The field of medicine has its own language, and frankly, it’s a mess. Different fields of medicine have different languages, which sometimes disagree on the simplest terms and use many words inconsistently. Is depression a sign, a symptom, an illness, a disease, a disorder, a medical condition, or as defined in the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a symptom domain? It’s all of the above, depending on the patient, the person speaking, the situation, and other factors. Depression can also be applied to physical attributes which might be natural, unnatural or a sign of illness.
Cures Do Not Exist in Medicine
Most importantly, the word cure hardly exists in medicine. Many medical dictionaries do not define the word cure. No medical reference contains a scientific medical definition of cure. Cures do exist in medicine and illnesses are cured, but there is no accounting for cures. Most cures are invisible to the medical view. Cures that come naturally from healthiness or that are brought about by healthy actions are not considered cures. Therefore: “there is no cure for the common cold (mumps, measles, influenza, etc.).” These infections are considered incurable. However, when patients are healthier, they cure faster, and when patients are less healthy the cure takes longer – or death might result. The only infections cured in the language of medicine are those cured by a medical treatment, a drug or surgery, that removes or kills the infecting agent.
All other cures are currently outside of the language of medicine.
‘Physicians of the Utmost Fame
Were called at once; but when they came
They answered, as they took their Fees,|
There is no Cure for this Disease‘ – Belloc
All chronic diseases are considered incurable by conventional medicine. Cured is not defined for any mental disorder. Even trivial diseases like scurvy and others caused by malnutrition, do not have medically documented cures in authoritative medical references. Instead, patients are “treated” with no intention to cure. Patients with diabetes, arthritis, PTSD, and more are advised to “learn to live with” (learn to die with) their disease. If, or when a patient finds a cure, or is cured naturally by health, the cure cannot be recognized. All cures are confused with remission. There is no scientific or medical distinction between remission and cure. Cured is not defined. Nobody cares about claims of remission. Claims of cured cannot be proven.
Although the words illness, disease, disorder, medical condition, and sickness are often used interchangeably, there is a general consensus with regards to illness, disease, and sickness. We can begin here to create a language of cure. The well known witty quote is “A patient goes to the doctor with an illness and goes home with a disease“. What is an illness? But, first, we need to understand healthiness.
Healthiness
An illness is an instance of being ill. A healthiness is a measurable instance or unit of health. Health is a broad, overall concept. Healthiness is a defined, measurable concept. A healthiness might be very simple, like Vitamin C consumption, or very complex, like circulatory system health.
A healthiness can be very small, or very wide and very deep. It can be very strong, or very weak in many dimensions. When it becomes so weak that a problem is noticeable, or when it begins to affect other aspects of healthiness, an illness is present. An illness is negative. An illness is a hole in health.
Illness
An illness is what the patient has. The illness is honest and true. Every illness is a negative judgement. Every illness has a cause. Sometimes the cause is gone – in the past. An elementary illness, an element of illness, or an illness element, has a single cause. When an illness has multiple independent causes, it consists of several illness elements, it is a compound illness. Every cause has a cause, so every illness has a causal chain. Causes can be in the environment, the patient’s life processes, in their body, their mind, their spirits, or their communities. Causal chains can connect from or leap to different layers. The first cure for any illness is to successfully address the cause, to break the causal chain. Compound illnesses require multiple first cures. Every illness has consequences. The consequences of an illness include signs, symptoms, and sometimes attributes. Signs can be observed independently, like heart rate, blood pressure, and a rash. Symptoms are observed by the patient, but cannot be validated by a doctor or other person, like pain, feelings of hot, cold, and disorientation. Attributes caused by illness often persist after the illness is cured, like scars, lost teeth, or even lost limbs. The second cure is healing, to address the damage that is a consequence of the illness. Healing occurs naturally, but can often be aided or improved by healthy actions. The third cure is to address negative attributes that result from an illness if necessary and if possible.
Disease
A disease is an abstraction, a generalization covering a group of similar illnesses. Diseases are often defined by consequences, signs and symptoms, without reference to cause. A single disease concept covers independent causes. No disease can be cured, because no disease is a single case, by definition.
A case of disease is what the doctor diagnoses. A case of disease is rarely mapped to a specific causal chain resulting in the present signs and symptoms because when a disease is diagnosed cause is generally ignored. At diagnosis it might be named a disease, a disorder, a medical condition, or many other names. Most cases of disease are never proven to be cured because cured is not defined for most diseases.
Not every disease is an illness. Not every illness is a disease.
No disease is an illness. NO disease is a specific case. No illness is a disease – an illness is a specific case which might be mapped to a disease. However, many illnesses cannot be mapped to any disease, and many more are never diagnosed because they are cured by health before any doctor is needed.
Most illnesses are never diagnosed. We seldom visit a doctor for a cold, a minor injury or other illness. Even most infections are cured by health, without the aid of a medicine, although these cures, like all cures are seldom recognized and not accounted for by medicine.
Many people have illnesses that cannot be diagnosed, for multiple reasons. There are more people with more illnesses than people with diseases, by definition, because if the diagnosis is correct an illness must be present to diagnose.
Sickness
A sickness is a community’s view of illness and disease. Different communities see different sicknesses and different types of sickness. Some sicknesses can be mapped to a disease, can be diagnosed. Those sicknesses are recognized by a medical community. Some sicknesses cannot be mapped to any disease: a group of conservatives might view anyone who expresses left-leaning tendencies as “sick”. Many sicknesses are observations or judgements with little requirement for scientific judgement, no requirement for identification of the cause, and little expectation of a cure.
