Therapy, remedy, cure: disorder and the spatiotemporality of medicine and everyday life.

Increasingly, there is a temporal differentiation among kinds of treatments available through medicine. Cures offer one-time resolution of symptoms; that is, with the benefit of a cure, there is no longer a medical problem in need of treatment. Remedies offer temporary, situational relief of symptoms. Therapies offer temporary relief of symptoms, but promise the possibility of nonsituational fixes, offering universal cessation of symptoms but only for a limited time. Therapy has become increasingly integral to the rhythm of everyday life, particularly in the United States, where medical treatment and pharmaceutical consumption have become a means for normalizing oneself to social expectations. I draw on fieldwork with people who experience sleep disorders-narcolepsy, sleep apnea, and delayed and advance sleep phase syndrome-to explicate these models of treatment and consider how these medical spatiotemporalities formulate emergent everyday orders of life.