Cure facts for kids

A cure is when a medical condition completely goes away. This could be a disease, a mental illness, or even something like baldness that someone wants to change. When you are cured, the problem is permanently gone.

Sometimes, a cure comes from medication, a surgical operation, or even changing your lifestyle. If you get a common cold and then feel better, you are cured of that cold. But you could still get another cold later.

It's important to know that a disease that can't be cured (an incurable disease) isn't always deadly (a terminal illness). And a disease that can be cured can still sometimes lead to death.

Doctors talk about a cure rate or cure fraction. This is the percentage of people with a disease who are cured by a certain treatment. They figure this out by comparing how long treated people stay healthy to people who never had the disease.

How Doctors Know Someone is Cured

For complex diseases, like cancer, doctors often look at how long patients stay healthy after treatment. This is called disease-free survival. If someone stays healthy for a very long time, it's like they are in a permanent remission. This is often seen as being cured.

Doctors use special ways to study groups of patients. They compare how long people who were treated stay free of the disease to healthy people. If the number of people who are still disease-free stops dropping, it means that everyone who is still healthy is likely permanently cured.

If this "survival curve" never flattens out, it means the disease is still considered incurable with the treatments available.

Sometimes, it takes many years to gather enough information to know if a disease is truly cured. This can be frustrating for patients. Because of this, some people talk about a psychological cure. This is when a patient decides they are likely cured and chooses to live their life as if they are.

What Are Related Terms?

Sometimes, words like "response" or "recovery" are used. They are similar to "cure" but have different meanings.

Response

A response means that symptoms have partly gone down after treatment. It's not a full cure, but it shows the treatment is helping.

Recovery

Recovery means getting back to health or normal functioning. Someone who is cured might not be fully recovered yet. Also, someone who has recovered might not be cured. For example, they might be in a temporary remission or carrying a disease without symptoms.

Prevention

Prevention is about stopping an injury, sickness, or disease from happening in the first place. It usually doesn't help someone who is already sick. For example, vaccinations prevent diseases like polio. But a vaccine won't cure someone who already has polio. A treatment or cure is used after a medical problem has started.

Therapy

Therapy is a treatment for a problem. It may or may not lead to a cure. For conditions that can't be cured, therapy helps make the condition better. This often lasts only as long as the treatment continues. For example, there is no cure for AIDS, but treatments can slow down the harm from HIV.

Treatments don't always work for everyone. For example, chemotherapy is a treatment for cancer. It might cure some patients, but not all. Even if a treatment only cures a small number of patients, it is still considered a curative treatment for those who are cured.

Examples of Cures Through History

Cures can come in many forms. These include natural or man-made antibiotics for bacterial infections, antivirals for some viral infections, antifungals, antitoxins, vitamins, gene therapy, surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy. Even with many cures developed, there are still many diseases that cannot be cured.

1700s

Scurvy became curable and preventable with vitamin C. This was discovered by James Lind in 1753. He found that eating limes helped sailors avoid scurvy.

1890s

Emil Adolf von Behring and his team created antitoxins for diphtheria and tetanus. These treatments were a huge step forward in treating serious infectious diseases.

1930s

Sulphonamides became the first widely available cure for bacterial infections. Also, the first antimalarials were made, making malaria curable.

1940s

Bacterial infections became widely curable with the development of antibiotics.

2010s

Hepatitis C, a viral infection, became curable. This was thanks to new antiviral medications.

See also

• Eradication of infectious diseases
• Preventive medicine
• Remission (medicine)
• Relapse, the reappearance of a disease
• Spontaneous remission