Every illness has a cure. How can we find the cure? Every illness has a cause. How can we find the cause?
It’s obvious that every illness has a cure, obvious that every illness has a cause, but most of the time, when we encounter an illness, we don’t look for the cause, we don’t look for the cure, we treat the symptoms. Are the symptoms the cause? No. Are the symptoms the cure? Nope.
To clearly understand “The Cure is to Address the Cause”, we need to clearly understand what we mean by illness. Our medical systems don’t help much. Modern medicine has no clear definition of illness, nor of cure. Modern medicine tackles ‘disease’, but it has no clear definition of disease either.
Although illness and disease are not well defined in medicine, the difference between them is well understood. An illness is what the patient has. Every patient, and thus every illness is unique. Every illness is an anecdote, a single story. A disease is what the physician diagnoses and treats. Many, actually most illnesses, are never diagnosed. We know that they are not serious, so we don’t call the doctor. Only a physician is allowed, by laws of man – not laws of nature – to diagnose a disease. Only a physician is allowed, by laws of medicine, to treat a disease. A patient can treat their illness, and in many cases, only the patient can successfully cure the illness.
An illness is an ongoing, negative, health condition, with a cause.
There are three types of illness, according to the International Classification of Diseases (ICD10) and the World Health Organization (WHO).
Parasitic Illnesses– (the WHO refers to these as communicable diseases). A parasitic illness is when something, a living entity, attacks the patient. The germ theory of disease is all about parasitic illnesses, and it’s easy to make the mistake of thinking all parasites are small, almost invisible. But a tiger is a parasite. As is any living entity that attacks the patient, creating an illness. Parasitic illnesses can range from arthritis (parasitic arthritis) to humans to tigers to zygomycosis. A person can be a parasite, even a community can be a parasite. And when we broaden our vision further, we can see that the patient might be the parasite, might be harming themselves, and that co-dependency might be a co-parasitic illness. Life is complex. The patient’s mind can harm the body, and the patient’s spirit can harm the mind.
When the patient has a parasitic illness, the only cure is to address the cause. We need to identify the cause and then fight it. If a bacteria makes you ill, the cure is to fight the bacteria.
Healthiness Illnesses – A healthiness illness arises when the patient’s health drops so low that an illness appears. If you don’t eat, your health will drop, and after some time you will acquire the illness ‘starvation’. There are many more specific illnesses of starvation. If you don’t eat enough Vitamin C, your health will drop, and you will suffer the illness called ‘scurvy’. If you don’t eat enough zinc, you will eventually suffer the illness of zinc deficiency. But, if you eat too much zinc, your health will drop, and you will suffer the illness called ‘zinc toxicity’. Illness can be caused by unhealthy deficiencies or by unhealthy excesses. But take note: zinc is not the ’cause’ of the deficiency nor of the toxicity. The cause is an excess, or deficiency of action, of consumption.
It is likely that many, many illnesses are complex variations of starvation and excess of nutrient consumption. Modern medicine generally studies nutrition by focusing on single items, not combinations.
Healthiness illnesses are not just about you eat, or what you don’t eat, they involve every healthy life process.
If you don’t get enough exercise, you will eventually become ill. Exercise is more than just physical activity. We need to exercise our bodies, our minds, our spirits, and our communities to stay healthy. We also need to exercise restraint. With insufficient exercise, you might suffer from many different illnesses, ranging from arthritis to alcoholism, to . If you get too much exercise, you might suffer from many other illnesses ranging from arthritis to Zieve’s syndrome.
Healthiness illnesses are caused by unhealthiness, by unhealthy activities or lack of healthy activities. They are cured by healthiness,by addressing the unhealthiness. The cure is to address the cause.
If you have scurvy, because you are not consuming foods with sufficient Vitamin C, the cure is to change your diet. Consuming Vitamin C will not cure the illness – it will create a chronic illness, treated with Vitamin C. If you have gingivitis because you are smoking too many cigarettes – the cure is fewer cigarettes. The cure is to address the cause.
According to the ICD10, there are three types of disease: communicable diseases (parasitic diseases), non communicable diseases (healthiness diseases) and injuries. The third category of disease, injury, is a result, or a symptom of illness, it is not illness.
Injury can result from a parasitic illness: bacteria, soldiers, and tigers can cause injury. Injury can result from a healthiness illness, dietary deficiencies and excessive exercise can cause injury. Any illness might cause injury. Injury can also result from a simple accident or incident.
Injuries cannot be cured, they can only be healed. Our healthiness is constantly healing small injuries, and when a larger injury occurs, our healthiness steps up to high gear to heal the injury. Some injuries can be completely healed. Some can only be partially healed, and some are simply fatal, such that death will result before healing can occur.
An injury that does not heal, or does not heal completely, results in a handicap. We gradually accumulate handicaps as we grow older – sometimes we acquire a large handicap in a single incident. A handicap is a result of an injury, that cannot be healed.
Every illness can be cured. The cure is to address the cause.
MERCK’s manual of Diagnosis and Therapy, Lange’s Current Medical Diagnosis and Treatment, and also the reference Complete Guide to Illness and Injury do not use the word cure in their title, not in the table of contents, not in their indexes. Cure is not defined and the word cure is generally avoided, even when the cause of an illness is clearly identified, and the ‘treatment’ is directed against the cause. Why does this happen?
Perhaps it’s because of the confusion around the word cure. We often think of a ‘cure’ as only being present when there is a ‘complete cure’. But few, if any, cures are perfect. If you suffer from scurvy, Vitamin C will cure your illness, stop the progress of the disease – but a complete recovery might not be possible. If you have gingivitis because you are smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, and you cut back to two cigarettes a day, that’s a cure – even though you might never be ‘completely cured’ of the damage caused.
Or perhaps it’s simply that many of the treatments recommended do not address cause. As a result, they cannot possibly cure any illness. Most medical treatments today are treatments for symptoms, not for causes of illness. Symptoms cannot be cured.
How can we prove the cause? We might first look to science, to philosophy to understand cause and effect. Look if you want. You will find only shadows. There is no simple, clear understanding of ’cause and effect’ in science or philosophy.
How can we find the cause of any illness, if cause and effect cannot be proven?
By curing it. When we cure the illness, we have found the cause. If we are wrong, who cares? The illness has been cured. If we fail to cure the illness – we haven’t yet found the correct cause yet, and the illness persists.
Cause and effect are fundamental features of life. Life makes active uses of cause and effect to live, to reproduce, and to evolve. Every life process is a cause, and an effect, just as every illness is a cause, and an effect. The only mystery is the mystery of life.
We need to persist in our search for the cure. Every cure must address the cause. Every successful cure proves a cause.
to your health, tracy
Tracy is the author of two books about healthicine:
