CareCure itself does not advocate particular points of view concerning care, cure, or life with spinal cord injury. Many members of course advocate their views on these and other subjects, such as politics, religion, food, music, literature, etc. These are views of the members, not CareCure.
While advocacy movements have started within CareCure, the responsibility for these movements rests with the members and not CareCure itself. CareCure does not espouse any particular view on stem cells or other matters. I have discouraged attempts to collect money from carecure members in the same way we discourage advertising on this site.
Let me explain why I decided that the mission of CareCure is information and not advocacy. Before I founded CareCure in July 2001, I had started Spinewire, the first interactive community forum. In 1999, I agreed to allow a company called Cando to take over Spinewire in hopes of generating revenues for spinal cord injury research.
In 2001, Cando crashed along with the dot com industry. Cando took spinewire.com and cando.com into its grave. Even though I offered them $40,000 of my own money to purchase the spinewire/cando database from them, they sold the database and the remnants of Cando to some company for $200,000.
When I formed CareCure, I decided not to allow CareCure be controlled by any organization again. From 2001-2006, we hosted CareCure on a commercial servers. It was expensive and we moved CareCure to Rutgers University. In March 2020 we moved out of Rutgers. It continues to function with little or no interference from any organization. At the present, I am supporting the server with my donations. We have retained our independence.
CareCure cannot itself be an advocacy site is because there is a tendency for advocates to attack and drive out people who don't agree with them. Advocates of all types are welcome here, except when they attack each other. That is why the first rule of the site is no attacks of other members. Unfortunately, many members break this rule all the time.
It also is a human tendency to want to gather your friends around you and ban people that you don't like. We do not ban people because they hold unpopular views or are disliked. Over the years, we have banned relatively few people for egregiously attacking others and only after repeated warnings and refusal to comply.
Spammers are the key exception to this banning rule. We ban spammers (i.e. people who post advertisements on our forums) on sight because they are not legitimate members of our community and are seeking to use our web site for commercial purposes.
Thus, CareCure is an interactive information site for all people in the community, not only those who hold a particular point of view about care, cure, or life with spinal cord injury. We welcome all those who want to know about any aspect of spinal cord injury, who have information that they wish to share with others, and advocates of all view points.
CareCure is as non-intrusive a moderated site as any on internet. We generally do not interfere with what people write or their language, unless it is truly offending other members and giving rise to firefights between members. We don't charge anybody to be members. There are only three rules that we apply to members:
- No attacks of other members
- No spam
- No commercial advertisements