Cure is the name of a benefit in some health insurance plans that helps pay for care when you can’t work due to a disability. This can keep you from going into debt or losing your home while you recover from an illness or injury. It’s important to understand what cure actually means for you before you choose an insurance plan.

For most medical conditions, there’s no cure, but some treatment outcomes can help you feel better and live a healthier life. A cure is one of these treatment outcomes that may be achieved by your doctor.

Whether your condition is curable depends on the type of disease, its progression and your response to treatment. Each kind of cancer has its own grades, stages and symptoms, so it can be challenging to predict if you will be cured.

Some doctors have avoided using the word “cure” because they are hesitant to make false promises or raise unrealistic expectations. Additionally, disease progression and individual responses to treatments can vary significantly.

The definition of cure is an important consideration when discussing gene therapies or other innovative treatments. Because trials use specific endpoints to measure effectiveness, if cure were to be included in the design of a trial, it would need to be well-defined with a component of time (e.g., five years) in order to be a valid measure of efficacy. Moreover, the discussion of cure in clinical practice often leads to speculation about what it will mean to be cured or what a “cure” might look like.