4e Cure Disease badly worded/overpowered

[RGTraynor]

Beyond that, look. While GURPS is far better at this than most games (in so far that non-adventuring spells actually do exist), the magic system's design still revolves around adventuring/non-adventuring paradigms. A spell that puts hit points of damage on a target gets three paragraphs and can be cast in a second or two. Cure Disease gets three sentences and takes ten freaking minutes to cast. And if the authors devoted enough space to spell out all the complexities of Cure Disease, we all know there would've been many protests: "Who the eff cares whether Cure Disease can handle beriberi or not? Is that useful in a dungeon?"

Me being firmly in the "magic has rules, it's not just a handwave" camp, I've given a good bit of thought to the spell. I've houseruled the casting time down twentyfold, and that it won't work on viral diseases (short of criticals) ... TL4 (or 5) just has no notion of a virus.

But even with that, there's been chalktalking. One of my longtime players has been seriously diabetic (as in dialysis as a teenager) his whole life, and I've been myself the last decade. But "eliminate" the diabetes all you want, it's not the result of an infection, it's the result of the pancreas no longer producing enough insulin OR the body's cells no longer processing insulin properly. Are such metabolic disorders susceptible to Cure Disease?

My houserule is "no." It can repair the retinal damage, fix the neuropathy ... but the risk factors? My coming down with diabetes was always a possibility: my family's riddled with it, and more than one has died early from it. What safed the bet with me was when my joints broke down to the point I couldn't do combat LARPing any more, or the six hours of fight practice I was doing a week at age 42 to keep up with my juniors, and I put on 40 pounds in a year. Cure Disease isn't going to bring me back down to fighting weight.