Suffering From A Chronic Disease or Chronic Pain?
Chronic illnesses can be devastating to deal with, but there is reason for hope. We can also frame chronic pain as a chronic disease so for the purpose of this post, we’ll consider both.
One of the most things for a person suffering from chronic health problems is to take the approach of never giving up.
It can be an incredibly frustrating process but you can’t just lose all hope and accept the problems as final. It’s very important to continue believing you may find things to help improve the problems.
Chronic Versus Permanent
Chronic disease is not necessarily permanent disease. Chronic only refers to a process lasting 3 months or more by definition.
Having said that, many diseases are classified currently as un-curable.
There are a few problems with classifying things this way.
They may be right, they may currently be right (many diseases were once considered incurable but no longer are), or they may be un-curable with current standards of care.
Many chronic diseases, in fact most, are lifestyle diseases.
This is according to the CDC.
In other words, our lifestyle choices over time cause many serious chronic diseases.
The challenge in treatment is that generally the individual suffering is only getting ever increasing amounts of various medications for ever worsening symptoms without ever addressing the cause of the chronic disease (according to the CDC), lifestyle.
When the causes are addressed, many people see remarkable changes.
We see this reported in many chronic diseases in the literature with dietary, exercise, sleep, and stress changes.
Are they cured?
You can’t really say that if it’s classified as incurable… but if their symptoms improve and objective findings improve then they are happy regardless of cure status.
Let me give a great example of a serious, incurable disease being helped with a simple dietary change.
Some autoimmune celiac disease sufferers go into remission by simply removing ‘gluten’ from their diets. Of course, Celiac disease is an autoimmune reaction to gluten – among other things but that is beyond the scope of this blog post.
An interesting case study of Medical Doctor, Terry Wahl’s, recovery from MS can be found here in her TED Talk.
Yes, these may seem like extreme examples.
However…
You could argue though that many people (not all) with a chronic disease are suffering because of lifestyle challenges. The same is true of chronic pain. This is despite the fact that the symptoms may be severe and that no healthcare practitioner ever really told them this. This is one reason why so many Americans are having serious health problems and this includes chronic pain.
Dr. Marc Hagebusch’s answer to… “How do I overcome my chronic illness, I’m desperate?”
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