I don't want to be a downer because I absolutely do want more & better medical research & care, but cure-related messaging really doesn't resonate with me for a whole bunch of reasons that I need to work on articulating.

I don't want a cure for, say, dysautonomia until everyone who experiences dysautonomia has access to compassionate & informed care.

I don't want the idea of a cure to pit us all against each other & send us running back into the diagnostic siloes that weren't built to serve us.

And I feel like cure-related campaigns reinforce the myth that we understand chronic illness enough to be developing cures in the first place.

In the hands of people who think we aren't getting better because we don't want it enough, this myth hurts us.

Right now, across the spectrum of chronic illness, it looks to me like we've developed a lot of protocols that redirect the discomfort. And I'm not saying that's bad!

But I'm saying that the tools we have typically try to replace our bigger problems with smaller ones.

Most of the things that are represented as "cures" right now will replace disease progression with fatigue or replace your worst symptoms with constant hypervigilance.

And because of the improvements, a lot of healthy people will sigh with relief & ignore the cost we still pay.

But honestly this trade-off isn't the biggest problem.

The biggest problem is how hard it is to get anybody to acknowledge your chronic illness in the first place. The biggest problem is that it takes some combination of privilege & labor & luck to become a candidate for a cure.