A panacea is something that is regarded as a cure-all—that is, something that will make everything about a situation better.

// The new program should help with the city’s housing crisis, but it’s no panacea.

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“It was a mistake to regard and romanticize information as a panacea for the world’s problems. For they are completely different things: information, knowledge and wisdom. Every day we are bombarded with thousands of snippets of information, but there is very little knowledge, and no time to slow down to gain knowledge, much less wisdom.” — Elif Shafak, 1984: 75th Anniversary Edition by George Orwell, 2024

The maxim “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” isn’t true, but belief in a miraculous botanical “cure for whatever ails ya” has existed for millennia and is at the root of the word panacea. In current use, panacea most often refers to a remedy—medical or otherwise—that inevitably falls far short of what some claim or hope it can do, but the word’s Latin and Greek forebears referred to plants with legit healing properties, including mints and yarrows. Both the Latin word panacēa and its Greek antecedent panákeia (from the word panakēs, meaning “all-healing”) were applied especially to flowering herbs (genus Opopanax) of the carrot family used to treat various ailments.