Is modern medicine searching for zipless cures, cures that are absolutely pure, single chemicals, patentable, free of side effects, cures that do the job, and leave quietly?
Zipless cures are rarer than unicorns.
In 1973, Eric Jong wrote in Fear of Flying: “The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game…. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn.”
Zipless cures are efficient and easy. They don’t require complex analysis, nor a serious relationship between the physician and the patient. The diagnosis is completed, the physician prescribes the cure, the patient takes the cure, never to return. Zipless.
Health, and illness are not zipless. Health is about life, constantly changing, until we die. The health of an individual is about their life, their activities and habits. Most illnesses are about the life, the activities and the habits of the patient.
There are three types of diseases according to the World Health Organization and the ICD10 – the International Classification of Diseases:
- communicable diseases, HIV, TB, etc.
- non communicable diseases : hypertension, breast cancer, etc.
- external causes of injuries : traffic accident, drowning.
No medicine can ‘cure’ an injury. Injuries are cured by health and healing.
Medicine is searching for zipless cures for communicable diseases, like the common cold, pneumonia, HIV and Tuberculosis. We might believe that antibiotics and antifungal and antiviral medicines are zipless, but the more we use them, the more we understand their problems. Medicines that fight and kill unhealthy living organisms also fight and kill healthy living organisms in our bodies. Not only that, bad bacteria evolves. Medicines that kill them only work for a short time, until a more dangerous organism evolves, it’s evolution assisted by the not so zipless cure – which killed off the original bacterial competitor.
Modern medicine is also searching for zipless cures for non communicable diseases like hypertension, diabetes, breast cancers, arthritis, and obesity. But, this is an error in the logic. An illness can only be cured by addressing the cause. There is single conceptual flowchart, a clear path to find the cure for any illness – if one is to be found. But it’s not zipless. It can take time, and commitment from both the doctor and the patient.
An illness can only be cured by addressing the cause.
We can’t kill the cause of obesity, or hypertension. The cause is lack of healthiness. These illnesses can only be cured with health, not with medicines.
Health is not zipless. Improving healthiness requires commitment. If the doctor, if the medical establishment really wants to cure these illnesses – they need to commit to a relationship with the patient, not look for a zipless cure.
Many illnesses can be caused by the actions of the patient, or the non-activities of the patient. Obesity is caused by eating too much, scurvy is caused by ‘not consuming enough of specific healthy foods’.
What if you get the common cold? If you get a cold, is it your fault? Are you to blame? It’s not difficult to blame the patient, in fact it’s commonplace. You shouldn’t go out in the cold. You should have worn a sweater. You should wash your hands. Blame is all around us.
Your doctor doesn’t want to blame you for your cold, although they might agree, if you blame yourself, to help you feel better. The cold needs to be treated. It needs to be cured. Modern medicine needs a zipless cure for the common cold, a cure that zips in and gets rid of the cold, without putting any responsibility on the patient, without any responsibility on the doctor – except to sign the prescription.
There is a cure for the common cold. The cure for the common cold is trivial. It has been described, accurately, by Darrell Huff: “Proper treatment will cure a cold in seven days, but left to itself, a cold will hang on for a week.”
The cure for the common cold is health. The more health you have, the faster the cure. People who are healthier get fewer colds, and cure them faster. The best preventative for the common cold is also health. The more health you have, the fewer colds you get.
But when you have a cold, or any other illness – you don’t want blame. You want a cure, a zipless cure. A doctor who gives you blame is wasting time. You don’t want to hear it. Not only that, when you have a cold, blame won’t help. Blame does not cure. Blame is not zipless.
So modern medicine searches for zipless cures. Not just for colds, for every illness. But zipless cures are rarer than unicorns.
What can be done? There are two solutions, and both are in use today.
First: modern medicine must avoid the word cure, preferring ‘incurable’. The common cold is incurable. Obesity is incurable. Depression is incurable. Heart disease is incurable. I recently checked six current ‘medical dictionaries’. Five of six did not contain a definition for the word ‘cure’. The single definition provided is simplistic and does not mention any ’cause’ of the illness to be cured. Is it possible to ‘cure’ any illness if the cause is not addressed?
No. It is not possible.
Modern medicine has given up searching for cures, because modern medicine wants zipless cures – which do not exist. So, what’s next?
Modern medicine searches for ‘therapies’ and ‘treatments’ instead of cures. Treatments and therapies provide many benefits over cures:
- they can be bought and sold. Many can be patented and manufactured.
- they are provided by a doctor, not based on changing the patient.
- no-one expects a treatment to cure. If they cured, they could be called ‘cures’.
- because there is no need to cure, it’s easy to find new treatments.
- although treatments have side effects. We expect side effects from treatments.
- treatments carry no guarantee. It’s normal that they don’t work in many cases.
- treatments can be tested in clinical studies, documented as such, and approved by the government, the US FDA. Note: Cures cannot be tested in most clinical studies, because cured is not defined scientifically for most illnesses. Every actual cure is an anecdote, not a clinical study.
The preference for therapies and treatments, and ignoring of cures can clearly be seen in the titles of major medical reference texts:
MERCK Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy
Lange’s Current Medical Diagnosis and Treatment
Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine: Disease Parthenogenesis and Treatment
None of these tomes has a definition of cure or cured. They occasionally use the word cure, although not consistently, because the individual sections are written by different authors, who have no common scientific definition of cure.
What is the main difference between a treatment and a cure?
A treatment prolongs your illness. It reduces symptoms, and helps you to live with the illness, to live longer with the illness. In doing so, it helps the illness to live longer as well. Treatments, that do not cure, create chronic illnesses – a market for more treatments. Treatments are more financially successful than cures. There are powerful economic incentives to develop, test, and market treatments over cures.
Should we be surprised that so many illnesses have become chronic? As long as we search for zipless cures – and only find treatments, we will continue to create and maintain chronic illness.
A cure cures. When an illness is cured, it is gone, no further treatments are required. Cures trump treatments. After your health cures a cold, you might get another cold. It is not a ‘recurrence’ of the same cold, it is a new cold, because the first cold was cured. That’s how cures work.
But, cures for most diseases cannot be proven in clinical studies. Does that surprise you? If you have an illness caused by a nutritional deficiency, or a dietary toxicity, or a sleep deficiency, or an exercise excess, “cured” is not defined. Even if you have the common cold, easily cured by health, cured is not defined scientifically.
If you check the medical reference books for scurvy, for example, MERCK, Lange’s, and Harrison’s offer treatments, but not cures. Why not? Because there is no medical test for cured. Even though the cure is understood, even by many schoolchildren, cured is not defined scientifically, and cannot be tested. As a result, official medical texts do not document a cure for scurvy. Scurvy cannot be cured.
The cure for scurvy is not zipless.
No one pretends the cure for scurvy is zipless. If we give the patient ascorbic acid, synthetic Vitamin C, the symptoms of scurvy will go away. As soon as the treatment is discontinued, the illness returns. More medicine, more ascorbic acid addresses the symptoms. Ascorbic acid, the treatment recommended by all major medical references, creates a chronic illness, requiring a chronic medicine, a chronic treatment – a lifetime of medicine.
What about alternative medicines?
Can a homeopath, a naturopath, or a chiropractor, or a practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine, or Ayurveda, find more cures than a ‘modern doctor’?
Let’s be frank. Often, these practitioners make exactly the same mistakes as western doctors. They recommend treatments for symptoms. Different treatments, but exactly the same results. In many cases, the dispute between conventional and alternative medicines is simply a nonsense debate posing a nonsense question:
“Which medicine, conventional or alternative, does not cure better?”
Sometimes, a naturopath, or a chiropractor, or another alternative practitioner, sometimes even a western medical doctor, spends more time with the patient, listens to the patient, talks to the patient, and changes the actions and habits of the patient.
Sometimes, they actually CURE the patient. Not a zipless cure, because zipless cures are as rare as unicorns. It is a cure that involves the patient, that arises from changes in the actions and inactions of the patient. A real cure. When a doctor, any kind of doctor, or even a patient, without the aid of a doctor, follows the cure flowchart – sometimes cures are found. But those cures cannot be proven, they cannot be tested scientifically. Cured is not defined scientifically for most illnesses.
Modern medicine ignores these cures. It’s easy. Cure is not defined for any illness that is not cured with medicine. If you cure someone, really cure someone, of a non communicable disease, you are a Saint, not a doctor.
Meanwhile, back at the medical research lab, perhaps a few scientists are still searching for a zipless cure. A magic cure. A miracle. Truly, as rare as a unicorn.
to your health, tracy
