They removed disease curing?!

Not in my games! At least it's a BA now. It seems like a lot of reference to disease in general has been removed from the new rules (at least from what I've seen so far), which is a shame since one campaign I'm running is based around a plague. Oh well. Good thing I have my homebrew disease mechanics.

Quote from Riesenfriese >>

They removed disease curing?!

 They removed diseases period. Or rather, somewhere along the line they've announced that diseases are being handled under the poisoned condition.
Granted, I don't recall where specifically that was mentioned so treat that info as rumor.

If diseases are handled under the Poisoned condition and Lesser Restoration removes Poisoned (it does) then Lesser Restoration cures disease.

The exact mechanics around diseases were never formally codified, which made apply features that fixed them a fiddly grey area. I think the shift to integrating the relevant effects with Poisoned works- any disease significant enough to be of note would definitely impact the body sharply enough to give disadvantage to attack rolls and ability checks, so in the same way that Charmed tends to be applied to mind control effects, I think tying the Poisoned condition to such infirmities helps integrate them with the hard mechanics in a way that allows players to consistently interact with them.

The DM is likely not to give the common cold stats, much less the poisoned condition. And even if he does, are the players just supposed to assume that? How is a cleric player supposed to have even the faintest idea that this spell should work on most diseases? How is the DM supposed to know?

Or maybe the player knows but the DM doesn't know, but it's also not in the book, so it only leads to a table argument...

You can't just remove disease from the spell description assuming most diseases will be represented by the prisoned condition because most diseases are likely to be narrative devices.

If the DM doesn't know how diseases work int he rules, then the DM isn't doing their job properly.

And the book should actually do it's job of helping the GM run the game.

I just noticed it now. It can't cure diseases anymore?!

Oh, okay... so diseases are poison now. I guess cancer is also poison then? I know I once used this spell to cure cancer in a modern setting a while back.

Removing reference to disease? This is one "clarification" that basically went backwards. Diseases are not poisons. Diseases can have different effects on the body than being poisoned. Every earlier version of D&D, including the 2014 5th Ed detailed many different diseases and how they were to be handled. Now, all of a sudden, we are just throwing diseases away or making them poisons because they are what, too complicated? Sounds to me like lazy writers not believing in the intelligence of DMs. Wizards of the Coast already had the most massive flop ever with version 4 because they tried to make D&D like playing a video game on paper. It sucked. I hope this isn't a trend back toward that type of game design.

As for me and my group, we will continue using the 2014 version of many of the spells, including lesser restoration.