Disease Recovery Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Disease Recovery. Here they are! All 100 of them:

Whether I or anyone else accepted the concept of alcoholism as a disease didn't matter; what mattered was that when treated as a disease, those who suffered from it were most likely to recover.
Craig Ferguson (American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot)
Amy [Winehouse] increasingly became defined by her addiction. Our media though is more interested in tragedy than talent, so the ink began to defect from praising her gift to chronicling her downfall. The destructive personal relationships, the blood soaked ballet slippers, the aborted shows, that YouTube madness with the baby mice. In the public perception this ephemeral tittle-tattle replaced her timeless talent. This and her manner in our occasional meetings brought home to me the severity of her condition. Addiction is a serious disease; it will end with jail, mental institutions, or death.
Russell Brand
This rose of pearl-coated infinity transforms the diseased slums of a broken heart into a palace made of psalms and gold.
Aberjhani (Visions of a Skylark Dressed in Black)
Between 10 and 20 percent of people with anorexia die from heart attacks, other complications and suicide; the disease has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. Or Kitty could have lost her life in a different way, lost it to the roller coaster of relapse and recovery, inpatient and outpatient, that eats up, on average, five to seven years. Or a lifetime: only half of all anorexics recovery in the end. The other half endure lives of dysfunction and despair. Friends and families give up on them. Doctors dread treating them. They’re left to stand in the bakery with the voice ringing in their ears, alone in every way that matters.
Harriet Brown
I grew up in traditional black patriarchal culture and there is no doubt that I’m going to take a great many unconscious, but present, patriarchal complicities to the grave because it so deeply ensconced in how I look at the world. Therefore, very much like alcoholism, drug addiction, or racism patriarchy is a disease and we are in perennial recovery and relapse. So you have to get up every morning and struggle against it.
Cornel West (Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life)
Alcoholism or addiction is a disease because it fits the definition of disease. It is progressive and chronic, and left untreated, it will kill.
Irene Tomkinson (Not Like My Mother: Becoming a sane Parent after Growing up in a Crazy family)
You are not an alcoholic or an addict. You are not incurably diseased. You have merely become dependent on substances or addictive behavior to cope with underlying conditions that you are now going to heal, at which time your dependency will cease completely and forever.
Chris Prentiss (The Alcoholism and Addiction Cure: A Holistic Approach to Total Recovery)
Our disease involved much more than just using drugs, so our recovery must involve much more than simple abstinence.
Narcotics Anonymous (Narcotics Anonymous)
It is time to embrace mental health and substance use/abuse as illnesses. Addiction is a disease.
Steven Kassels
Having one's mother or father or past abuser admit to their crimes or even apologize for them changes nothing--certainly not what they did. Rather, such an apology would give you the psychological permission to "move on" with your life. But you do not need anybody's permisson to move on with your life. It does not matter whether or not those responsible for harming you ever understand what they did, care about what they did, or apologize for it. It does not matter. All that matters is your ability to stop fondling the experience with your brain. Which you can do right now.
Augusten Burroughs (This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.)
Don’t ever forget you are beautiful, although your life, your past and your present situation may be ugly. You are beautiful.
Ricky Maye (Barefoot Christianity: The Rough Road Ahead in the Life of a Jesus Follower)
Change is inevitable. Progression is a choice. We all move, but are you going to move forward?
Ricky Maye
Most trouble is temporary… unless you make that not so. Recovery is not grand, it’s one step in front of the other. Unless your cure is more of the disease. Only
Ryan Holiday (Ego is the Enemy: The Fight to Master Our Greatest Opponent)
Alcoholism is above all a disease of denial.
David Stafford
Let me claim that Africa and I kept company for a while and then parted ways as if we were both party to relations with a failed outcome. Or say I was afflicted with Africa like a bout of a rare disease from which I have not managed a full recovery.
Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)
I almost wish I had cancer. Then I’d either beat it or die from it. But my disease, even if successfully treated, will never go away. And it might not kill me. But it will hang over me like the blade of a guillotine; more threatening inert than if the blade suddenly slips and mercifully turns out my lights. This is my war to end all wars.
William Cope Moyers
In acute diseases it is not quite safe to prognosticate either death or recovery.
Hippocrates (Aphorisms (Illustrated))
There's a peculiar thing that happens every time you get clean. You go through this sensation of rebirth. There's something intoxicating about the process of the comeback, and that becomes an element in the whole cycle of addiction. Once you've beaten yourself down with cocaine and heroin, and you manage to stop and walk out of the muck you begin to get your mind and body strong and reconnect with your spirit. The oppressive feeling of being a slave to the drugs is still in your mind, so by comparison, you feel phenomenal. You're happy to be alive, smelling the air and seeing the beauty around you...You have a choice of what to do. So you experience this jolt of joy that you're not where you came from and that in and of itself is a tricky thing to stop doing. Somewhere in the back of your mind, you know that every time you get clean, you'll have this great new feeling. Cut to: a year later, when you've forgotten how bad it was and you don't have that pink-cloud sensation of being newly sober. When I look back, I see why these vicious cycles can develop in someone who's been sober for a long time and then relapses and doesn't want to stay out there using, doesn't want to die, but isn't taking the full measure to get well again. There's a concept in recovery that says 'Half-measures avail us nothing.' When you have a disease, you can't take half the process of getting well and think you're going to get half well; you do half the process of getting well, you're not going to get well at all, and you'll go back to where you came from. Without a thorough transformation, you're the same guy, and the same guy does the same shit. I kept half-measuring it, thinking I was going to at least get something out of this deal, and I kept getting nothing out of it
Anthony Kiedis (Scar Tissue)
Stop looking back when your future is ahead of you
Ricky Maye
For almost every addict who s mired in this terrible disease, other -- a mother or father, a child or spouse, an aunt or uncles or grandparents, a brother or sister -- are suffering too. Families are the hidden victims of addiction, enduring enormous levels of stress and pain. They suffer sleepless nights, deep anxiety, and physical exhaustion brought on by worry and desperation. They lie awake for hours on end as fear for their loved one's safety crowds out any possibility of sleep. They liveeach day with a weight inside that drags them down. Unable to laugh or smile, they are sometimes filled with bottled-up anger or a constant sadness that keeps them on the verge of tears.
Beverly Conyers (Addict In The Family: Stories of Loss, Hope, and Recovery)
Addiction is a family disease because one person uses but the whole family gets sick.
Toni Sorenson
At its heart, Codependency is a set of behaviors developed to manage the anxiety that comes when our primary attachments are formed with people who are inconsistent or unavailable in their response to us. Our anxiety-based responses to life can include over-reactivity, image management, unrealistic beliefs about our limits, and attempts to control the reality of others to the point where we lose our boundaries, self-esteem, and even our own reality. Ultimately, Codependency is a chronic stress disease, which can devastate our immune system and lead to systemic and even life-threatening illness.
Mary Crocker Cook (Awakening Hope. A Developmental, Behavioral, Biological Approach to Codependency Treatment.)
And now they’re telling me I have to get rid of the only thing that loosens its grip. That’s the irony, isn’t it? [...] The thing that helped has become the thing that imprisons us. We keep feeding it and it keeps wanting more. This is a disease that tries to convince you that you don’t have it. This is a disease where the medicine that gives relief is the same thing that kills you.
Amy Reed (Clean)
For this reason, temperance was an important component in the Progressive movement’s effort to improve the lives of the working class.
Stanton Peele (Diseasing of America: How We Allowed Recovery Zealots and the Treatment Industry to Convince Us We Are Out of Control)
For one thing, that Kitty was addicted to amphetamines for twenty-six years without her husband’s knowledge suggests a certain lack of communication or awareness in the marriage. Was
Stanton Peele (Diseasing of America: How We Allowed Recovery Zealots and the Treatment Industry to Convince Us We Are Out of Control)
Porn is a clear example of how our culture is feeding the disease of addiction. The natural impulse to have sex becomes a compulsion to masturbate. The attraction to connect is culturally translated by pornography into a numb and lonely staring strum at broken digital ghosts. The most physically creative thing we have, reduced to a dumb shuffle that’d embarrass a monkey.
Russell Brand (Recovery: Freedom From Our Addictions)
Think about the stigma that is attached to the idea that alcoholism is a disease, an incurable illness, and you have it. That's a terrible thing to inflict on someone. Labeling alcoholism as a disease, a cause unto itself, simply no longer fits with what we know today about its causes.
Chris Prentiss (The Alcoholism and Addiction Cure: A Holistic Approach to Total Recovery)
Like most people who decide to get sober, I was brought to Alcoholics Anonymous. While AA certainly works for others, its core propositions felt irreconcilable with my own experiences. I couldn't, for example, rectify the assertion that "alcoholism is a disease" with the facts of my own life. The idea that by simply attending an AA meeting, without any consultation, one is expected to take on a blanket diagnosis of "diseased addict" was to me, at best, patronizing. At worst, irresponsible. Irresponsible because it doesn't encourage people to turn toward and heal the actual underlying causes of their abuse of substances. I drank for thirteen years for REALLY good reasons. Among them were unprocessed grief, parental abandonment, isolation, violent trauma, anxiety and panic, social oppression, a general lack of safety, deep existential discord, and a tremendous diet and lifestyle imbalance. None of which constitute a disease, and all of which manifest as profound internal, mental, emotional and physical discomfort, which I sought to escape by taking external substances. It is only through one's own efforts to turn toward life on its own terms and to develop a wiser relationship to what's there through mindfulness and compassion that make freedom from addictive patterns possible. My sobriety has been sustained by facing life, processing grief, healing family relationships, accepting radically the fact of social oppression, working with my abandonment conditioning, coming into community, renegotiating trauma, making drastic diet and lifestyle changes, forgiving, and practicing mindfulness, to name just a few. Through these things, I began to relieve the very real pressure that compulsive behaviors are an attempt to resolve.
Noah Levine (Refuge Recovery: A Buddhist Path to Recovering from Addiction)
So many modern diseases, including heart disease, depression, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and all the autoimmune diseases (such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus), occur in part because our body’s immune systems produce excess chronic inflammation. In chronic inflammation, the immune system stays on too long and may even begin to attack the body’s own tissues, as though they were outside invaders. The causes of chronic inflammation are many, including diet and, of course, the countless chemical toxins that become embedded in the body. Chronically inflamed bodies produce chemicals, called pro-inflammatory cytokines, which contribute to pain and inflammation.
Norman Doidge (The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity)
I didn’t want to be sad, but I didn’t know why I was sad or how not to be sad or how to talk about it. I was broken. I felt broken. My body ached. My stomach hurt. I couldn’t sleep. Nothing was pleasurable. Every morning, I woke up knowing I’d failed before my feet hit the ground. At night, I’d lie in bed and wish for a terminal disease.
David Poses (The Weight of Air: A Story of the Lies about Addiction and the Truth about Recovery)
Depression can be due to a low endocrine function, nutritional deficiencies, blood sugar problems, food allergies, or systemic yeast infection. Depression can also result from medical illnesses such as stroke, heart attack, cancer, Parkinson's disease, and hormonal disorder. It can also be caused by a serious loss, a difficult relationship, a financial problem, or any stressful, unwelcome life change.
Chris Prentiss (The Alcoholism and Addiction Cure: A Holistic Approach to Total Recovery)
If our guiding principle is that a person who makes his own bed ought to lie in it, we should immediately dismantle much of our health care system. Many diseases and conditions arise from self-chosen habits or circumstances and could be prevented by more astute decisions.
Gabor Maté (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction)
Hershey Pennsylvania was self-proclaimed as the “Sweetest Place On Earth,” but less advertised than chocolate, it was also home to one of the state’s largest Children’s Hospitals. The streets lined with Hershey Kiss–shaped streetlamps that led excited children and families on vacation to chocolate tour rides and rollercoasters were the same exact streets that led anxious children and families to x-rays and MRIs on the worsts days of their lives. Chocolate was being created on the same street that childhood diseases were being diagnosed. And that was life. The sweetest of sensations and the deepest of devastations live next door to each other.
Tessa Shaffer (Heaven Has No Regrets)
Most trouble is temporary . . . unless you make that not so. Recovery is not grand, it’s one step in front of the other. Unless your cure is more of the disease.
Ryan Holiday (Ego Is the Enemy)
When you enable the addict, you nourish the disease.
Toni Sorenson
Altitude sickness, unregulated drugs and medical gas enabled workers to become drug abusers/addicts
Steven Magee
In the words of Durk Pearson and Sandra Shaw, the authors of Life Extension,
Stanton Peele (Diseasing of America: How We Allowed Recovery Zealots and the Treatment Industry to Convince Us We Are Out of Control)
I always think in this connection of the Rumanian saying my in-laws use when they see an extremely obese person: “So, you ate what you wanted.
Stanton Peele (Diseasing of America: How We Allowed Recovery Zealots and the Treatment Industry to Convince Us We Are Out of Control)
The disease of addiction is a chronic, devious bitch just waiting for you to slip-up.
D.C. Hyden (The Sober Addict)
You are not alone. You are not weak. You are brass and bold and stronger than this disease. You are.
Callie Bowld (What Goes Down: The End of an Eating Disorder)
In the West we have a disease-care system, and medicine recognizes thousands of ailments and myriad remedies. One Spirit Medicine, on the other hand, is a health-care system that identifies only one ailment and one cure. The ailment is alienation from our feelings, from our bodies, from the earth, and from Spirit. The cure is the experience of primeval Oneness with all, which restores inner harmony and facilitates recovery from all maladies, regardless of origin.
Alberto Villoldo (One Spirit Medicine)
Toward some few others who habitually became drunk or who couldn’t control their drinking, most people adopted an attitude between knowing condescension and outright scorn: why were these people so weak or immoral as not to know when enough was enough?
Stanton Peele (Diseasing of America: How We Allowed Recovery Zealots and the Treatment Industry to Convince Us We Are Out of Control)
You must be your own advocate... You can't rely solely on your doctors or you family or anyone else; you have to stay on top of your own care, no matter how sick or exhausted you feel. Learn everything you can about your disease and your diagnosis, locate the very best doctors, find out exactly what drugs and treatments your doctors are giving you and what they're supposed to do, never stop researching and asking questions, and check, check, check what the doctors tell you-get second and third opinions. All of this is up to you because ultimately no one else-not your family members who love you, or your doctors, who want you to survive-is responsible for your health. You need a support team, of course, but in the end, you run this race on your own.
Barbara K. Lipska (The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery)
For some of us faith comes easily. For others, especially if we have experienced betrayal, it may be more difficult. Sometimes we must exhaust all of our own resources in trying to overcome our addictive “disease” before we will risk believing in a higher Power.
Stephen Arterburn (The Life Recovery Bible NLT)
[hypnosis] does not permit us. . .to recognize the resistance with which the patient clings to his disease and thus even fights against his own recovery; yet it is this phenomenon of resistance which alone makes it possible to comprehend his behavior in daily life.
Sigmund Freud
In addition, experiences that facilitate addiction offer people a sense of power or control, of security or calm, of intimacy or of being valued by others; on the other hand, such experiences succeed in blocking out sensations of pain, discomfort, or other negative sensations.
Stanton Peele (Diseasing of America: How We Allowed Recovery Zealots and the Treatment Industry to Convince Us We Are Out of Control)
Human being" is more a verb than a noun. Each of us is unfinished, a work in progress. Perhaps it would be most accurate to add the word "yet" to all our assessments of ourselves and each other . . . If life is process, all judgments are provisional, we can't judge something until it is finished. No one has won or lost until the race is over . . . In our instinctive attachments, our fear of change, and our wish for certainty and permanence, we may undercut the impermanence which is our greatest strength, our most fundamental identity. Without impermanence, there is no process. The nature of life is change. All hope is based on process . . . It is taken me somewhat longer to recognize that a diagnosis is simply another form of judgment. Naming a disease has limited usefulness. It does not capture life or even reflect it accurately. Illness, on the other hand, is a process, like life is. Much in the concept of diagnosis and cure is about fixing, and the narrow-bore focus on fixing people's problems can lead to denial of the power of their process. Years ago, I took full credit when people became well; their recovery was testimony to my skill and knowledge as a physician. I never recognized that without their biological, emotional, and spiritual process which could respond to my interventions, nothing could have changed at all. All the time I thought I was repairing, I was collaborating.
Rachel Naomi Remen (Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories that Heal)
Donna made it obvious that not only is addiction a developmental journey, but it’s a journey that continues through the period of recovery. In fact, by the time I’d finished my interviews with Donna, the term “recovery” no longer made sense to me. “Recovery” implies going backward, becoming normal again. And it’s a reasonable term if you consider addiction a disease. But many of the addicts I’ve spoken with—including Donna—see themselves as having moved forward, not backward, once they quit, or even while they were quitting. They often find they’ve become far more aware and self-directed than the person they were before their addiction. There’s no easy way to explain this direction of change with the medical terminology of disease and recovery. Instead of recovering, it seems that addicts keep growing, as does anyone who overcomes their difficulties through deliberation and insight.
Marc Lewis (The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease)
We must also consider the enormous social-class differences in addiction rates. That is, the farther down the social and economic scale a person is, the more likely the person is to become addicted to alcohol, drugs, or cigarettes, to be obese, or to be a victim or perpetrator of family or sexual abuse. How
Stanton Peele (Diseasing of America: How We Allowed Recovery Zealots and the Treatment Industry to Convince Us We Are Out of Control)
Depression becomes for us a set of habits, behaviors, thought processes, assumptions, and feelings that seems very much like our core self; you can’t give those up without something to replace them and without expecting some anxiety along the way. Recovery from depression is like recovery from heart disease or alcoholism.
Richard O'Connor (Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You)
prominent spokespeople lecture us that cocaine is a drug with “neuropsychological properties” that “lock people into perpetual usage” so that the only way people can stop is when “supplies become unavailable,” after which “the user is then driven to obtain additional cocaine without particular regard for social constraints.
Stanton Peele (Diseasing of America: How We Allowed Recovery Zealots and the Treatment Industry to Convince Us We Are Out of Control)
The truth is, the path to skid row isn't always laced in crystal meth - there is no concrete path that leads to insanity. Crazy is really just you or me and one bad day that leads to several more bad days. It's those of us who were forgotten about. Those of us who couldn't get help in time. Those of us with a disease that was misdiagnosed.
Trevor Church (The Gospel According to a Basket-Case)
While there is a real urgency for caution, there is also an overwhelming urgency for calm. My greatest concern is that the driving force of this pandemic may cause those who have no signs or symptomology to develop other chronic fears, anxieties and medical conditions. Heightened fears and anxieties will not make you feel safer. Compulsive and impulsive purchases will not protect you from the virus. It is important that you take care of your physical and mental health. Follow what your state and county are advising you to do. The sky is not falling and life will return to normal. The most prudent thing that people can do at this time, is to take commonsense approaches to reduce your risk of exposure.
Asa Don Brown
One last bit of bad news. We’ve been focusing on the stress-related consequences of activating the cardiovascular system too often. What about turning it off at the end of each psychological stressor? As noted earlier, your heart slows down as a result of activation of the vagus nerve by the parasympathetic nervous system. Back to the autonomic nervous system never letting you put your foot on the gas and brake at the same time—by definition, if you are turning on the sympathetic nervous system all the time, you’re chronically shutting off the parasympathetic. And this makes it harder to slow things down, even during those rare moments when you’re not feeling stressed about something. How can you diagnose a vagus nerve that’s not doing its part to calm down the cardiovascular system at the end of a stressor? A clinician could put someone through a stressor, say, run the person on a treadmill, and then monitor the speed of recovery afterward. It turns out that there is a subtler but easier way of detecting a problem. Whenever you inhale, you turn on the sympathetic nervous system slightly, minutely speeding up your heart. And when you exhale, the parasympathetic half turns on, activating your vagus nerve in order to slow things down (this is why many forms of meditation are built around extended exhalations). Therefore, the length of time between heartbeats tends to be shorter when you’re inhaling than exhaling. But what if chronic stress has blunted the ability of your parasympathetic nervous system to kick the vagus nerve into action? When you exhale, your heart won’t slow down, won’t increase the time intervals between beats. Cardiologists use sensitive monitors to measure interbeat intervals. Large amounts of variability (that is to say, short interbeat intervals during inhalation, long during exhalation) mean you have strong parasympathetic tone counteracting your sympathetic tone, a good thing. Minimal variability means a parasympathetic component that has trouble putting its foot on the brake. This is the marker of someone who not only turns on the cardiovascular stress-response too often but, by now, has trouble turning it off.
Robert M. Sapolsky (Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping)
parents are the most important influences on children, and that the best way to curb misbehavior is to insist on standards of decency. If we cannot persuade our children that they have the capacity to manage their lives and that the world is worth living in—and then work to create a world in which this is true—medical treatments will expand endlessly but will not be able to help us.
Stanton Peele (Diseasing of America: How We Allowed Recovery Zealots and the Treatment Industry to Convince Us We Are Out of Control)
Let’s Convince Him He’s Addicted for Life Parents consent to their children’s treatment for diseases other than taking drugs. One of the most common groups of childhood diseases is “learning disabilities,” including especially hyperactivity. Are such learning disabilities permanent? One piece of research showed that, “Contrary to the expectations of many experts, . . . boys who are hyperactive do not always have
Stanton Peele (Diseasing of America: How We Allowed Recovery Zealots and the Treatment Industry to Convince Us We Are Out of Control)
Achievement and competence. People fall prey to addiction more readily when they lack positive motivation to achieve or work. Children need to learn that accomplishment is important and within their reach, not solely for material rewards, but because people should make positive contributions to the world and other people and because it is satisfying to make such contributions and to mobilize one’s skills effectively. Participating with children in constructive activity, like reading, building, or gardening—and encouraging independent activity whenever feasible—are strong precursors to achievement and competence. Consciousness and self-awareness. Addiction is the result of accumulated self-destructive behavior that people ignore, just as unconscious acceptance of any negative syndrome ingrains that habit in people’s lives.
Stanton Peele (Diseasing of America: How We Allowed Recovery Zealots and the Treatment Industry to Convince Us We Are Out of Control)
When the tumult of war shall cease, and the tempest of present passions be succeeded by calm reflection, or when those, who, surviving its fury, shall inherit from you a legacy of debts and misfortunes, when the yearly revenue scarcely be able to discharge the interest of the one, and no possible remedy be left for the other, ideas far different from the present will arise, and embitter the remembrance of former follies. A mind disarmed of its rage feels no pleasure in contemplating a frantic quarrel. Sickness of thought, the sure consequence of conduct like yours, leaves no ability for enjoyment, no relish for resentment; and though, like a man in a fit, you feel not the injury of the struggle, nor distinguish between strength and disease, the weakness will nevertheless be proportioned to the violence, and the sense of pain increase with the recovery.
Thomas Paine (The Crisis)
The disease of addiction, for all the pain and damage it causes, is an invitation to see this prodigal God in action. The question is, will we? Will we as the church step out of our comfort zones into uncharted territory that will at times be unpredictable and even scary for us? Or will we, like the older son, gloat, sulk and stomp off in resentment? Would we rather be party poopers or partygoers, estranged children or reconciled ones?
Jonathan Benz (The Recovery-Minded Church: Loving and Ministering to People With Addiction)
Anyone can prove whatever they want. It's easy. I could "prove," via those mechanisms that carbs are the devil, fat is the devil, protein is the devil, grains destroy your digestive tract, grains are the ultimate food for digestive health, fruit is the devil, fruit is the salvation of mankind, dairy is the perfect food, dairy is atherogenic, dairy causes autoimmune disease, dairy cures autoimmune disease, fat makes you fat, fat makes you thin...
Matt Stone (Diet Recovery: Restoring Hormonal Health, Metabolism, Mood, and Your Relationship with Food (Diet Recovery #1))
(Ramana Maharshi's advice on depression) This depression must be traced to its origin. The origin is the wrong identification of the body with the Self. The disease is not of the Self. It is of the body. But the body does not come and tell you that it is possessed by the disease. It is you who say so. Why? Because you have wrongly identified yourself with the body. The body itself is a thought. Be as you really are. There is no reason to be depressed. (p. 360)
Ramana Maharshi (Talks With Ramana Maharshi: On Realizing Abiding Peace and Happiness)
I couldn’t go on saying, “Let’s get a couple of grams of blow (cocaine) and write a song. Let’s get stoned before the gig. Let’s get stoned after the gig. I’m in town, where are the girls?” I was living the classic wild style, and that was no longer working for me. I’m not AA or anything. My ethic is that I work hard, do what I do under my own power, and at the end of the day, like everybody else in the world, I do what I can get away with. —Iggy Pop, rock singer
Stanton Peele (Diseasing of America: How We Allowed Recovery Zealots and the Treatment Industry to Convince Us We Are Out of Control)
Chronic long-term fatigue, recurrent infections, recovery from long-term illness and infections, nervous exhaustion, chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic disease conditions with depression, low immune function, brain fog, and to accelerate recovery from debilitating conditions. Note: The plant is specific for the kinds of damage that occur during encephalitis infections. It is highly neuroprotective and strongly anti-inflammatory in the brain and CNS. It should be used in all encephalitis infections.
Stephen Harrod Buhner (Herbal Antivirals: Natural Remedies for Emerging & Resistant Viral Infections)
It's curious to note that the miracles performed by an "all-loving" and benevolent God so often involve sparing a handful of people from a tragic accident, devastating disaster or deadly disease. God is rarely held accountable by believers for all of the deaths that occur when people are not saved by a "miracle." On the whole, the tiny percentage of "miraculous" recoveries would be greater evidence of a deity's arbitrary cruelty than his benevolence, but this is never something believers seem comfortable discussing.
Atheist Republic (Your God Is Too Small: 50 Essays on Life, Love & Liberty Without Religion)
Control: May 5 Many of us have been trying to keep the whole world in orbit with sheer and forceful application of mental energy. What happens if we let go, if we stop trying to keep the world orbiting and just let it whirl? It’ll keep right on whirling. It’ll stay right on track with no help from us. And we’ll be free and relaxed enough to enjoy our place on it. Control is an illusion, especially the kind of control we’ve been trying to exert. In fact, controlling gives other people, events, and diseases, such as alcoholism, control over us. Whatever we try to control does have control over us and our life. I have given this control to many things and people in my life. I have never gotten the results I wanted from controlling or trying to control people. What I received for my efforts is an unmanageable life, whether that unmanageability was inside me or in external events. In recovery, we make a trade-off. We trade a life that we have tried to control, and we receive in return something better—a life that is manageable. Today, I will exchange a controlled life for one that is manageable.
Melody Beattie (The Language of Letting Go: Daily Meditations on Codependency (Hazelden Meditation Series))
Our eyes will make no progress against the mystery of recovery so long as we look at the addicted person through 12-step lenses. To say that such a person is powerless – and insane, morally deficient, filled with wrongs, a menace to others, disoriented, beyond human assistance, afflicted with a progressive fatal disease, and genetically different from normal humans – is to declare that the person’s inner nature is a vile and empty wasteland. It is to deny that there is a better self inside. If that is true, recovery is inexplicable, a random act of God, an inscrutable mystery.
Martin Nicolaus (Empowering Your Sober Self: The LifeRing Approach to Addiction Recovery: Second Edition)
When the brain is diseased, the functions that become pathological are the person’s emotional life, thought processes and behaviour. And this creates addiction’s central dilemma: if recovery is to occur, the brain, the impaired organ of decision making, needs to initiate its own healing process. An altered and dysfunctional brain must decide that it wants to overcome its own dysfunction: to revert to normal—or, perhaps, become normal for the very first time. The worse the addiction is, the greater the brain abnormality and the greater the biological obstacles to opting for health.
Gabor Maté (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction)
Writing Saving My Sister was by far the most difficult yet meaningful and rewarding experience of my life,” comments author Nicole Woodruff. “After losing my sister, Amanda, to a fentanyl overdose in June 2019, I was determined to make her story matter and bring meaning to this horrible tragedy. So many families lose loved ones to this disease but often suffer in silence or feel ashamed to speak up due to addiction’s stigma. My goal with this book is to reduce this stigma, bring greater awareness to these stories, and ultimately help people in similar situations to mine know they are not alone,” continues Woodruff.
Nicole Woodruff (Saving My Sister)
For as medical men sometimes,   although they could quickly cover over the scars of wounds, keep back   and delay the cure for the present, in the expectation of a better and   more perfect recovery, knowing that it is more salutary to retard the   treatment in the cases of swellings caused by wounds, and to allow the   malignant humours to flow off for a while, rather than to hasten a   superficial cure, by shutting up in the veins the poison of a morbid   humour, which, excluded from its customary outlets, will undoubtedly   creep into the inner parts of the limbs, and penetrate to the very   vitals of the viscera, producing no longer mere disease in the body,   but causing destruction to life; so, in like manner, God also, who   knows the secret things of the heart, and foreknows the future, in much   forbearance allows certain events to happen, which, coming from without   upon men, cause to come forth into the light the passions and vices   which are concealed within, that by their means those may be cleansed   and cured who, through great negligence and carelessness, have admitted   within themselves the roots and seeds of sins, so that, when driven   outwards and brought to the surface, they may in a certain degree be   cast forth and dispersed. [2342]   And thus, although a man may appear   to be afflicted with evils of a serious kind, suffering convulsions in   all his limbs, he may nevertheless, at some future time, obtain relief   and a cessation from his trouble; and, after enduring his afflictions   to satiety, may, after many sufferings, be restored again to his   (proper) condition.  For God deals with souls not merely with a view to   the short space of our present life, included within sixty years [2343]   or more, but with reference to a perpetual and never-ending period,   exercising His providential care over souls that are immortal, even as   He Himself is eternal and immortal. 
Origen (The Works of Origen: De Principiis/Letters/Against Celsus (Active ToC))
Therapeutic fasting accelerates the healing process and allows the body to recover from serious disease in a dramatically short period of time. In my practice I have seen fasting eliminate lupus and arthritis, remove chronic skin conditions such as psoriasis and eczema, heal the digestive tract in patients with ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, and quickly eliminate cardiovascular diseases such as high blood pressure and angina. In these cases the recoveries were permanent: fasting enabled longtime disease sufferers to unchain themselves from their multiple toxic drugs and even eliminate the need for surgery, which was recommended to some of them as their only solution.
Joel Fuhrman (Fasting and Eating for Health: A Medical Doctor's Program For Conquering Disease)
It’s hard not to let negative emotions take over and leave their mark, but it seems that our lives depend on it; the reality is that stress kills. When it goes unresolved, stress can lead to chronic disease, causing premature death. The elevation of the stress hormone cortisol lowers immune system functioning, increases blood pressure, and cholesterol, and increases the risk of heart disease, cancer, and various other diseases. However, grief doesn’t last forever, despite how devastating and all-encompassing it can be. With the right help, support, and outlook, recovery will bring the body and mind to a new place of healing. We will never be the same again, but we will be stronger versions of ourselves. It’s important to remember to approach recovery with some level of gratitude for the beauty of life—it’s important to always express, accept, and learn from ourselves.
Lisa Dianne McInnes (The Majewski Curse)
It took Mr. N. four months to make the plunge. The marriageable widow he chose was more than willing, and she subsequently became Mrs. N. Before this happy time came, Mr. N. had to go through a few more difficulties. He developed a case of prematurity; he had never experienced this in homosexual affairs. This is the "trouble" that confronts many ( not all ) ex-homosexuals in their affairs with women in the end phases of treatment. The majority of the candidates for recovery overcome it. A small minority do not; these patients remain bogged down at that point. Fortunately for N., he was able to overcome this hurdle, too. He was cured, and frankly the analyst was no less surprised at the outcome than the patient. "Miracles do happen," was the patient's conclusion. "Never predict the unfavorable" was the analyst's more conservative resolve, remembering his own unfavorable impressions of N. at the beginning of treatment.
Edmund Bergler (Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life)
EBV is a virus that chronically inflames nerves. Most strains of EBV are mild and less aggressive, but its multiple sclerosis varieties eat away at the myelin sheath, which is what creates the distinct set of symptoms associated with this disease. (As for your immune system, not only is it innocent of any wrongdoing, it’s your primary defense against MS. When your immune system gets what it needs, recovery is possible—and within reach.) Something else that distinguishes MS from other forms of EBV is that it’s accompanied by a unique combination of bacteria, fungi, and heavy metals. Specifically, if you have MS, you’ll typically have the following EBV cofactors in your system: Streptococcus A and Streptococcus B bacteria H. pylori bacteria (or at least a previous case of H. pylori) Candida fungus Cytomegalovirus The heavy metals copper, mercury, and aluminum—these metals weaken the immune system’s ability to protect the body from viral nerve damage
Anthony William (Medical Medium: Secrets Behind Chronic and Mystery Illness and How to Finally Heal)
To explain the metamorphosis that takes place in the process of recovery from addiction, we have to wait for that physiological change to occur -you can’t rush it, it will happen in its own time. Imagine trying to teach a caterpillar how to fly. The poor thing might listen, take flight lessons, watch butterflies darting around. But no matter how hard it tries, it won’t fly. Maybe we get frustrated because we know this whole day has it in him to become a butterfly. So we give him books to read, try to counsel him, scold him, punish him, threaten him, maybe even toss him up in the air and watch his flap his little legs before crashing back to earth. The miracle takes time, we must be patient. But just as it is natural and normal for caterpillars to become butterflies, So can we expect addicted individuals, given the appropriate care and compassion, to be transformed in the recovery process. The metamorphosis is nothing short of miraculous, as people who are desperately sick are restored to health and a “normal” state of being. So don’t sit around feeling sorry for yourself, be grateful that you have a disease from which you can make a full recovery.
Katherine Ketcham (The Only Life I Could Save)
These axons can shuttle information around so quickly because they’re fatter than normal axons, and because they’re sheathed in a fatty substance called myelin. Myelin acts like rubber insulation on wires and prevents the signal from petering out: in whales, giraffes, and other stretched creatures, a sheathed neuron can send a signal multiple yards with little loss of fidelity. (In contrast, diseases that fray myelin, like multiple sclerosis, destroy communication between different nodes in the brain.) In sum, you can think about the gray matter as a patchwork of chips that analyze different types of information, and about the white matter as cables that transmit information between those chips. (And before we go further, I should point out that “gray” and “white” are misnomers. Gray matter looks pinkish-tan inside a living skull, while white matter, which makes up the bulk of the brain, looks pale pink. The white and gray colors appear only after you soak the brain in preservatives. Preservatives also harden the brain, which is normally tapioca-soft. This explains why the brain you might have dissected in biology class way back when didn’t disintegrate between your fingers.)
Sam Kean (The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery)
We can all be "sad" or "blue" at times in our lives. We have all seen movies about the madman and his crime spree, with the underlying cause of mental illness. We sometimes even make jokes about people being crazy or nuts, even though we know that we shouldn't. We have all had some exposure to mental illness, but do we really understand it or know what it is? Many of our preconceptions are incorrect. A mental illness can be defined as a health condition that changes a person's thinking, feelings, or behavior (or all three) and that causes the person distress and difficulty in functioning. As with many diseases, mental illness is severe in some cases and mild in others. Individuals who have a mental illness don't necessarily look like they are sick, especially if their illness is mild. Other individuals may show more explicit symptoms such as confusion, agitation, or withdrawal. There are many different mental illnesses, including depression, schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Each illness alters a person's thoughts, feelings, and/or behaviors in distinct ways. But in all this struggles, Consummo Plus has proven to be the most effective herbal way of treating mental illness no matter the root cause. The treatment will be in three stages. First is activating detoxification, which includes flushing any insoluble toxins from the body. The medicine and the supplement then proceed to activate all cells in the body, it receives signals from the brain and goes to repair very damaged cells, tissues, or organs of the body wherever such is found. The second treatment comes in liquid form, tackles the psychological aspect including hallucination, paranoia, hearing voices, depression, fear, persecutory delusion, or religious delusion. The supplement also tackles the Behavioral, Mood, and Cognitive aspects including aggression or anger, thought disorder, self-harm, or lack of restraint, anxiety, apathy, fatigue, feeling detached, false belief of superiority or inferiority, and amnesia. The third treatment is called mental restorer, and this consists of the spiritual brain restorer, a system of healing which “assumes the presence of a supernatural power to restore the natural brain order. With this approach, you will get back your loving boyfriend and he will live a better and fulfilled life, like realize his full potential, work productively, make a meaningful contribution to his community, and handle all the stress that comes with life. It will give him a new lease of life, a new strength, and new vigor. The Healing & Recovery process is Gradual, Comprehensive, Holistic, and very Effective. www . curetoschizophrenia . blogspot . com E-mail: rodwenhill@gmail. com
Justin Rodwen Hill
More or less the same can be said for Art Therapy, which is organized infantilism. Our class was run by a delirious young woman with a fixed, indefatigable smile, who was plainly trained at a school offering courses in Teaching Art to the Mentally Ill; not even a teacher of very young retarded children could have been compelled to bestow, without deliberate instruction, such orchestrated chuckles and coos. Unwinding long rolls of slippery mural paper, she would tell us to take our crayons and make drawings illustrative of themes that we ourselves had chosen. For example: My House. In humiliated rage I obeyed, drawing a square, with a door and four cross-eyed windows, a chimney on top issuing forth a curlicue of smoke. She showered me with praise, and as the weeks advanced and my health improved so did my sense of comedy. I began to dabble happily in colored modeling clay, sculpting at first a horrid little green skull with bared teeth, which our teacher pronounced a splendid replica of my depression. I then proceeded through intermediate stages of recuperation to a rosy and cherubic head with a “Have-a- Nice-Day” smile. Coinciding as it did with the time of my release, this creation truly overjoyed my instructress (whom I’d become fond of in spite of myself), since, as she told me, it was emblematic of my recovery and therefore but one more example of the triumph over disease by Art Therapy.
William Styron
The Company We Keep So now we have seen that our cells are in relationship with our thoughts, feelings, and each other. How do they factor into our relationships with others? Listening and communicating clearly play an important part in healthy relationships. Can relationships play an essential role in our own health? More than fifty years ago there was a seminal finding when the social and health habits of more than 4,500 men and women were followed for a period of ten years. This epidemiological study led researchers to a groundbreaking discovery: people who had few or no social contacts died earlier than those who lived richer social lives. Social connections, we learned, had a profound influence on physical health.9 Further evidence for this fascinating finding came from the town of Roseto, Pennsylvania. Epidemiologists were interested in Roseto because of its extremely low rate of coronary artery disease and death caused by heart disease compared to the rest of the United States. What were the town’s residents doing differently that protected them from the number one killer in the United States? On close examination, it seemed to defy common sense: health nuts, these townspeople were not. They didn’t get much exercise, many were overweight, they smoked, and they relished high-fat diets. They had all the risk factors for heart disease. Their health secret, effective despite questionable lifestyle choices, turned out to be strong communal, cultural, and familial ties. A few years later, as the younger generation started leaving town, they faced a rude awakening. Even when they had improved their health behaviors—stopped smoking, started exercising, changed their diets—their rate of heart disease rose dramatically. Why? Because they had lost the extraordinarily close connection they enjoyed with neighbors and family.10 From studies such as these, we learn that social isolation is almost as great a precursor of heart disease as elevated cholesterol or smoking. People connection is as important as cellular connections. Since the initial large population studies, scientists in the field of psychoneuroimmunology have demonstrated that having a support system helps in recovery from illness, prevention of viral infections, and maintaining healthier hearts.11 For example, in the 1990s researchers began laboratory studies with healthy volunteers to uncover biological links to social and psychological behavior. Infected experimentally with cold viruses, volunteers were kept in isolation and monitored for symptoms and evidence of infection. All showed immunological evidence of a viral infection, yet only some developed symptoms of a cold. Guess which ones got sick: those who reported the most stress and the fewest social interactions in their “real life” outside the lab setting.12 We Share the Single Cell’s Fate Community is part of our healing network, all the way down to the level of our cells. A single cell left alone in a petri dish will not survive. In fact, cells actually program themselves to die if they are isolated! Neurons in the developing brain that fail to connect to other cells also program themselves to die—more evidence of the life-saving need for connection; no cell thrives alone. What we see in the microcosm is reflected in the larger organism: just as our cells need to stay connected to stay alive, we, too, need regular contact with family, friends, and community. Personal relationships nourish our cells,
Sondra Barrett (Secrets of Your Cells: Discovering Your Body's Inner Intelligence)
The second aspect of the moral appeal of the inner-child movement is consolation. Life is full of setbacks. People we love reject us. We don't get the jobs we want. We get bad grades. Our children don't need us anymore. We drink too much. We have no money. We are mediocre. We lose. We get sick. When we fail, we look for consolation, one form of which is to see the setback as something other than failure-to interpret it in a way that does not hurt as much as failure hurts. Being a victim, blaming someone else, or even blaming the system is a powerful and increasingly widespread form of consolation. It softens many of life's blows. Such shifts of blame have a glorious past. Alcoholics Anonymous made the lives of millions of alcoholics more bearable by giving them the dignity of a “disease” to replace the ignominy of “failure,” “immorality,” or “evil.” Even more important was the civil rights movement. From the Civil War to the early 1950s, black people in America did badly-by every statistic. How did this get explained? “Stupid,” “lazy,” and “immoral” were the words shouted by demagogues or whispered by the white gentry. Nineteen fifty-four marks the year when these explanations began to lose their power. In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court held that racial segregation in schools was illegal. People began to explain black failure as “inadequate education,” “discrimination,” and “unequal opportunity.” These new explanations are literally uplifting. In technical terms, the old explanations—stupidity and laziness—are personal, permanent, and pervasive. They lower self-esteem; they produce passivity, helplessness, and hopelessness. If you were black and you believed them, they were self-fulfilling. The new explanations—discrimination, bad schools, lean opportunities are impersonal, changeable, and less pervasive. They don't deflate self-esteem (in fact, they produce anger instead). They lead to action to change things. They give hope. The recovery movement enlarges on these precedents. Recovery gives you a whole series of new and more consoling explanations for setbacks. Personal troubles, you're told, do not result as feared from your own sloth, insensitivity, selfishness, dishonesty, self-indulgence, stupidity, or lust. No, they stem from the way you were mistreated as a child. You can blame your parents, your brother, your teachers, your minister, as well as your sex and race and age. These kinds of explanations make you feel better. They shift the blame to others, thereby raising self-esteem and feelings of self-worth. They lower guilt and shame. To experience this shift in perspective is like seeing shafts of sunlight slice through the clouds after endless cold, gray days. We have become victims, “survivors” of abuse, rather than “failures” and “losers.” This helps us get along better with others. We are now underdogs, trying to fight our way back from misfortune. In our gentle society, everyone roots for the underdog. No one dares speak ill of victims anymore. The usual wages of failure—contempt and pity—are transmuted into support and compassion. So the inner-child premises are deep in their appeal: They are democratic, they are consoling, they raise our self-esteem, and they gain us new friends. Small wonder so many people in pain espouse them.
Martin E.P. Seligman (What You Can Change and What You Can't: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement)
Engineer's are retarded. They have some kind of brain damage that allows them to not have social skills so that they could concentrate long enough to write code. But it's a disease. That's why I had to quite. I mean, I'm like an engineer in recovery. I don't want to write code anymore. It just makes you retarded. I mean, get a girlfriend, get a life.
Jim Reekes
The best doctors in the world are healers and not dealers!
Sandra Bloom (Thyroid and adrenal support: why you feel brain-fogged, down, tired and overweight? My thyroid disease recovery revelead in this book: and how you can cure hypothyroidism and get your life back too!)
By April 23, 2014, thirty-four cases and six deaths from Ebola in Liberia were recorded. By mid-June, 16 more people died. At the time it was thought to be malaria but when seven more people died the following month tests showed that was the Ebola virus. The primary reason for the spreading of the Ebola virus was the direct contact from one person to the next and the ingesting of bush meat. Soon doctors and nurses also became infected. On July 2, 2014, the head surgeon of Redemption Hospital was treated at the JFK Medical Center in Monrovia, where he died from the disease. His death was followed by four nurses at Phebe Hospital in Bong County. At about the same time two U.S. health care workers, Dr. Kent Brantly and a nurse were also infected with the disease. However, they were medically evacuated from Liberia to the United States for treatment where they made a full recovery. Another doctor from Uganda was not so lucky and died from the disease. Arik Air suspended all flights between Nigeria and Liberia and checkpoints were set up at all the ports and border crossings. In August of 2014, the impoverished slum area of West Point was cordoned off. Riots ensued as protesters turned violent. The looting of a clinic of its supplies, including blood-stained bed sheets and mattresses caused the military to shoot into the crowds. Still more patients became infected, causing a shortage of staff and logistics. By September there had been a total of 3,458 cases of which there were 1,830 deaths according to the World Health Organization. Hospitals and clinics could no longer handle this crisis and patients who were treated outside died before they could get help. There were cases where the bodies were just dumped into the Mesurado River. The Ivory Coast out of compassion, opened carefully restricted humanitarian routes and resumed the previously suspended flights to Liberia. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf the president of Libera sent a letter to President Barack Obama concerning the outbreak of Ebola that was on the verge of overrunning her country. The message was desperate, “I am being honest with you when I say that at this rate, we will never break the transmission chain and the virus will overwhelm us.” Having been a former finance minister and World Bank official, Johnson Sirleaf was not one for histrionics however she recognized the pandemic as extremely dangerous. The United States responded to her request and American troops came in and opened a new 60-bed clinic in the Sierra Leone town of Kenema, but by then the outbreak was described as being out of control. Still not understanding the dangerous contagious aspects of this epidemic at least eight Liberian soldiers died after contracting the disease from a single female camp follower. In spite of being a relatively poor country, Cuba is one of the most committed in deploying doctors to crisis zones. It sent more than 460 Cuban doctors and nurses to West Africa. In October Germany sent medical supplies and later that month a hundred additional U.S. troops arrived in Liberia, bringing the total to 565 to assist in the fight against the deadly disease. To understand the severity of the disease, a supply order was placed on October 15th for a 6 month supply of 80,000 body bags and 1 million protective suits. At that time it was reported that 223 health care workers had been infected with Ebola, and 103 of them had died in Liberia. Fear of the disease also slowed down the functioning of the Liberian government. President Sirleaf, had in an emergency announcement informed absent government ministers and civil service leaders to return to their duties. She fired 10 government officials, including deputy ministers in the central government who failed to return to work.
Hank Bracker
Feelings of suspicion—sometimes rising to the level of paranoia—can be a symptom of many types of mental illness, including Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s patients may accuse their romantic partners of cheating on them or their caretakers of stealing property or trying to harm or even kill them. While neuroscientists don’t really understand the networks or parts of the brain related to paranoia, in some cases this condition is attributed to temporal lobe damage.
Barbara K. Lipska (The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery)
There is a fine line between what’s the disease’s fault and what’s the drinker’s fault.
Toni Sorenson
In any disease, say smoking-induced lung or heart disease, organs and tissues are damaged and function in pathological ways. When the brain is diseased, the functions that become pathological are the person’s emotional life, thought processes and behaviour. And this creates addiction’s central dilemma: if recovery is to occur, the brain, the impaired organ of decision making, needs to initiate its own healing process. An altered and dysfunctional brain must decide that it wants to overcome its own dysfunction: to revert to normal — or, perhaps, become normal for the very first time. The worse the addiction is, the greater the brain abnormality and the greater the biological obstacles to opting for health. The scientific literature is nearly unanimous in viewing drug addiction as a chronic brain condition, and this alone ought to discourage anyone from blaming or punishing the sufferer. No one, after all, blames a person suffering from rheumatoid arthritis for having a relapse, since relapse is one of the characteristics of chronic illness. The very concept of choice appears less clear-cut if we understand that the addict’s ability to choose, if not absent, is certainly impaired. “The evidence for addiction as a different state of the brain has important treatment implications,” writes Dr. Charles O’Brien. “Unfortunately,” he adds, “most health care systems continue to treat addiction as an acute disorder, if at all.
Gabor Maté (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction)
ME, a neurological disease[20,21], has been described in the medical literature since 1934 under various names[22], e.g., epidemic neuromyasthenia and atypical poliomyelitis, often on account of outbreaks[23-25]. Characteristic symptoms of ME, classified as a disease of the nervous system by the WHO since 1969[26], are: muscle weakness, neurological dysfunction, especially of cognitive, autonomic and neurosensory functions; variable involvement of the cardiac and other systems; a prolonged relapsing course; but above all general or local muscular fatigue after minimal exertion with prolonged recovery times (post-exertional “malaise”)[20].
Frank Twisk
No organism in nature is separate from the system in which it lives, functions and dies, and no natural process can be understood in isolation from its physical and biological context. From an ecological perspective, the addiction process doesn’t happen accidentally, nor is it preprogrammed by heredity. It is a product of development in a certain context, and it continues to be maintained by factors in the environment. The ecological view sees addiction as a changeable and evolving dynamic that expresses a lifelong interaction with a person’s social and emotional surroundings and with his own internal psychological space. Healing, then, must take into account the internal psychological climate — the beliefs, memories, mind-states and emotions that feed addictive impulses and behaviours — as well as the external milieu. In an ecological framework recovery from addiction does not mean a “cure” for a disease but the creation of new resources, internal and external, that can support different, healthy ways of satisfying one’s genuine needs. It also involves developing new brain circuits that can facilitate more adaptive responses and behaviours.
Gabor Maté (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction)
13 Reasons to include Curry Leaves to your Diet Sambar. Upma. Dal. Poha. What do they all have in common? A tempering rich in curry leaves. But curry leaves – or Curry leaves, as they are commonly known in India – do more good than simply seasoning your food. Curry power benefits include weight loss and a drop in cholesterol levels. But there’s lots more that the Curry leaves can do. Here are 13 reasons to chew on those curry leaves that pop up on your plate. To keep anaemia away The humble Curry leaves is a rich source of iron and folic acid. Anaemia crops up when your body is unable to absorb iron and use it. “Folic acid is responsible for iron absorption and as Curry leaves is a rich source of both compounds, it’s the perfect choice if you’re looking to amp up your iron levels,” says Alpa Momaya, a Diet & Wellness consultant with Sunrise nutrition hub. To protect your liver If you are a heavy drinker, eating curry leaves can help quell liver damage. A study published in Asian Journal of Pharmaceutical and Clinical Research has revealed that curry leaves contain kaempferol, a potent antioxidant, and can protect the liver from oxidative stress and harmful toxins. To maintain blood sugar levels A study published in the Journal of Plant food for Nutrition has revealed that curry leaves can lower blood sugar levels by affecting the insulin activity. To keep your heart healthy A study published in the Journal of Chinese Medicine showed that “curry leaves can help increase the amount of good cholesterol (HDL) and protect you from heart disease and atherosclerosis,” Momaya says. To aid in digestion Curry leaves have a carminative nature, meaning that they prevent the formation of gas in the gastrointestinal tract and facilitate the expulsion of gas if formed. Ayurveda also suggests that Curry leaves has mild laxative properties and can balance the pitta levels in the body. Momaya’s advice: “A juice of curry leaves with a bit of lime juice or added to buttermilk can be consumed for indigestion.” To control diarrhoea Even though curry leaves have mild laxative properties, research has shown that the carbazole alkaloids in curry leaves can help control diarrhoea. To reduce congestion Curry leaves has long been a home remedy when it comes to dealing with a wet cough, sinusitis or chest congestion. Curry leaves, packed with vitamin C and A and rich in kaempferol, can help loosen up congested mucous. To help you lose weight Curry leaves is known to improve digestion by altering the way your body absorbs fat. This quality is particularly helpful to the obese. To combat the side effects of chemotherapy Curry leaves are said to protect the body from the side effects of chemotherapy and radiotherapy. They also help protect the bone marrow and halt the production of free radicals in the body. To improve your vision Curry leaves is high in vitamin A, which contains carotenoids that can protect the cornea. Eating a diet rich in curry leaves can help improve your vision over time. To prevent skin infections Curry leaves combines potent antioxidant properties with powerful anti-bacterial, anti-fungal and antiprotozoal properties. It is a common home remedy for common skin infections such as acne and fungal infections of the nail. To get better hair Curry leaves has long been used to prevent greying of the hair by our grandmothers. It also helps treat damaged hair, tackle hair fall and dandruff and add bounce to limp hair. To take care of skin Curry leaves can also be used to heal damaged skin. Apply a paste on burns, cuts, bruises, skin irritations and insect bites to ensure quick recovery and clean healing. Add more Curry leaves to your diet and enjoy the benefits of curry leaves.
Sunrise nutrition hub
Recovery from the disease of Codependence involves stopping the war within so that we can get in touch with our True Self, so that we can start to Love and trust ourselves.
Robert Burney (Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls)
With "anything people do but shouldn't" labeled "disease," those who oppose Christianity may very well call prayer, worship, reading the Bible, faith in Jesus Christ, and obeying the Lord 'diseases" or symptoms of a religious "disease." The organization Fundamentalists Anonymous is based upon the idea that conservative Christianity (believing that Jesus is the only way and that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God) is a serious, debilitating addiction. Unfortunately, the three Christian authors of 'Love Is a Choice' have listed this anti-Christian organization at the end of their book with this recommendation: "Seek them out locally.
Martin Bobgan
Christians become friends with the world when they follow its psychological theories to understand themselves and others and to change behavior. They are friends of the world when they call sinful behavior "mental illness" and sinful habits "diseases.
Martin Bobgan (12 Steps to Destruction: Codependecy/Recovery Heresies)
The real disease from which almost all of us suffer is the disease of playing God, of thinking we are or should be in control of what happens to us in life.
Rami M. Shapiro (Recovery—The Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice (The Art of Spiritual Living))
Exercise 4: A Future Without Anxiety. Just as before, close your eyes and imagine yourself in front of a mirror in five years' time. Only this time, your life is no longer controlled by your anxiety: you are the one in control of your life. You can do all of the things you want to do in life without worrying about panic attacks and silly diseases. You've stopped checking for symptoms on the internet – you have realised that there is so much more to life than that. You are so content with life and proud of yourself at your own recovery, as are the people around you who love you. Feel free to talk out loud about how happy you are. Feel free to laugh. Feel free to sing out loud. Whatever is natural for you. Remain in this place for five minutes (or longer if you'd like, I'm not going to stop you!) and when you finish, turn the page. See, visualisation isn't all that hard, is it? I hope that it has given you a sense of inspiration on how you can change. Do you want to spend the next five years with the dull cloud of health anxiety lingering around your head? Or do you want to get your life back?
Darren Sims (Conquering Health Anxiety: How To Break Free From The Hypochondria Trap)
Today, this theory has been soundly discredited. Schizophrenia, we now know, is a disease caused by abnormal brain structure and function, just as heart disease is a product of faulty arteries. The difference is that we don’t yet have a “brain fingerprint” for schizophrenia.
Barbara K. Lipska (The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery)
Imagine once again that you are struggling with highly distressing mental experiences—unusual perceptions and/or beliefs that others around you do not share. This time, however, you live in a society or a community that validates your experience. Your beliefs may be challenged, but not your underlying experience. You will not be locked up against your will or forced to ingest debilitating drugs. You will not be told that you have a diseased brain with no hope of real recovery, but rather, there is the assumption that you will recover, and there is even the assumption that your experiences may eventually allow you to contribute to your community in a unique and powerful way. Your needs for choice, dignity, and respect will be held—your mind, body, and spirit will not be invaded. You find that people listen to your suffering with empathy and compassion rather than fear and judgment.
Paris Williams (Rethinking Madness: Towards a Paradigm Shift in Our Understanding and Treatment of Psychosis)
because we have a disease that tells us we don’t have a disease.
Erica C. Barnett (Quitter: A Memoir of Drinking, Relapse, and Recovery)
When the Kingdom of Heaven invades the Earth, the powers of darkness, including infirmities and incurable diseases, are broken. This is how the apostles turned the world upside down, because they knew they had powers, superhuman powers from another world. You are more than an apostle. You are more than a prophet. You are more than a pastor. You are a King! Your church must become a church that dethrones, dismantles, and disrobes principalities. The Bible says, “To the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known by the church
David E. Taylor (The Kingdom of God - Part II: Recovery of the Crown)
I’m no doctor. But I do think between the sun and the fresh air, being that close to nature is a smart place to start. What you fuel your body with during any kind of recovery is going to play a role in how successful you are,” he continued. “You can’t fight an injury or a disease as efficiently on fast food and soda as you can with plants and healthy grains and water.
Lucy Score (No More Secrets (Blue Moon, #1))
folks. Chronic systemic inflammation plays a key role in more than just age-related diseases. Inflammation contributes to a long list of conditions that you may be dealing with right now. Like asthma, allergies, acne, eczema and other skin conditions, depression, ADHD, and mood swings. Do we have your attention now? EXERCISE AND RECOVERY Chronic systemic inflammation affects your physical fitness, whether you play a sport, are
Dallas Hartwig (It Starts with Food: Discover the Whole30 and Change Your Life in Unexpected Ways)
I’m convinced that calling addiction a disease is not only inaccurate, it’s often harmful. Harmful, first of all, to addicts themselves. While shame and guilt may be softened by the disease definition, many addicts simply don’t see themselves as ill, and being coerced into an admission that they have a disease can undermine other—sometimes highly valuable—elements of their self-image and self-esteem. Many recovering addicts find it better not to see themselves as helpless victims of a disease, and objective accounts of recovery and relapse suggest they might be right. Treatment experts and addiction counsellors often identify empowerment or self-efficacy as a necessary resource for lasting recovery.
Marc Lewis (The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease)