Where's George Orwell When You Need Him?

It was probably 1984 when I read 1984, but it's definitely one of those books that sticks with you. And certainly in the years since 1984, there've been no shortage of articles and arguments claiming that current society was shaping up to be as Orwell described in his novel. 

Go ahead and add this one to the list.

There's a lot going on in Orwell's novel, but one of the primary topics is the manipulation, and abuse, of language. I was thinking about this today as I co-worker and I were walking past a billboard posted by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Their slogan? "Cures start here." And the Hutch isn't the only health care organization claiming the word cure for marketing purposes.

Which is all well and good, save for the fact that in adopting the word cure there's also an implicit -- and in some cases explicit -- effort to redefine the term. I'm no linguist, but a bit of web surfing was enough to show that the word cure has roots in the concept of "making whole." Originally, the word cure was applied to the patient, and to cure the patient was to make them whole again. Over time the word began to be applied to the disease -- e.g., to cure cancer -- but the underlying concept was still that of restoring the sick individual to health and making them whole.

A few things that to my mind are inconsistent with that definition of "cure": 1) basic research on how biological systems work or drugs behave; 2) treatments that require lifetime follow-ups and consistent monitoring; 3) procedures or processes that don't actually interact with a sick person; 4) treatments that require devices to be embedded inside you or for you to continue taking pills, capsules, injections, infusions or any other intervention to remain "cured"; 5) promises that something that's happening today will at some unspecified future date lead to a "cure."

I'm a big believer in basic research, clinical trials, and the rest. But those things are not "cures," and calling them cures does a disservice to everybody.

It's sort of like the word "literally." Literally used to be perfectly fine word with a perfectly fine meaning. Until everybody started using it to mean the exact opposite of its actual meaning. I mean, unless you've got a hot air balloon strapped to your back, if you say "I literally floated out of the room" you're not using the word correctly. But eventually the dictionary writers got tired of fighting off the "common" usage, and so literally was recently redefined to mean both "literally" and "the opposite of literally." And we've lost a perfectly good word.

I fear we're on the same track with "cure." Frankly, it seems that medicine has found it too hard in too many cases to make the patient whole -- to "cure" them -- and rather than dealing with why that may be, it seems we've decided instead to just redefine the term. 

Well, that and the fact that fundraising is a lot easier if you can tell your donors they're funding "cures" rather than "research."

But it's going to be a sad day for patients everywhere when that original definition of "cure" disappears completely.