonsense question. Without a definition of cured – we have no idea if the treatment cured the illness, or moved the condition towards a cured state, or away from one – ultimately making a cure harder. We can’t tell. To count cures, we need to count cured cases.

To study cures scientifically, we need to study cured. We need a theory of cure. A New Theory of Cure defines cures in a comprehensive fashion, providing a solid foundation for studies of treatments that cure.

to your health, tracy
Author: A New Theory of Cure