Why Regarding Unknown Illnesses As "Mental Disease" Is Offensive

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Since most people take modern medicine as "absolute" (by saying that I mean, people believe modern medicine can take care of all physical illnesses, except fatal diseases like cancer), they easily consider the cause of unknown illnesses as "mental". This is why we often see people try to "encourage" those who suffer invisible diseases to work "harder", to push through, as if they are mentally weak individuals. I still remember once a kind lady's first words to me after hearing my brief story: " be tough." I have to say, not only this is a wrong approach, but also offensive attitude toward those patients. Why, because one of primary reasons these people got so sick is precisely because they are mentally tough - so tough that they overdrew their energy, and their illnesses are nothing but the consequence of their mental toughness (physical energy overdrawn).

Do I Deserve Help? My Pride And My disappointment

The Help (Photo credit: __MaRiNa__)

During my relapse I am extremely debilitated so I often need help. But, I am living alone, also I happened to be a person who never learned how to ask help. What's worse, I am a person who doesn't look like need help. My relatively strong body build, my absolutely decisive countenance, my firm stride as long as my health permit me to be vertical, all these qualities make girls want to depend on me, guys want to leave me alone. This, also is why I better live alone during my chronic condition.

I have been in major relapse since June, and just started recovering since recent several days. This morning I feel almost perfect so I wanted to move several gardening stones (small size like football!) back to my backyard. Trust me, this is far less than a piece of cake for anyone in normal health condition, but for me, it is a serious task, so serious that I planned to do but have not touched it for days due to the fact that it might trigger another crash, which also could cause the cancellation of my weekend classes, on which my current income depends. Anyhow this morning I felt I could do it, at least I could do part of it. I also had my strategy, first to put several stones in my small dolly and push them to backyard. Plus, the fresh morning air was tempting, so I put myself in action.

Right after I put about 5 stones into my dolly, I realized that I once again overestimated my strength. Half way to my backyard there is a small slope, and I realized that if I "pushed" myself to pull the dolly up, I might have big trouble following up, and my weekend classes will be again jeopardized . So I decided to stop right there no matter what. But my dolly was right in the middle of lawn, between my house and my neighbor's. Just as I was wondering what to do, I saw a guy was knocking my neighbor's door, so I asked him if he could help me because I had heart problem. Since I was already breathless, my voice was extremely weak. He looked at me and said: I too have heart problem. And he lifted his shirt to show the scar on his front chest. So I immediately said never mind.

What happened the rest was that I struggled to move the stones one by one to my "territory", which is only a couple yards away from the dolly, then I took the dolly back to my backyard, and after that I immediately went back and lied down for a little while, let my heart back to normal function. So far, I don't feel big trouble but, I already could not cook lunch as I planned. I decide to boil some dumplings instead, because it costs almost no energy at all.

Thing is, I believe that guy could help me. Though he does have scar on his chest, but from his attitude, his loud voice, his brisk stride, I can hardly believe that he could not handle what I asked. Why didn't he offer me help? I don't know exactly, but based on my past experience, I have reason to believe it was because I did not convince him that I needed help. As I mentioned in the beginning of this post, I happen to have a relatively big build, don't look fragile, so I generally give people an impression that I am a strong person. During my past years, I just cannot count how many times I had to handle things I was actually not able to handle, and caused my crashes sometime relapse for days or weeks, and these disasters could be avoided only if people knew how serious my health trouble was so they could give me a hand. But I am very proud person, I would rather die than having people pity me, or misjudge me. Thinking that people would take my weakness and my asking for help as "mentally weak" would simple kill me. Truth is, this character of mine certainly contribute its huge share on worsening my health problems.

Of course, lessons after lessons, I have learned that I need to take it easy on how people think of me. It doesn't matter. I also should learn to be responsible to my body, my health. It's the only thing my life rely on. If I need help, I should just ask. As one of my blogger friends said, asking help is being responsible to yourself.

On the other hand, I can't help but feel so disappointed about some of our fellow human beings. The selfishness, the distrusting each other, and many more negative aspects of human nature, just darken my view on life. And sometime, I just can't help but think, that this earth is not for me, simply because I am too good to be here.

Call me cynic!

"Absolute Causality Between Body And Mind"

Chronic Illness (Photo credit: eyejammy)

Believing a theory that states AS LONG AS you are mentally happy, you will be physically healthy, by my opinion, is a modern superstition very likely caused by the overwhelmingly futile treatment of modern medicine. Let me temporarily call this theory as "absolute causality between body and mind". When modern medicine cannot find anything wrong with patients, they usually "suggest" psychological reasons. And this "suggestion" gradually became "belief" because of people's blind trust to science, such as modern medicine and modern psychology, which both are young and far away from complete understanding our body and mind.

FACT is, so many people who got cancers or other fatal diseases were/are not at all unhappy people, and many mentally ill people can also be physically healthy.

The harm this seemingly unharmful belief does to our societies is, that many people who suffer from serious physical unknown illnesses would get wrong treatments, and further more, they are easily discriminated by others, who think they deserve what they suffer.  

My doomed 2009 -- A lesson was learned

Image via Wikipedia

In 2009, I met the toughest challenge in my life: jobless paired with terrible health condition. While I poorly "conquered" the first one during the first half of the year, the later one remains problematic.

CFS (chronic fatigue syndrome) is really a monster. It doesn't kill you like some cancers, but it makes you to be only half of yourself, or even less than half. You may suffer symptoms of heart diseases, or of diabetes, or of many other diseases but as matter of fact, you have none of those diseases. The causes for CFS are still unknown, or too complicated to be detected. For sufferers, this means there is no cure for you. Or, as many doctors claimed, "you are fine".
The worst part of CFS is that it is the most misunderstood thus the most commonly misdiagnosed and mistreated illness ever. Usually it starts with normal tiredness, gradually gets severe until it's too late. During the course, patients inevitably and frequently feel inadequate, which is exactly how people with depression would feel. Thus CFS are often diagnosed as depression and given anti-depressants. However there is no study shows the effectiveness of these treatments. On the contrary, there were plenty cases showed the opposite (A young lady Sophia Mirza was one of the victims who DIED under mental treatments: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mZMpvtD3rg). To clear this confusion, people (esp. doctors ) should know that it is chronic physical illness cause depression, not the other way around. However I don't mean that depression doesn't cause ANY physical problems at all, it only means that it is not most CFS sufferers' cases.

As a longterm sufferer, I personally diagnose my CFS as "energy overdrawn". By Chinese medicine, our energy is like a bank: we make withdraw everyday also we make deposit everyday. When we make withdraw but not make deposit, we bring ourselves troubles.
How do we make deposit for our energy? Answer is: Foods, sleep and exercises. These 3 things are the most important "deposit" we make for our energy bank. They together make a concept called: "positive life style". If we keep these things on going everyday, we should have no problems at all.
So my personal conclusion on the cause of CFS is " bad lifestyle", which mean failed on these 3 things. For CFS patients (not real depression sufferers), making effort on changing your physical life style would do much better job on recovering than focusing on what's wrong with your mind (like doctors said).

As a person who never cared about my physical being, this is the biggest lesson I learn in very hard way during my struggling in 2009. I had to shift my whole interest from "spirit" to "physical matters", such as cooking, sleep, exercises, etc. (the first one --- cooking --- is very hard for me to do because my stomach doesn't like American food so I have to work very hard to please such a patriotic organ!)

Of course, there is one thing I did not mention on my good life style menu: good spirit. I used to think this one is the most important thing and it is above all physical issues, but after physically problematic for so long, I had to doubt my former belief. All I can tell now, is that we must take care of every aspect of ourselves: body and mind. Being balanced is the key.

May I have a blessed 2010! And you too!


01/01/2010