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Cure begins once the person becomes aware of the reality of disease in their system and seeks the guidance of a skilled practitioner of medicine. It is not just the application of a particular medicine but leads down many societal, constitutional and cosmic paths. Drugs or remedies are not going to cure all disease but should be accompanied by social and individualized care. That care has taken shape in psychological counseling, hygiene, diet and nutrition, and many other beneficial studies.
There is no clear moment where cure ends, just as in an organism there is no clear point at which sickness begins. The result of disease is recognized only sometime after it has occurred. In observing the sick person, we have to account for the possibility that the person who believes they took sick yesterday may have been sick for quite some time. Also cure may take place long after the presenting symptoms of the patient are alleviated.
The identification of disease by name is a need that in the collective thought of medicine has been passed down through the generations. Even homeopathy has tried to categorize disease which has led into misunderstandings and a lack of success. The lexicon of pathology has swerved and avoided criticism by changing meanings as modern sciences change. Terms of "virus" and "cancer" and "brain" have different meanings than a few decades ago and continue to change. Even the traditional mechanisms of disease are being questioned by new threats such as the "mad cow disease."
The sheer mass of information about the human body is creating an engineering corps of medical professionals armed with technical manuals that take computers to search through. But unlike engineering where specialists work to bring two points of a project together, the human body does not have well-defined structures to join at the seams just because our language has managed to isolate them. This makes for incurable situations for a whole medical staff but a possible miraculous 'remission' after visiting a local homeopath in one visit. Doctors can document the ability of the organism to repair itself but still have to question what activated it.
The criteria by which we judge a cure is not by how many lab tests were run, how many out-of-state specialists were brought in, or what kind of state-of-the-art technologies costing millions of dollars were appointed to the task, but that we have improved the condition.
The isolated cures of the individual practitioner are meaningless if they can't be generalized into a law of cure that can be adopted by other physicians. The single case study can not be the basis for a responsible medical community practicing on tens or hundreds of patients in the same method. It is a control method of statistics that has given us the standard by which we can measure success and work with a large number of possibilities for cure. That method uses the collection of data which ignores the individual for the elusively defined disease taxonomy in current use.
