An incurable disease is being cured. I went over to my local library last fall, to do some research on diabetes. It was an interesting experience. I picked about ten books off the shelf, and took them to a study table. You can see a list in the references at the bottom.
One of the books, one in ten, claimed to cure diabetes. The others provided ‘treatments‘ and guidelines on ‘how to live with your diabetes‘, assuming, even stating clearly in most cases, that ‘diabetes cannot be cured’. The truth is a bit longer sentence: ‘Diabetes cannot be cured by medicines’.
Note: This post is an exploration of the concept of cure, based on several years of research and writing, which led to the publication of the book A New Theory of Cure. This post was written in 2015 – little has changed and I made a note of observable changes.
There are two ‘types’ of diabetes. Type 1 Diabetes (in theory) exists when your body loses ALL of the islet cells in the pancreas, thus, according to the Theory of Cures, might be better described as an incurable disability, not a disease. However, in modern medicine, the distinction between disease and disability is very fuzzy. But if our understanding of type 1 diabetes is wrong, it might be curable. Or maybe it’s curable some of the time? How can we tell? By counting the cured.
Type 2 diabetes covers a wide range of conditions, with causes and contributing factors. It is a disease with an ongoing cause so, in theory, it can be cured. And there are many claims of cured.
But what do the medical authorities say?
According to MERCK the bible of medical diagnosis and therapy, diabetes is incurable. The goals of treating diabetes are: ‘Treatment involves control of hyperglycemia to relieve symptoms and prevent complications while minimizing hypoglycemic episodes.‘ Today, MERCK advises, Complications can be delayed or prevented with adequate glycemic control; heart disease remains the leading cause of mortality in diabetes mellitus. The word cure is not used except for corn cures for foot care.
The American Diabetes Association is not actively looking for a cure, their website suggests Give a tax-deductible donation today to get us closer to a cure. Closer to a cure is not a cure. Closer to a cure is not measurable – without a clear definition of cured. Their webpage has seven section headings suggesting we learn to ‘live with diabetes‘. Their stated mission is To prevent and cure diabetes and to improve the lives of all people affected by diabetes. They want you to donate, to help them search for the cure”, but as we shall see, they can’t find any cured cases, and don’t believe a cure exists. Today, they advise From symptoms and treatment, to management and medication—arm yourself with the knowledge to live well with diabetes. The word cure does not appear except in phrases like ‘make a research donation…to support… eventual cures.’
The Canadian Diabetes Association asks you to help ‘lead the fight against diabetes‘. They offer, for purchase, ‘Give the gift of a cure‘, by which they mean a donation to the Canadian Diabetes Association. According to the Canadian Diabetes Association – there is no cure for diabetes. Instead they suggest you learn to live with prediabetes, with type 1 diabetes, and with type 2 diabetes. Today, it advises Canada’s best researchers and doctors are working day and night to find a cure.
Diabetes.UK, in Great Britain, advises that ‘Living with diabetes is not the end of the world. There is no hint of a cure. Diabetes Australia says We are committed to reducing the impact of diabetes.’ Not to curing it. Today, it advises ‘There isn’t a cure for either Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes.‘
The World Health Organization (WHO) advises that ‘Diabetes is a chronic disease’, and operates under the general assumption that chronic diseases can be prevented and treated, but not cured. Today, the word cure is avoided, and the WHO offers 5 non curative goals for 2030:
- 80% of people with diabetes are diagnosed;
- 80% of people with diagnosed diabetes have good control of glycaemia;
- 80% of people with diagnosed diabetes have good control of blood pressure;
- 60% of people with diabetes of 40 years or older receive statins; and
- 100% of people with type 1 diabetes have access to affordable insulin and blood glucose self-monitoring.
The WHO webpage for diabetes contains the word procurement, but not cure.
The Center for Chronic Disease says that Chronic Disease is a long-lasting condition that can be controlled but not cured. Today, the Centre for Chronic Disease has disappeared – replaced by a number of organizations, including the CDC’s official National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (NCCDPHP), which advises ‘chronic diseases like cancer, heart disease and diabetes are leading causes of death… NCCDPHP supports healthy behaviors and preventative medical care to help people prevent and manage chronic illness.’ The word cure does not appear. The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) advises ‘There isn’t a cure yet for diabetes.‘
The CURED?
On the other hand, diabetes is being being cured. Although officially, according to medical experts, diabetes is incurable, it is quietly acknowledged that some people attain complete recovery. Why can’t the “Diabetes Associations” find these people? If diabetes was curable, what would these organizations do? Where would they go? How would their missions need to change?
When someone with diabetes is cured, who notices? Who measures, tracks, and counts cures? Diabetes is a disease, like cancer, where people who are ‘cured’ are ignored. There is no clear definition of cure, or cured, in our medical system. There are no statistics for people who are cured of cancer. And there are no statistics for people who are cured of diabetes. There are also no statistics of diabetes recovered. Apparently, nobody cares.
Diabetes is a different disease than cancer. It is very, very difficult to be certain someone has cancer. As a result, it can be very, very difficult to tell if someone’s cancer has been cured. Diabetes, on the other hand, is very clearly defined. You have diabetes if the AC1 test shows a average blood glucose rating of 6.5% or greater. You have diabetes if your Fasting Plasma Glucose is greater than 126 mg/dl or higher. You have diabetes if your Oral Glucose Tolerance Test shows 200 mg/dl or higher. You have diabetes if your Random Plasma Glucose Test shows 200 mg/dl or higher. If you can pass all of these tests, you don’t have diabetes. If you were diagnosed with diabetes using these tests, and now you can pass all of these tests – you have been cured (but officially you have recovered). There should be no mystery. You are either cured, or you are still diagnosed with diabetes. There are people who are tested, and diagnosed with diabetes. And later, they are tested and found to be diabetes free. Cured. Here are two books that show us how.
1. Dr Neal Barnard’s Program for Reversing Diabetes: The Scientifically Proven System for Reversing Diabetes Without Drugs. The word cure does not appear once in the entire book.
2. The End of Diabetes: The Eat to Live Plan to Prevent and Reverse Diabetes. “A leading expert on preventive medicine offers a complete health transformation to prevent and reverse diabetes without medication” The word cure appears 8 times, including this quote ‘The cure for type 2 diabetes is already known— removing the cause can reverse the disease,’
Neither book dares to use the word ‘cure’ in the title, nor the sub-title. The word ‘cure’ has been shamed, has become verboten, forbidden, in medical books. Cures are generally only claimed by alternative medical practitioners. MERCK’s famous manual of Diagnosis and Therapy seldom uses the word cure, where scurvy is not cured with Vitamin C, it is treated. Cures are generally reserved for medicines, and Vitamin C is a nutrient, not a medicine.
Here are four important truths about medicines and cures:
1. Modern medicine has no clear definition of cure, no theory of cure.
3. There are many diseases that we know can be cured, but cannot be cured with medicines.
4. Medical insurance pays for treatments and medicines, not for cures. If you have medical insurance, and you need a medicine to treat your disease, your insurance will pay. But if you have medical insurance, and you cure it “without a medicine”, your insurance will not pay a cent. Cures don’t matter. Cures don’t count on insurance claims. They are not on the list.
As a result, books that provide evidence of a cure for diabetes avoid the word cure. Instead they speak in vague terms like “overcome diabetes”, and ”reverse diabetes”, or “lose weight and cut medications”.
Let’s take a closer look at the word ‘cure’. If you have a bacterial infection, and you take an antibiotic, the infection can be ‘cured’ by the medicine. You might get another infection in a week, a month, or a year, but that does not detract from the fact that you were cured. If you have scurvy, caused by a diet lacking in Vitamin C, and you change to a diet with lots of Vitamin C – your scurvy will be cured. It might be cured faster, and more effectively with supplemental Vitamin C as well. Cured is cured. If you neglect your diet, and you get scurvy again, it does not detract from the fact that you were ‘cured’ of the first bout of scurvy. Cured as defined by the theory of cure, is when the cause of the disease is removed, or stopped, and the progression of the disease stops.
If you take deliberate actions to fight your diabetes, and you overcome diabetes, if you reverse diabetes, if you can easily pass all of the diagnostic tests for diabetes, your diabetes has been cured.
So. What about these books? What do they say? How can you cure your diabetes? Is one better than the other?
I am not a doctor. I am also not a diabetic. To be perfectly honest, I don’t know. But I can read. I used to be a google research meister, good at adding things up, sniffing out sense from nonsense and at meta-analysis. But, Google has changed. Have you noticed? Google’s focus has shifted from information to sales – and cures are not as profitable as treatments.
My conclusion: The books advise on how to cure (although they avoid the word) your diabetes with dietary restrictions and exercise. The first book, Dr Neal Barnard’s Program for Reversing Diabetes, tells us that, when food rationing was instituted in Great Britain, during the war, “diabetes deaths dropped by 50%“. It gives a complex dietary plan to reverse diabetes. The second book: The End of Diabetes, offers a dietary plan to lose weight and advises that it can also reverse your diabetes.
The interesting thing about these books, is that the authors don’t seem to really understand what’s happening. They have lots of theories. It’s almost as if they cure diabetes by intentional accident. I’m not saying they can’t cure diabetes, simply that they don’t really understand what is going on. They seem to have some right ideas, they succeed some of the time, but they fail some of the time. They don’t understand why they succeed, or why they fail. Can this be true?
There are additional sources that suggest – yes, it is true. These authors, professional doctors, like the many people writing hundreds of books about diabetes, have many good ideas, but a limited understanding of what is happening. They are right to say that medicines cannot cure diabetes. They are right to say that diet can cure diabetes. But they haven’t fully understood, haven’t fully articulated, haven’t fully studied the problems, and the solutions. It is possible to cure your diabetes by following the techniques recommended in these books. Many people succeed. Some fail.
We need to look a bit farther.
The Newcastle Magnetic Resonance Centre, in the UK advises: “Read the full scientific paper, Reversal of type 2 diabetes “. Their hypothesis is simple.
“individuals have different levels of tolerance of fat within liver and pancreas. Only when a person has more fat than they can cope with does type 2 diabetes develop. In other words, once a person crosses their personal fat threshold, type 2 diabetes develops. Once they successfully lose weight and go below their personal fat threshold, diabetes will disappear. ”
Now you might think “Hey, this is BIG NEWS! Why haven’t I heard of it yet, it must be really new.” Nope. The original hypothesis was proposed in 2008, and the research study, showing full reversal of diabetes, was published in 2011. It summarized results, with this conclusion: “Normalisation of both beta cell function and hepatic insulin sensitivity in type 2 diabetes was achieved by dietary energy restriction alone. This was associated with decreased pancreatic and liver triacylglycerol stores. The abnormalities underlying type 2 diabetes are reversible by reducing dietary energy intake.” There is evidence that this has been known, by some professionals, for decades, possibly even longer. In 2012, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, writing Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, advised ‘We know we can cure many cases of diabetes by putting people on a very strict starvation-style diet, shocking their system—in fact the mechanism had to have been known heuristically for a long time since there are institutes and sanatoria for curative starvation in Siberia.‘
But you haven’t heard about it. Neither, apparently has the World Health Organization, the Mayo Clinic, the MERCK Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy, nor the diabetes fundraising groups in the USA, Canada, Australia, and Great Britain – according to their web pages. It is worth noting that this research was supported by Diabetes UK, according to the Newcastle Centre’s web page. But Diabetes UK webpage gives no hint of a cure, and clearly states that “Diabetes medication cannot cure diabetes, and most people will have to take it for the rest of their lives.”
A diet that takes the person’s fat levels in the liver and pancreas below the individual person’s threshold, cures diabetes. Different people have different thresholds. If the fat level rises again, diabetes appears again. Many diets can work but the ‘diet’ is not the solution, and the patient’s diet is not the ‘key cause’. No single food can be identified. Food consumption and exercise levels are related causes. But the key is the individual’s fat levels in the liver and pancreas – and their individual tolerance for that fat.
Diabetes is like scurvy, but in reverse. You get scurvy if you don’t consume enough Vitamin C. You get diabetes if you consume so much food that your liver and pancreas develop a heavy layer of fat. And you have diabetes until you remove sufficient amounts of that fat.
Fasting cures diabetes. Is this the first time that fasting has been proven to cure a disease – in a clinical study? We tend to think of ‘taking medicine’ to cure disease, and some medicines are even created to ‘cure’ obesity. But fasting is a true cure. Of course there are many different types of ‘fasts’, and some can be dangerous. But medicines can be dangerous too. And medicines don’t cure diabetes. Everyone agrees with that.
Fasting can be healthy. Fasting can improve your healthiness. The Newcastle Centre made an interesting discovery: “insulin in obese patients sometimes normalized BEFORE visible weight loss occurred”. Total fasting was not required. Consumption of less than 800 calories per day for 8 weeks resulted in a diabetes cure.
Do we really understand diabetes? There is still a lot to be learned, but it can only be learned, once we accept that diabetes can be cured, and undertake more studies. The Newcastle Centre has a list of research projects to help understand more. We will learn more about how to cure diabetes, and how to cure diabetes more efficiently, more effectively. How to improve our healthiness, even if we do not have diabetes.
It unfortunate that the Newcastle Centre still believes that Type 1 Diabetes is incurable, and is not studying it. If you think you cannot, you cannot. Every diabetes fundraising society should be true to their stated mission, should be funding studies to learn more. Every diabetes fundraising society should be publicizing these techniques to their donors, and their clients.
Here is a video, that gives some useful insight to what we can learn, when we throw away the advice of the diabetes societies, when we stop using medicine to treat problems caused by food.
There are many more reports, throughout history, of diseases being cured by fasting. Today, many clinics that claim to cure diseases by fasting. But modern medicine has never taken them seriously. Patent medicines, treating signs and symptoms, are more profitable that actually curing a disease. So you can advertise them, market them, and due to patent legislation, own the market.
This cure for diabetes is ‘half invented’, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb uses the phrase in the book Antifragile. An invention that has been discovered many, many times – but is difficult, perhaps impossible to implement, or to market. It works in theory, but we can’t make it work in practice. How far is the distance from medical theory, to medical practice? Six inches – the length of the almighty dollar. If it doesn’t make money, if it doesn’t provide patent protection, it’s impossible to buy it. You can’t buy ‘not eating’. And your insurance won’t pay for it.
The cure for diabetes is health. A specific kind of healthiness. When you raise that specific kind of healthiness, remove a specific unhealthiness, diabetes is cured.How many more diseases are only cured by health? Share on X Diabetes is a cause of many different diseases. If we cure diabetes – do we cure these, or just prevent them? Can the diabetes cure also cure patients who have cardiovascular disease – caused by diabetes. Can it cure kidney failure – caused by diabetes, can it cure nerve damage and vision loss – that is caused by diabetes? Can this diabetes cure eliminate the need for cholesterol reduction drugs, reducing cholesterol naturally, healthily? Does it actually work better at reducing bad cholesterol than ‘medicines’? Or is it only a ‘preventative’, preventing damage, amputations, and death? Is that all, just a preventative?
We need to spend more time, more money and more energy pursuing healthiness, and cures that are derived from healthiness – and less on medicines to treat signs and symptoms.
to your health, tracy
Tracy is the author of A New Theory of Cure
Research at my local library Treatments that don’t cure.
1. Diabetes: Sugar-coated Crisis : Who Gets It, Who Profits and
How to Stop It, talks about causes, but does not claim that a
cure exists, nor present a cure. It’s an important book, maybe even a cure for
society, but not a cure for any patient.
2. Mayo Clinic Wellness Solutions for Diabetes (a video) – offers
solutions to” live with diabetes”. No mention of cure.
3. Handy Health Guide to Diabetes – how to ‘treat’ diabetes. Not
how to cure.
4. What Nurses Know– Diabetes – how to live with diabetes. Not
how to cure.
5. The Facts About Diabetes – how to treat diabetes – not how to
cure.
6. American Diabetes Association Complete Guide to Diabetes –
expert advice to diabetics on living an active, healthy life. No
suggestion that diabetes can be cured.
7. The Diabetes Manifesto: Take Charge of your Life. But no cure.
8. How to Deal With Diabetes – Advice on how to manage the disease
and live a healthy life. Says “As diabetes is incurable”.
9. Eat and Beat Diabetes With Picture Perfect Weight Loss –
promoting weight loss and helping to manage and fight diabetes. No
suggestion of cure.
1o. Diabetes Diet Cookbook – make losing weight and getting blood
sugar under control easier than ever before. But no mention of
cure.
11. Diabetes Rising: How A Rare Disease Became A Modern Pandemic,
and What to Do About It. a gripping expose of the quest for a cure
for the disease .. but no cure.
12. The Diabetes Diet: Dr. Bernstein’s Low-carbohydrate Solution.
“The standard treatment of diabetes.” But no cure.
13. 50 Things You Need to Know About your Diabetes: Expert Tips
for Taking Control. But no cure.
14. The American Diabetes Association Guide to Herbs and
Nutritional Supplements: What You Need to Know From Aloe to Zinc
Alternative treatments for diabetes… but no mention of cure.
15. The Real-Life Guide to Diabetes: Practical answers to your
diabetes problems. But no claim of cure.
16. The Diabetes Breakthrough: Based on A Scientifically Proven
Plan to Lose Weight and Cut Medications. Treatments. It is
interesting that the book uses the words ‘reverse’ diabetes, but
not ‘cure’.
