To the extent that internet cures are not online health misinformation, they resist the logic of intervention as problem-solving precisely because they provide resolution to problems that otherwise remain indeterminate: digital inscription of miracle cures as record-making and record-keeping, transnational networked sociality that emerges out of the increasingly datafied environment of executable text, the reconfiguration of downtime into connectedness and belonging, and the creation of an alternative miraculous space for therapy as a playful activity. The crowdsourcing of miracle cures happened organically via social media as an intermediary for matching community needs with community capacity; that the longevity of these online groups enables post hoc creation of datasets that can be explored computationally, that the dynamic knowledge-making processes that unfold on these groups become fully open to view thanks to platform affordances – are secondary to the pre-digital social dynamics that drove these practices forward. These secondary utilities, however, came to solidify and legitimize these practices in an ecology of datafied behaviour; in this process, these utilities also transformed the expectation around what it means to engage with miracle cures. If seeking herbal cures for cancer, for example, used to mean coming to a lương y (‘doctor of good conscience’) for advice, or to a herbal store to purchase thuốc gia truyền recipes (‘family transmission’ recipes) and coming away with instructions that are based on socially sanctioned expertise, increasingly people are taking to social media to work out the details of these bodies of knowledge both in response to emergent health concerns and to enact the work of care. That it became acceptable and even desirable to carry out this kind of work in such a digital context is a by-product of the historical continuation of practices that never quite ceased to exist in the first place – and also of emerging forms of sociality as compositions of meaning via digital platform affordances.

Miracle cures proliferate at the digital edge in ways that are very important to their survival: in languages that skirt the technical capabilities and political will of regimes of automated platform content moderation, as esoteric discourse that defies easy categorization, in formats that are prioritized for the imperative of platform profit, and at a temporality constantly recalibrated to accommodate self-time/ eigenzeit.