“Selina and Chris hope that, by studying the activity of genes in mini-brains cultured from the tissues of people with those genetic mutations, they might come to understand more about the causes and ultimately find clues that could lead to possible cures.”
Philip Ball, How to Grow a Human:
Adventures in How We Are Made and Who We Are, 2019
This is one of many quotes by or about well meaning scientists who believe that their research might lead to wonderful new cures for mystery diseases.
What does the Theory of Cure say?
Most diseases are trivial. Easily cured. When we study the entirety of diseases, this is easy to see. Our medical systems focus on incurability, not on cures. Cures are ignored. Most diseases, curable and incurable both, are treated – without intentions to cure.
Most cures are ignored. We don’t study cure. We don’t collect statistics of cases of any disease cured. How many cases of the common cold are cured? How many cases of COVID? Most cases of measles are easily cured. But we ignore cures. The book even acknowledges this with the quote:
According to Lydia Lynch, thanks to cancer immunotherapy,
“we are now using the taboo word [in cancer research]: cure.”
Searching for cures in genetics will not help us find cures – because we cannot recognize, much less acknowledge cures that are present for most diseases, much less those for some vague diseases in some fuzzy future.
Most medical research studies don’t even contain a definition of cure, much less a testable definition of cured. We are talking about cures, as if they will be found in the future. Most cures today are present. We ignore them.
We have no functional medical definition of cure, cures, curing, or cured. Most medical references, and many medical dictionaries don’t even have an entry to define cure. Most of today’s cures are simply ignored.
The same will probably happen to any cures these researchers find. We have no functional medical definition of cure. Cures are disappearing from modern medicine, not being found. The Nobel Prize committee has awarded the Nobel prize in medicine to a single cure in 130 years of prizes. Every other year’s prize is for a not-cure. If Selina and Chris are hoping for a Nobel, they are dreaming in technicolor. Nobel does not recognize cures.
This type of quote is often made, by many different sources – even medical ones – with little thought. For example, the current, authoritative, fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, by the American Psychiatric Association, contains a meaningful reference to “cure” only once, in the phrase:
“monitoring of the descriptions and explanatory text is essential to improve understanding, reduce stigma, and advance the treatment and
eventual cures for these conditions.”
Eventual Cures?
The entire DSM/5 does not contain nor reference a single cure for any mental disorder. Cured is not only not defined for mental disorders – cured cannot be defined for mental disorders. This should not be surprising. Most medical reference texts do not even define cures, much less list any cures. The Handbook of Diagnosis and Treatment of DSM-5 contains the word cure once, in dismissal fashion, “The patients were described as clinging and dependent, and as expecting magical cures and medication“. And it’s not just mental diseases that are without cures.
Modern medicine’s dreams of “eventual cures” are simply wishful thinking, without substance, like the belief wearing a pin representing a leg will cure arthritis in the leg.
To find cures, we need to define cured for every disease and every medical condition. How can we find a cure if we cannot recognize cured?
Understanding Cure-ious Quotes
The theory of cure gives us a wider perspective, a way to look at quotes and thoughts about cure in different ways, from a broader perspective, a more comprehensive view of cure.
The Theory of Cure website has a random “cure quote generator” that presents a random cure quote from a growing library of over 2700 quotes about cure from hundreds of different authors. Cure-ious quotes is a set of posts that explore those quotes from the perspective of the theory of cure.
To your health, tracy
Author: A New Theory of Cure