Why Don’t Doctors use the word Cure?

Doctor’s don’t use the word cure because they are not trained in cures. Doctors are trained to diagnose diseases and medical conditions, but they are not trained to diagnose cured.

Cured is not defined for most diseases.

Not defined. When cured is not defined, no doctor can prove a cure. Cured is defined for diseases caused by a pathogen or parasite, a live entity, and cured is accomplished with a poison that kills the pathogen. The test for cured is to prove that the pathogen is no longer present. There are no other medical tests for cured.

#Cure and cured are not defined for most diseases, Click To Tweet

Cured is not defined for arthritis, beriberi, cancer, diabetes, depression, gout, hypertension, obesity… and many more diseases. So no doctor should use the word cure with regards to these diseases.

Cured is not defined for the common cold, measles or influenza, even though they are generally and easily cured by health and time because there is no medicine involved in the cure.  No medicine, in conventional medicine, means no cure. If you don’t pay for the cure, it’s not a cure in current theories of conventional medicine.

The solution is trivial, but there is no interest. The solution is to define cured for all diseases. There’s no money in cures. No insurance company pays for cures, they pay for treatments. Cured is not defined, so cures are unimportant. Cures are not counted. There are no statistics for cured.

Many doctors also caution their staff to avoid the word cure, for another reason. Claiming a cure puts the doctor at risk. It might not be a cure – even if it was treated with an antibiotic, for example, and appears to be cured. There is no medical definition between a remission and a new case of disease for most diseases – because a new case requires proof of cure.

The medical profession, conventional and alternative, has a long list of weasel words to use instead of cure:

– defeat your cancer
– reverse your diabetes
– roll back your aging
– conquer your hypertension
– put your arthritis into remission
– banish your migraines

None of these words requires a cure. None of them requires addressing the cause of the illness. No illness can be cured unless the cause is addressed. Nobody complains, and more importantly, nobody sues if you say they defeated their cancer – and it comes back, or they reversed their diabetes, and it reverses it again, or that they banished their migraines – and they return.

The book A Calculus of Curing articulates the true meanings of cure, and relates them to these different medical claims.

If a doctor says their migraines are cured, and the patient gets a new migraine, they think the cure was a failure. It’s nonsense. If your health cures your cold, and you get a cold again is it a “return of your cold” that proves the cure invalid? Of course not. If you have scurvy and it is cured by a healthy diet – and your later stop eating a healthy diet and get a NEW case of scurvy, is it a return of the disease? No. It’s a return of the cause, creating a new case of the disease.

A #cure exists when cause and consequences have been successfully addressed. Click To Tweet

Cured is when the cause has been successfully addressed. But most doctors and most medicines pay no attention to cause. As a result, most doctors and most medicines cannot cure most diseases.

So they don’t use the word cure. Doctors don’t use the word cure. And – you can check your medicine cabinet and pharmacy – medicine labels do not use the word cure either because they don’t aim to cure. They aim to treat disease, sometimes to reverse, fight, banish symptoms, roll back signs, but not to cure.

Note: This post was written based on my response to a question on Quora. https://www.quora.com/Why-dont-doctors-use-the-word-cure-And-as-a-doctor-how-do-you-feel-about-using-this-word-in-medicine/answer/Tracy-Kolenchuk 

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About Tracy Kolenchuk

Founder of Healthicine.org. Author. A New THeory of Cure. Theory of Cure - Update 2023. Healthicine: The Arts and Sciences of Health and Healthiness, Healthicine: Introduction to Healthicine.
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