Category: healthcare

Contemplating Disease – Part 10 – Your Visit – September 24, 2018

Previously I mentioned keeping a journal of your illness experience, a medical journal.  In the past I’ve also advocated the benefit of keeping a gratitude journal.  Journalling, however you decide to do it whether through words, drawings, collage, completely free form or a mixture has no known harmful effects and only known beneficial effects.   Our brain, perhaps our whole being, is programmed to remember bad things more than good things it seems.  This may…

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Contemplating Disease – Part 9 – Power of Names – September 23, 2018

In my leisure I read a lot of Science Fiction, Fantasy, General Fiction, and Young Adult literature.  If anyone has read anything dealing with magic, or sorcery, or witchcraft and lore one thing that is a constant is the power of a name.  In fact mages, witches, sorcerers guard their true name knowing that someone who knows their name has power over them.  To know someone’s name is to have a power over them.  Think…

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Contemplating Disease – Part 8a – Religious Ideation – September 17, 2018

Faith can be a wonderful thing and it can also be dangerous.  I’ll write more about the power of faith with regard to managing illness and disease.  For now I would briefly like to stop here and speak of harmful religious ideation, a term that frequently used among chaplains when working with patients and families who would believe something that was harmful to their lives and contrary to the advice of their medical providers. Being…

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Contemplating Disease – Part 7 – Shijo Kingo and Managing Illness – September

In Chih-I’s time, and in fact for most of the time humans have been around until more recent times, the idea of living with long term illness didn’t exist much.  You either recovered or you died in most cases.  With the advances of modern medicine people are living longer, dying at later ages, and living with illnesses that would previously meant death.  This is a wonderful benefit of modern medical science.  We have much to…

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