Recovered From Disease Quotes

Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.

Why did they believe? Because they saw miracles. Things one man took as chance, a man of faith took as a sign. A loved one recovering from disease, a fortunate business deal, a chance meeting with a long lost friend. It wasn't the grand doctrines or the sweeping ideals that seemed to make believers out of men. It was the simple magic in the world around them.

Recovering from suffering is not like recovering from a disease. Many people don’t come out healed; they come out different.

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.

No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

We may like to combat disease or even want to cure death. We may try to surf on the waves of infinity and attempt to kill mortality. Nobody, though, ever recovers from the lethal illness. In the meantime, we’d better unlock temporal moments that deliver touches of eternity. They, for sure, never disappoint. (" Living on probation")

the person who takes medicine must recover twice,once from the disease ,and once from the medicine.

I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that — everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.

We do food every single day! Conscious Eating is a big step toward Conscious Living. Quality and Quantity of Food is directly related to our Health and state of mind. We can use food to help us recover from Stress and Disease. Not taking food seriously will eventually lead to Stress or/and Disease.

What you need is a chick from Camden,' Van Patten says, after recovering from McDermott's statement. Oh great,' I say. 'Some chick who thinks it's okay to fuck her brother.' Yeah, but they think AIDS is a new band from England,' Price points out. Where's dinner?' Van Patten asks, absently studying the question scrawled on his napkin. 'Where the fuck are we going?' It's really funny that girls think guys are concerned with that, with diseases and stuff,' Van Patten says, shaking his head. I'm not gonna wear a fucking condom,' McDermott announces. I have read this article I've Xeroxed,' Van Patten says, 'and it says our chances of catching that are like zero zero zero zero point half a decimal percentage or something, and this no matter what kind of scumbag, slutbucket, horndog chick we end up boffing.' Guys just cannot get it.' Well, not white guys.

Youth is a disease from which we all recover.

I thought I would stand myself a little dinner. I hadn't quite enough sense to know that what I really wanted was human companions. There aren't such things. Every man is eternally alone. But when you get mixed up with a fairly decent crowd, you forget that appalling fact for long enough to give your brain time to recover from the acute symptoms of its disease - that of thinking.

a spider and a fly i heard a spider and a fly arguing wait said the fly do not eat me i serve a great purpose in the world you will have to show me said the spider i scurry around gutters and sewers and garbage cans said the fly and gather up the germs of typhoid influenza and pneumonia on my feet and wings then i carry these germs into households of men and give them diseases all the people who have lived the right sort of life recover from the diseases and the old soaks who have weakened their systems with liquor and iniquity succumb it is my mission to help rid the world of these wicked persons i am a vessel of righteousness scattering seeds of justice and serving the noblest uses it is true said the spider that you are more useful in a plodding material sort of way than i am but i do not serve the utilitarian deities i serve the gods of beauty look at the gossamer webs i weave they float in the sun like filaments of song if you get what i mean i do not work at anything i play all the time i am busy with the stuff of enchantment and the materials of fairyland my works transcend utility i am the artist a creator and demi god it is ridiculous to suppose that i should be denied the food i need in order to continue to create beauty i tell you plainly mister fly it is all damned nonsense for that food to rear up on its hind legs and say it should not be eaten you have convinced me said the fly say no more and shutting all his eyes he prepared himself for dinner and yet he said i could have made out a case for myself too if i had had a better line of talk of course you could said the spider clutching a sirloin from him but the end would have been just the same if neither of us had spoken at all boss i am afraid that what the spider said is true and it gives me to think furiously upon the futility of literature archy

We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters. We are God's property. Is it not our happiness thus to view the matter? Is it any happiness or any comfort, to consider that we are our own? It may be thought so by the young and prosperous. These may think it a great thing to have everything, as they suppose, their own way–to depend on no one–to have to think of nothing out of sight, to be without the irksomeness of continual acknowledgment, continual prayer, continual reference of what they do to the will of another. But as time goes on, they, as all men, will find that independence was not made for man–that it is an unnatural state–will do for a while, but will not carry us on safely to the end …'" Mustapha Mond paused, put down the first book and, picking up the other, turned over the pages. "Take this, for example," he said, and in his deep voice once more began to read: "'A man grows old; he feels in himself that radical sense of weakness, of listlessness, of discomfort, which accompanies the advance of age; and, feeling thus, imagines himself merely sick, lulling his fears with the notion that this distressing condition is due to some particular cause, from which, as from an illness, he hopes to recover. Vain imaginings! That sickness is old age; and a horrible disease it is. They say that it is the fear of death and of what comes after death that makes men turn to religion as they advance in years. But my own experience has given me the conviction that, quite apart from any such terrors or imaginings, the religious sentiment tends to develop as we grow older; to develop because, as the passions grow calm, as the fancy and sensibilities are less excited and less excitable, our reason becomes less troubled in its working, less obscured by the images, desires and distractions, in which it used to be absorbed; whereupon God emerges as from behind a cloud; our soul feels, sees, turns towards the source of all light; turns naturally and inevitably; for now that all that gave to the world of sensations its life and charms has begun to leak away from us, now that phenomenal existence is no more bolstered up by impressions from within or from without, we feel the need to lean on something that abides, something that will never play us false–a reality, an absolute and everlasting truth. Yes, we inevitably turn to God; for this religious sentiment is of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other losses.'" Mustapha Mond shut the book and leaned back in his chair. "One of the numerous things in heaven and earth that these philosophers didn't dream about was this" (he waved his hand), "us, the modern world. 'You can only be independent of God while you've got youth and prosperity; independence won't take you safely to the end.' Well, we've now got youth and prosperity right up to the end. What follows? Evidently, that we can be independent of God. 'The religious sentiment will compensate us for all our losses.' But there aren't any losses for us to compensate; religious sentiment is superfluous. And why should we go hunting for a substitute for youthful desires, when youthful desires never fail? A substitute for distractions, when we go on enjoying all the old fooleries to the very last? What need have we of repose when our minds and bodies continue to delight in activity? of consolation, when we have soma? of something immovable, when there is the social order?

Whatever we may say, all of us suffer from disturbed sleep at times. Some in truth hardly sleep, though some who sleep copiously swear that they do not. Some are disquieted by incessant dreams, and a fortunate few are visited often by dreams of delightful character. Some will say that they were at one time troubled in sleeping but have 'recovered' from it, as though awareness were a disease, as perhaps it is.

Before, Sazed had looked at the doctrines themselves. This time, he found himself studying the people who had believed, or what he could find of them. As he read their words over again in his mind, he began to see something. The faiths he had looked at, they couldn't be divorced from the people who had adhered to them. In the abstract, those religions were stale. However, as he read the words of the people—really read them—he began to see patterns. Why did they believe? Because they saw miracles. Things one man took as chance, a man of faith took as a sign. A loved one recovering from disease, a fortunate business deal, a chance meeting with a long lost friend. It wasn't the grand doctrines or the sweeping ideals that seemed to make believers out of men. It was the simple magic in the world around them. What was it Spook said? Sazed thought, sitting in the shadowy kandra cavern. That faith was about trust. Trusting that somebody was watching. That somebody would make it all right in the end, even though things looked terrible at the moment. To believe, it seemed, one had to want to believe. It was a conundrum, one Sazed had wrestled with. He wanted someone, something, to force him to have faith. He wanted to have to believe because of the proof shown to him. Yet, the believers whose words now filled his mind would have said he already had proof. Had he not, in his moment of despair, received an answer? As he had been about to give up, TenSoon had spoken. Sazed had begged for a sign, and received it. Was it chance? Was it providence? In the end, apparently, it was up to him to decide. He slowly returned the letters and journals to his metalminds, leaving his specific memory of them empty—yet retaining the feelings they had prompted in him. Which would he be? Believer or skeptic? At that moment, neither seemed a patently foolish path. I do want to believe, he thought. That's why I've spent so much time searching. I can't have it both ways. I simply have to decide. Which would it be? He sat for a few moments, thinking, feeling, and—most important—remembering. I sought help, Sazed thought. And something answered. Sazed smiled, and everything seemed a little bit brighter. Breeze was right, he thought, standing and organizing his things as he prepared to go. I was not meant to be an atheist.

I hadn't quite enough sense to know that what I really wanted was human companions. There aren't such things. Every man is eternally alone. But when you get mixed up with a fairly decent crowd, you forget that appalling fact for long enough to give your brain time to recover from the acute symptoms of its disease -that of thinking.

In a devastating of example critical thinking gone bad, highly educated, deeply caring parents avoid the vaccinations that would protect their children from killer diseases. I love critical thinking and I admire scepticism, but only in a framework that respects evidence. So if you are sceptical about the measles vaccinations, I ask you to do two things. First, make sure you know what it looks like when a child dies of measles. Most children who catch measles recover, but there is still no cure and even with the best modern medicine, one or two in every thousand will die from it. Second, ask yourself, “What kind of evidence would convince me change my mind about vaccination. If the answer is ‘no evidence could ever change my mind about vaccination,” then you are putting yourself outside evidence-based rationality, outside the very critical thinking that first brought you to this point. In that case, to be consistent in your scepticism about science, next time you have an operation please ask your surgeon not to bother washing her hands.

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.

We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters. We are God's property. Is it not our happiness thus to view the matter? Is it any happiness or any comfort, to consider that we are our own? It may be thought so by the young and prosperous. These may think it a great thing to have everything, as they suppose, their own way–to depend on no one–to have to think of nothing out of sight, to be without the irksomeness of continual acknowledgment, continual prayer, continual reference of what they do to the will of another. But as time goes on, they, as all men, will find that independence was not made for man–that it is an unnatural state–will do for a while, but will not carry us on safely to the end …'" Mustapha Mond paused, put down the first book and, picking up the other, turned over the pages. "Take this, for example," he said, and in his deep voice once more began to read: "'A man grows old; he feels in himself that radical sense of weakness, of listlessness, of discomfort, which accompanies the advance of age; and, feeling thus, imagines himself merely sick, lulling his fears with the notion that this distressing condition is due to some particular cause, from which, as from an illness, he hopes to recover. Vain imaginings! That sickness is old age; and a horrible disease it is. They say that it is the fear of death and of what comes after death that makes men turn to religion as they advance in years. But my own experience has given me the conviction that, quite apart from any such terrors or imaginings, the religious sentiment tends to develop as we grow older; to develop because, as the passions grow calm, as the fancy and sensibilities are less excited and less excitable, our reason becomes less troubled in its working, less obscured by the images, desires and distractions, in which it used to be absorbed; whereupon God emerges as from behind a cloud; our soul feels, sees, turns towards the source of all light; turns naturally and inevitably; for now that all that gave to the world of sensations its life and charms has begun to leak away from us, now that phenomenal existence is no more bolstered up by impressions from within or from without, we feel the need to lean on something that abides, something that will never play us false–a reality, an absolute and everlasting truth. Yes, we inevitably turn to God; for this religious sentiment is of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other losses.

That night had been the first time I’d felt alive, the adrenaline and endorphins making my body, still recovering from disease, feel…normal. It was then that I realized I’d risk anything to feel that way all the time—and most days, I did.

Freud was fascinated with depression and focused on the issue that we began with—why is it that most of us can have occasional terrible experiences, feel depressed, and then recover, while a few of us collapse into major depression (melancholia)? In his classic essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), Freud began with what the two have in common. In both cases, he felt, there is the loss of a love object. (In Freudian terms, such an “object” is usually a person, but can also be a goal or an ideal.) In Freud’s formulation, in every loving relationship there is ambivalence, mixed feelings—elements of hatred as well as love. In the case of a small, reactive depression—mourning—you are able to deal with those mixed feelings in a healthy manner: you lose, you grieve, and then you recover. In the case of a major melancholic depression, you have become obsessed with the ambivalence—the simultaneity, the irreconcilable nature of the intense love alongside the intense hatred. Melancholia—a major depression—Freud theorized, is the internal conflict generated by this ambivalence. This can begin to explain the intensity of grief experienced in a major depression. If you are obsessed with the intensely mixed feelings, you grieve doubly after a loss—for your loss of the loved individual and for the loss of any chance now to ever resolve the difficulties. “If only I had said the things I needed to, if only we could have worked things out”—for all of time, you have lost the chance to purge yourself of the ambivalence. For the rest of your life, you will be reaching for the door to let you into a place of pure, unsullied love, and you can never reach that door. It also explains the intensity of the guilt often experienced in major depression. If you truly harbored intense anger toward the person along with love, in the aftermath of your loss there must be some facet of you that is celebrating, alongside the grieving. “He’s gone; that’s terrible but…thank god, I can finally live, I can finally grow up, no more of this or that.” Inevitably, a metaphorical instant later, there must come a paralyzing belief that you have become a horrible monster to feel any sense of relief or pleasure at a time like this. Incapacitating guilt. This theory also explains the tendency of major depressives in such circumstances to, oddly, begin to take on some of the traits of the lost loved/hated one—and not just any traits, but invariably the ones that the survivor found most irritating. Psychodynamically, this is wonderfully logical. By taking on a trait, you are being loyal to your lost, beloved opponent. By picking an irritating trait, you are still trying to convince the world you were right to be irritated—you see how you hate it when I do it; can you imagine what it was like to have to put up with that for years? And by picking a trait that, most of all, you find irritating, you are not only still trying to score points in your argument with the departed, but you are punishing yourself for arguing as well. Out of the Freudian school of thought has come one of the more apt descriptions of depression—“aggression turned inward.” Suddenly the loss of pleasure, the psychomotor retardation, the impulse to suicide all make sense. As do the elevated glucocorticoid levels. This does not describe someone too lethargic to function; it is more like the actual state of a patient in depression, exhausted from the most draining emotional conflict of his or her life—one going on entirely within. If that doesn’t count as psychologically stressful, I don’t know what does.

We can compare practice to a bottle of medicine a doctor leaves for his patient. On the bottle are written detailed instructions on how to take the medicine, but no matter how many hundred times the patient may read the directions, he is bound to die if that is all he does. He will gain no benefit from the medicine. And before he dies, he may complain bitterly that the doctor wasn’t any good, that the medicine didn’t cure him. He will think that the doctor was a fake or that the medicine was worthless, yet he had only spent his time examining the bottle and reading the instructions. He hadn’t followed the advice of the doctor and taken the medicine. However, if the patient had actually followed the doctor’s advice and taken the medicine regularly as prescribed, he would have recovered. Doctors prescribe medicine to eliminate diseases from the body. The Teachings of the Buddha are prescribed to cure diseases of the mind and to bring it back to its natural healthy state. So the Buddha can be considered to be a doctor who prescribes cures for the illnesses of the mind which are found in each one of us without exception. When you see these illnesses of the mind, does it not make sense to look to the Dhamma as support, as medicine to cure your illnesses?

Virginia Woolf's suicide note- Dearest, I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that - everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer.I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been Virginia Woolf filled her pockets with stones and drowned herself.

For the company to assemble at a late hour and engage in unusual, exciting and severe exercise throughout the entire night, is often too great a tax upon the physical system. To dress too thinly, and in a state of perspiration to be exposed, as ladies at the ball frequently are, to draughts of cold, is oftentimes to plant the seeds of a disease from which they never recover. Again, to come in contact, as ladies are liable to, more especially at the public ball, with disreputable men, is sometimes to form alliances that will make a lifetime of sorrow.' —Thomas E. Hill, Evils of the Ball, 1883

He had bits of some of them, floating in jars, and he wrote up their cases to print in his books. In a tattered edition of the Lancet, Nora discovered her own story with Dr. Croft’s prediction that having recovered from cholera, she’d gained immunity to the disease, and realized that she, too, was a specimen.

Quentin had grown up with that; the mere names were interchangeable and almost myriad. His childhood was full of them; his very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease, waking from the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond the fever and into the disease with actual regret, weak from the fever yet free of the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence.

The naming of a virus is a controversial matter. In 1832, cholera advanced from British India toward Europe. It was called ‘Asiatic Cholera’. The French felt that since they were democratic, they would not succumb to a disease of authoritarianism; but France was ravaged by cholera, which was as much about the bacteria as it is about the state of hygiene inside Europe and North America. (When cholera struck the United States in 1848, the Public Bathing Movement was born.) The ‘Spanish Flu’ was only named after Spain because it came during World War I when journalism in most belligerent countries was censored. The media in Spain, not being in the war, widely reported the flu, and so that pandemic took the name of the country. In fact, evidence showed that the Spanish Flu began in the United States in a military base in Kansas where the chickens transmitted the virus to soldiers. It would then travel to British India, where 60 percent of the casualties of that pandemic took place. It was never named the ‘American Flu’ and no Indian government has ever sought to recover costs from the United States because of the animal-to-human transmission that happened there.

We have not fully recovered from the Dark Ages: the insecurity that excites greed, the fear that fosters cruelty, the poverty that breeds filth and ignorance, the filth that generates disease, the ignorance that begets credulity, superstition, occultism—these still survive amongst us; and the dogmatism that festers into intolerance and Inquisitions only awaits opportunity or permission to oppress, kill, ravage, and destroy. In this sense modernity is a cloak put upon medievalism, which secretly remains; and in every generation civilization is the laborious product and precarious obligating privilege of an engulfed minority. The

Mustapha Mond paused, put down the first book and, picking up the other, turned over the pages. “Take this, for example,” he said, and in his deep voice once more began to read: “’A man grows old; he feels in himself that radical sense of weakness, of listlessness, of discomfort, which accompanies the advance of age; and, feeling thus, imagines himself merely sick, lulling his fears with the notion that this distressing condition is due to some particular cause, from which, as from an illness, he hopes to recover. Vain imaginings! That sickness is old age; and a horrible disease it is. They say that it is the fear of death and of what comes after death that makes men turn to religion as they advance in years. But my own experience has given me the conviction that, quite apart from any such terrors or imaginings, the religious sentiment tends to develop as we grow older; to develop because, as the passions grow calm, as the fancy and sensibilities are less excited and less excitable, our reason becomes less troubled in its working, less obscured by the images, desires and distractions, in which it used to be absorbed; whereupon God emerges as from behind a cloud; our soul feels, sees, turns towards the source of all light; turns naturally and inevitably; for now that all that gave to the world of sensations its life and charms has begun to leak away from us, now that phenomenal existence is no more bolstered up by impressions from within or from without, we feel the need to lean on something that abides, something that will never play us false-a reality, an absolute and everlasting truth. Yes, we inevitably turn to God; for this religious sentiment is of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other losses.”’ Mustapha Mond shut the book and leaned back in his chair. “One of the numerous things in heaven and earth that these philosophers didn’t dream about was this” (he waved his hand), “us, the modern world. ’You can only be independent of God while you’ve got youth and prosperity; independence won’t take you safely to the end.’ Well, we’ve now got youth and prosperity right up to the end. What follows? Evidently, that we can be independent of God. ’The religious sentiment will compensate us for all our losses.’ But there aren’t any losses for us to compensate; religious sentiment is superfluous. And why should we go hunting for a substitute for youthful desires, when youthful desires never fail? A substitute for distractions, when we go on enjoying all the old fooleries to the very last? What need have we of repose when our minds and bodies continue to delight in activity? of consolation, when we have soma? of something immovable, when there is the social order?

DO YOU HAVE OR HAVE YOU EXPERIENCED IN THE PAST SIX MONTHS . . . — PART A — ■ A feeling you’re constantly racing from one task to the next? ■ Feeling wired yet tired? ■ A struggle calming down before bedtime, or a second wind that keeps you up late? ■ Difficulty falling asleep or disrupted sleep? ■ A feeling of anxiety or nervousness—can’t stop worrying about things beyond your control? ■ A quickness to feel anger or rage—frequent screaming or yelling? ■ Memory lapses or feeling distracted, especially under duress? ■ Sugar cravings (you need “a little something” after each meal, usually of the chocolate variety)? ■ Increased abdominal circumference, greater than 35 inches (the dreaded abdominal fat, or muffin top—not bloating)? ■ Skin conditions such as eczema or thin skin (sometimes physiologically and psychologically)? ■ Bone loss (perhaps your doctor uses scarier terms, such as osteopenia or osteoporosis)? ■ High blood pressure or rapid heartbeat unrelated to those cute red shoes in the store window? ■ High blood sugar (maybe your clinician has mentioned the words prediabetes or even diabetes or insulin resistance)? Shakiness between meals, also known as blood sugar instability? ■ Indigestion, ulcers, or GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease)? ■ More difficulty recovering from physical injury than in the past? ■ Unexplained pink to purple stretch marks on your belly or back? ■ Irregular menstrual cycles? ■ Decreased fertility?

A fatal disease vanishing for another reason was New Guinea’s laughing sickness, transmitted by cannibalism and caused by a slow-acting virus from which no one has ever recovered. Kuru was on its way to exterminating New Guinea’s Foré tribe of 20,000 people, until the establishment of Australian government control around 1959 ended cannibalism and thereby the transmission of kuru. The

Grief is not a disease, a mental or emotional disorder, a bad attitude or perspective, or a misbehavior or sin. Grief does not need to be cured, diagnosed and medicated out of existence, fixed, recovered from, or avoided. Grieving people are not sick, broken, or crazy. Mourners are simply experiencing a natural, human response to the loss of a person due to death. —Larry Barber, The Grief Minister

Heart disease is the Jeffrey Dahmer of modern ailments. It kills more than 25 percent of us. That’s one person in the United States dying of it every 37 seconds. Expanding fitness just a bit—the equivalent of a person improving their max running speed from five to six miles an hour—reduces the risk of heart disease by 30 percent, according to the American Heart Association. Next is cancer. It kills 22.8 percent of us. The most fit people face a 45 percent lower risk of dying from the disease, according to a study in the Annals of Oncology. Then we have accidents. They take 6.8 percent of us. If a person is in a serious car accident, being in shape drops their chances of dying by 80 percent, according to a study in the Emergency Medical Journal. If the docs have to operate—regardless of whether it’s an emergency or a planned surgery—fitter people also face fewer surgical complications and recover faster than unfit people, say scientists in Brazil.

But whatever instances there may have been of such devotion, more often the sick and the dying were tended by the pitying care of those who had recovered, because they knew the course of the disease and were themselves free from apprehension.For no one was ever attacked a second time, or not with a fatal result.All men congratulated them, and they themselves, in the excess of their joy at the moment, had an innocent fancy that they could not die of any other sickness. (Book 2 Chapter 51.6)

I believe that the imperative need of the day is not simply revival, but a radical reformation that will go to the root of our moral and spiritual maladies and deal with causes rather than with consequences, with the disease rather than with the symptoms.” He concluded, “It is my considered opinion that under the present circumstances we do not want revival at all. A widespread revival of the kind of Christianity we know today in America might prove to be a moral tragedy from which we would not recover in a hundred years.

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.

By healing our mind with great compassion, we will be able to solve all our own problems and those of others. The positive thought of compassion will not only help us to recover from sickness but bring us peace, happiness, and satisfaction. It will enable us to enjoy life. It will also bring peace and happiness to our family and friends and to other people around us. Because we will have no negative thoughts toward them, the people — and even the animals — we deal with will feel happy. If we have loving kindness and compassion, our prime concern will always be not to hurt others, and this itself is healing. A compassionate person is the most powerful healer, not only of their own disease and other problems, but of those of others. A person with loving kindness and compassion heals others simply by existing. (p. 8)

Brian Doyle about the Irish custom of “taking to the bed.” He says “In Irish culture, taking to the bed with a gray heart is not considered especially odd. People did and do it for understandable reasons—ill health, or the black dog, or, most horrifyingly, to die during An Gorta Mor, the great hunger, when whole families took to their beds to slowly starve…And in our time: I know a woman who took to her bed for a week after September eleventh, and people who have taken to their beds for days on end to recover from shattered love affairs, the death of a child, a physical injury that heals far faster than the psychic wound gaping under it. I’ve done it myself twice, once as a youth and once as a man, to think through a troubled time in my marriage. Something about the rectangularity of the bed, perhaps, or supinity, or silence, or timelessness; for when you are in bed but not asleep there is no time, as lovers and insomniacs know. Yet, anxious, heartsick, we take to the bed, saddled by despair and dissonance and disease, riddled by muddledness and madness, rattled by malaise and misadventure, and in the ancient culture of my forbears this was not so unusual….For from the bed we came and to it we shall return, and our nightly voyages there are nutritious and restorative, and we have taken to our beds for a thousand other reasons, loved and argued and eater and seethed there, and sang and sobbed and suckled, and burned with fevers and visions and lust, and huddled and howled and curled and prayed. As children we all, every one of us, pretended the bed was a boat; so now, when we are so patently and persistently and daily at sea, why not seek a ship? p. 119-20 Brian Doyle in The Wet Engine: Exploring the Mad Wild Miracle of the Heart, p. 90-91

For the longest time, the crucial importance to health of just moving around was hardly appreciated. But in the late 1940s a doctor at Britain’s Medical Research Council, Jeremy Morris, became convinced that the increasing occurrence of heart attacks and coronary disease was related to levels of activity, and not just to age or chronic stress, as was almost universally thought at the time. Because Britain was still recovering from the war, research funding was tight, so Morris had to think of a low-cost way to conduct an effective large-scale study. While traveling to work one day, it occurred to him that every double-decker bus in London was a perfect laboratory for his purposes because each had a driver who spent his entire working life sitting and a conductor who was on his feet constantly. In addition to moving about laterally, conductors climbed an average of six hundred steps per shift. Morris could hardly have invented two more ideal groups to compare. He followed thirty-five thousand drivers and conductors for two years and found that after he adjusted for all other variables, the drivers—no matter how healthy—were twice as likely to have a heart attack as the conductors. It was the first time that anyone had demonstrated a direct and measurable link between exercise and health.

When the pandemic started, most of the other medical practices in the Detroit area shut down, Dr. David Brownstein told me. “I had a meeting with my staff and my six partners. I told them, ‘We are going to stay open and treat COVID.’ They wanted to know how. I said, ‘We’ve been treating viral diseases here for twenty-five years. COVID can’t be any different.’ In all that time, our office had never lost a single patient to flu or flu-like illness. We treated people in their cars with oral vitamins A, C, and D, and iodine. We administered IV solution outside all winter with IV hydrogen peroxide and vitamin C. We’d have them put their butts out the car window and shot them up with intramuscular ozone. We nebulized them with hydrogen peroxide and Lugol’s iodine. We only rarely used ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. We treated 715 patients and had ten hospitalizations and no deaths. Early treatment was the key. We weren’t allowed to talk about it. The whole medical establishment was trying to shut down early treatment and silence all the doctors who talked about successes. A whole generation of doctors just stopped practicing medicine. When we talked about it, the whole cartel came for us. I’ve been in litigation with the Medical Board for a year. When we posted videos from some of our recovered patients, they went viral. One of the videos had a million views. FTC filed a motion against us, and we had to take everything down.” In July 2020, Brownstein and his seven colleagues published a peer-reviewed article describing their stellar success with early treatment. FTC sent him a letter warning him to take it down. “No one wanted Americans to know that you didn’t have to die from COVID. It’s 100 percent treatable,” says Dr. Brownstein. “We proved it. No one had to die.

Every so often, the gods stop laughing long enough to do something terrible. There are few facts that are not brutal. The bitter, insufficient truth is that God recovered, but fun is dead. Alcohol: the antidote to civilization. Alcoholism is a fatal disease. But then I am not a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, because I don't want to be cured. Alcoholism is suicide with training wheels. I watch myself sinking, an inch at a time, and I spit into the eye of fate, like Doc Holliday, who died too weak to lift a playing card. My traitorous and degenerate attitude is sort of my book review of the world we live in. I resign from the human race. I declare myself null and void; folded, spindled, and mutilated. . . .This bar is an oasis for the night people, the street people, the invisible tribe, the people who simply do not exist in the orderly world we see in Time - the weekly science fiction magazine published by the Pentagon - an orderly world which is a sanitized Emerald City populated by contented Munchkins who pay taxes to buy tanks, nerve gas, and bombers and not a world which is a bus-station toilet where the air is a chemical cocktail of cancer-causing agents, children are starving, and the daily agenda is kill or be killed. When the world demands that you be larger than life, and you are finding it hard enough just being life-size, you can come here, in the messy hemorrhaging of reality, let your hair down, take your girdle off, and not be embarrassed by your wounds and deformities. Here among the terminally disenchanted you are graded not by the size of the car on display in your driveway but by the size of your courage in the face of nameless things. . . .Half of these people look like they just came back from the moon, and all of them are sworn witnesses for the prosecution on the charge that Earth serves as Hell for some other planet.

Mustapha Mond paused, put down the first book and, picking up the other, turned over the pages. “Take this, for example,” he said, and in his deep voice once more began to read: “ ‘A man grows old; he feels in himself that radical sense of weakness, of listlessness, of discomfort, which accompanies the advance of age; and, feeling thus, imagines himself merely sick, lulling his fears with the notion that this distressing condition is due to some particular cause, from which, as from an illness, he hopes to recover. Vain imaginings! That sickness is old age; and a horrible disease it is. They say that it is the fear of death and of what comes after death that makes men turn to religion as they advance in years. But my own experience has given me the conviction that, quite apart from any such terrors or imaginings, the religious sentiment tends to develop as we grow older; to develop because, as the passions grow calm, as the fancy and sensibilities are less excited and less excitable, our reason becomes less troubled in its working, less obscured by the images, desires and distractions, in which it used to be absorbed; whereupon God emerges as from behind a cloud; our soul feels, sees, turns towards the source of all light; turns naturally and inevitably; for now that all that gave to the world of sensations its life and charms has begun to leak away from us, now that phenomenal existence is no more bolstered up by impressions from within or from without, we feel the need to lean on something that abides, something that will never play us false—a reality, an absolute and everlasting truth. Yes, we inevitably turn to God; for this religious sentiment is of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other losses.’ ” Mustapha Mond shut the book and leaned back in his chair. “One of the numerous things in heaven and earth that these philosophers didn’t dream about was this” (he waved his hand), “us, the modern world. ‘You can only be independent of God while you’ve got youth and prosperity; independence won’t take you safely to the end.’ Well, we’ve now got youth and prosperity right up to the end. What follows? Evidently, that we can be independent of God. ‘The religious sentiment will compensate us for all our losses.’ But there aren’t any losses for us to compensate; religious sentiment is superfluous. And why should we go hunting for a substitute for youthful desires, when youthful desires never fail? A substitute for distractions, when we go on enjoying all the old fooleries to the very last? What need have we of repose when our minds and bodies continue to delight in activity? of consolation, when we have soma? of something immovable, when there is the social order?

I cannot be more specific, because the process does not happen in books but in living persons. People have drunk grape juice and recovered from cancer. If you can successfully restore balance to the bodymind, then the patient’s immune system will respond. The immune cells do not judge whether the doctor believes in conventional medicine, homeopathy, or Ayurveda. Insofar as it can change our participation in disease, every system is capable of working.

Most people think they know pain. Everyone's done something: broken a limb, been stung by a wasp, recovered from an operation or rammed a baby through their birth canal. But chronic pain is different. It isn't just pain that lingers; it's pain that dominates. It swaddles you in its gloom and slips blinkers on you until everything you see, and everything you experience, is filtered through that pea soup of pain. The vast majority of chronic pain conditions are not only incurable but also untreatable. They don't respond to drugs, and science hasn't -- yet -- located a central fuse box to repair. So people with chronic pain not only live with pain; they're told that this is it until death they do part. It is a diagnosis that dehumanises your body as much as it eviscerates your spirit. And it's made worse because, if there's no obvious physical explanation for it -- as is the case with most types of chronic pain (diseases like arthritis aside) -- people think, consciously or not, that you're making it up. Three GPs, eight consultants, three physiotherapists, one nurse and two psychologists had tried to rout my pain in the first year of its existence. All had failed, though each had laid their failure at my door, not theirs. There's no physical reason for it, they said; or there's kind of a physical reason but not enough of a physical reason to correspond to your level of pain. Maybe, some of them ventured, possibly, do you think... could it be in your head?

However, Pauling’s interest in these carotenoids and flavonoids was confined to their chemical structures and the influence of structure on optical properties; he did not address their health functions. In 1941 Pauling was diagnosed with Bright’s disease, or glomerulonephritis, which was at the time an often-fatal kidney disorder. On the advice of physicians at the Rockefeller Institute, he went to San Francisco for treatment by Thomas Addis, an innovative Stanford nephrologist. Addis prescribed a diet low in salt and protein, plenty of water, and supplementary vitamins and minerals that Pauling followed for nearly 14 years and completely recovered. This was dramatic firsthand experience of the therapeutic value of the diet. Revelations When Pauling cast about for a new research direction in the 1950s, he realized that mental illness was a significant public health problem that had not been sufficiently addressed by scientists. Perhaps his mother’s megaloblastic madness and premature death caused by B12 deficiency underlay this interest. At about this time, Pauling’s eldest son, Linus Jr., began a residency in psychiatry, which undoubtedly prompted Pauling to consider the nature of mental illness. Thanks to funding from the Ford Foundation, Pauling investigated the role of enzymes in brain function but made little progress. When he came across a copy of Niacin Therapy in Psychiatry (1962) by Abram Hoffer in 1965, Pauling was astonished to learn that simple substances needed in minute amounts to prevent deficiency diseases could have therapeutic application in unrelated diseases when given in very large amounts. This serendipitous and key event was critically responsible for Pauling’s seminal paper in his emergent medical field. Later, Pauling was especially excited by Hoffer’s observations on the survival of patients with advanced cancer who responded well to his micronutrient and dietary regimen, originally formulated to help schizophrenics manage their illness.19,20 The regimen includes large doses of B vitamins, vitamin C, vitamin E, beta-carotene, selenium, zinc, and other micronutrients. About 40 percent of patients treated adjunctively with Hoffer’s regimen lived, on average, five or more years, and about 60 percent survived four times longer than controls. These results were even better than those achieved by Scottish surgeon Ewan Cameron, Pauling’s close clinical collaborator, in Scotland. After a long and extremely productive career at Caltech,

God,—the Father planning everything well and giving His commands, the Son carrying these into execution and performing the work of creating, and the Spirit nourishing and increasing [what is made], but man making progress day by day, and ascending towards the perfect, that is, approximating to the uncreated One. For the Uncreated is perfect, that is, God. Now it was necessary that man should in the first instance be created; and having been created, should receive growth; and having received growth, should be strengthened; and having been strengthened, should abound; and having abounded, should recover [from the disease of sin]; and having recovered, should be glorified; and being glorified, should see his Lord. For God is He who is yet to be seen, and the beholding of God is productive of immortality, but immortality renders one nigh unto God.

Certain healing foods can help your body ward off or recover from the viruses behind Lyme disease symptoms. Star anise, asparagus, wild blueberries, radishes, celery, cinnamon, garlic, apricots, and onions

As long as the organism is able to act and react it will be able to recover from disease.

Systemic inflammation is implicated in many chronic diseases and, not surprisingly, is also involved in limbic system conditions. While an acute trauma may cause the initial inflammation, it is the maladapted stress response involved with limbic system dysfunction that keeps the brain and body in a state of chronic inflammation. Psychological, emotional, and physical responses to stress are equally as important and can cause the brain to release a specific chemical cocktail that causes a chain of reactions in the body.

Optimal stress is the balanced, moderate amount of stress that appears to be necessary to grow the new neurons and neuronal connections that correlate with keeping the brain healthy. Research shows that just as too much stress creates a biochemical condition that damages neurons in the brain, too little stress leads to the atrophy, death and lack of replacement of old neurons. This is why lifelong learning is widely recognized as one of the key practices necessary to avoid Alzheimer’s disease. In my opinion, lifelong recovering is an exalted subset of lifelong learning. I believe that optimal stress is frequently attained when we practice the behaviors that remedy our developmental arrests. Examples of this include reading self-help books, attending self-improvement workshops, working at deeper self-discovery through journaling, or struggling to be more vulnerable and authentic in a therapy session or an evolving relationship. Moreover, it might be that minor flashbacks sometimes function as optimal stress. I certainly know a number of long term recoverees who seem to be evolving and becoming sharper in their old age.

In The One Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa, Milarepa encounters some dakinis who have been offended by being burned by the smoke of a shepherd's foul-smelling fire. They have reacted by creating a pestilence. The dakinis say to him: 'According to the reciprocal-relation principle of the Law of Causation, when we recover from a disease so will the people. It is the common oath of all worldly Dakinis that if one of us has been made unwell or unhappy, we are all offended and the Devas and spirits support us, throwing the world into confusion.

I wouldn't work in a hospital again! They do not tell you about the high disease risks when they hire you. It is well known that hospital jobs are lemons today with the pandemic. One of my coworkers was suffering with chronic fatigue from her thirties onward. She has never been healthy since working there. She probably had an infection from a sickly patient and never recovered.

I remember some of these stories from when I lived here as a teenager. Every place has its lore, but Tahoe clings particularly tightly to the time when it was more exclusive, more glamorous; when it was more than just an overpriced weekend ski getaway for San Francisco's tribes of tech bro millionaires. I stare out the win dow at the forest flying past and think that it's nice to be in the mountains, away from the toxic bustle of urban life, the glittering lights that advertise desire. I imagine bringing my mother up here, to recover from her disease. The fresh air might be therapeutic; certainly it would be good for us both to get away from city life. And then I remember that once Lachlan and I leave here, along with Vanessa's money, we'll never be able to come back again.

Still not recovered from the physical and emotional strains of the war, Winant was also bone-tired. "I have never seen a more exhausted man in my life," a friend and former business partner of Winant's said shortly after the war. "He had aged tremendously." Mary Lee Settle would later describe the war-caused enervation that she, Winant, and others experienced as a "deep brutal exhaustion that had seeped into our souls, our bodies, our relationships with each other, a kind of fatal disease of exhaustion." Eric Sevareid, who was only thirty-two when the war ended, noted that he had "a curious feeling of age, as though I had lived through a lifetime, not merely through my youth.

Later generations will regard Mengenlehre (set theory) as a disease from which one has recovered.

Personally speaking, “social heredity” is a disease that no person or a country recovers from. Everyone tries to be good but, laws and demands of countries kill everything beautiful and innocent in a person.

Remember: letting go is not giving up. Letting go means you learned the lesson, gained the insight from a situation and make a deliberate choice to not holding a grudge and moving on with your life. While giving up means, you’re still hoping for the other part to listen to you, see you, understand you, apologize to you for causing you so much dilemma, and of course when none of the above happens, you may stop trying to get their attention and keep distance from those who did you wrong, physically but you’re still attached to them mentally and emotionally. And that’s what makes many people mentally and emotionally paralyzed. You may function physically and not have any visible or known diseases but you can’t do anything, you lack motivation and inner strength.

If the heart of the problem is the problem of the heart—which it is—you’ll never cure the disease you’re suffering from by doing X-rays on other people.

Because maybe not all the problem is your spouse. Maybe not all the problem is your employer. Maybe not everybody is conspiring together to come to the same conclusion about you. Maybe it’s just . . . the truth. And the truth is what God is always wanting you to see. Because when you’re dealing with the truth, that’s when you can actively work toward real change. So maybe it’s time for you to pull out the shovel and hand tools, as opposed to the easy push of the lawn mower. Time for sanctification to become a personal process for yourself, not just a personal assignment for somebody else. If you expect things to change, you can’t just keep mowing over the stuff that keeps cropping up, every time the people with whom you rub shoulders start rubbing you the wrong way. If the heart of the problem is the problem of the heart—which it is—you’ll never cure the disease you’re suffering from by doing X-rays on other people.

Have you ever been in a knock-down, drag-out fight? Or maybe you just felt like you were. It was as if you were in the ring with one of the greatest prizefighters that ever lived, and you were just getting the stuffing knocked out of you. You knew that you were outmatched, outgunned and woefully unprepared for what was coming your way, but it was headed straight for you, and you had nowhere to run and no time to get out of the way. And that was just last week! Today, you look up, and you see another battle forming just beyond the horizon, gathering strength, velocity, and force. "Not again," you think to yourself, "can I please have a moment to recover from the last one?" Dear friend, God sees your struggles, and He knows your pain. But He wants you to know that no matter what it looks like, you already have the victory. When you exchanged your dead, diseased life for a full and prosperous one in harmony with your heavenly Father, you became a warrior in the army of the Lord. As such, the enemy is going to try and take you out. He will send his best troops against you. He will devise the most elaborate plans to bring about your downfall. But, it will all be in vain. You see, if you remain in Christ and we know that Christ is in the Father, not only will you not lose any battles that you face in life, but you cannot lose.

Your body has a remarkable ability to recover from sporadic insults as long as you’re not habitually poking it with a fork.

Indeed, today, more people than ever before see themselves as addicted or recovering from substance addiction: 1 in 10 American adults—more than 23 million people—said they’d kicked some type of drug or alcohol addiction in their lifetime, in a large national survey conducted in 2012. At least another 23 million currently suffer from some type of substance use disorder. That doesn’t even count the millions who consider themselves addicted to or recovering from behaviors like sex, gambling, or online activities—nor does it include food-related disorders. With the 2013 declaration by the American Medical Association that obesity, like addiction, is a disease, up to one in three Americans may now qualify due to their body weight.

Youth is a disease from which we must never recover.

May 20 Coming Out Of Isolation "We find ourselves doing and enjoying things that we never thought we would be doing." Basic Text, p. 98 Active addiction kept us isolated for many reasons. In the beginning, we avoided family and friends so they wouldn't find out we were using. Some of us avoided all nonaddicts, fearing moral backlash and legal repercussions. We belittled people who had "normal" lives with families and hobbies; we called them "uncool" believing we could never enjoy the simple pleasures of life. Eventually, we even avoided other addicts because we didn't want to share our drugs. Our lives narrowed, and our concerns were confined to the daily maintenance of our disease. Today, our lives are much fuller. We enjoy activities with other recovering addicts. We have time for our families. And we've discovered many other pursuits that give us pleasure. What a change from the past! We can live life just as fully as the "normal" people we once scorned. Enjoyment has returned to our lives, a gift of recovery. Just for today: I can find pleasure in the simple routines of daily living.

Depending on the toxin, the level of exposure, and the autoimmune disease, removing the offending chemical from the environment may or may not provide a benefit. In some cases, removing that trigger to autoimmune disease will enable a full recovery to take place. In other cases, the damage has been done, and removing the harmful substance will not promote healing. (That doesn’t mean you can’t recover; it just means that diet and lifestyle are even more important.)

Koch’s postulates here: The same pathogen must be present in every case of a disease. The pathogen must be isolated from the diseased host and grown in a laboratory to show it is alive. The pathogen should be checked to confirm its purity and then injected into a healthy host (a laboratory animal). The injected pathogen must cause the same disease in the new host. The pathogen must be recovered from the new host and again grown in the laboratory. Some

The person who takes medicine must recover twice, once  from the disease and once from the medicine.” — William Osler, MD

Giving 'freedom' to women — an impossibility. With the liberation of women in the 19th century, the West has given itself an infection from which it can’t recover without the most terrible convulsions and the most thorough purgative measures. What the 'freedom' of women means in practice is the domination of mankind by the demagogues who can rally the lower orders of the spirit. Because there is no world in which 'the women' can act as a political unit. Liberation of women means freedom and power for financiers, lawyers, purveyors of comforts in and outside government, employers who whore out your wife and daughters. It has been the greatest weakening and self-own a civilization has ever visited on itself. But in the end is this so different from democracy as such? Yes…because the 'liberation' of women makes democracy into a terminal disease…one that doesn’t just end a particular government, but the civilization.

This was stress cardiomyopathy, also called “broken heart syndrome.” First described by the Japanese in 1990, this disease occurs when an emotional trauma causes the brain to release high doses of stress hormones. This hormonal blast paralyzes the muscle cells of the heart, preventing them from working to pump the blood. Typically only one section of the heart is spared this devastating paralysis—the part closest to the aorta so that with each heartbeat only the upper portion contracts and the heart looks like a narrow-necked vase. The Japanese called it takotsubo, after a type of trap that is used to capture octopus and has the same vase-like shape. For reasons that no one understands, this mostly affects postmenopausal women. There is no cure. There is no clot to bust, no bugs to kill. Like its metaphorical counterpart, the only treatment is support and the passage of time. The initial burst of hormones subsides and the patient must be kept alive until the heart recovers. For those who survive long enough to reach the hospital, the prognosis is good.

Due to the earned sick time policy of the USA, it is likely you are working with COVID-19 infected workers that do not have sufficient earned sick time to stay home and recover from their highly infectious disease!

Why did they believe? Because they saw miracles. Things one man took as chance, a man of faith took as a sign. A loved one recovering from disease, a fortunate business deal, a chance meeting with a long lost friend. It wasn’t the grand doctrines or the sweeping ideals that seemed to make believers out of men. It was the simple magic in the world around them.

Expanding fitness just a bit—the equivalent of a person improving their max running speed from five to six miles an hour—reduces the risk of heart disease by 30 percent, according to the American Heart Association. Next is cancer. It kills 22.8 percent of us. The most fit people face a 45 percent lower risk of dying from the disease, according to a study in the Annals of Oncology. Then we have accidents. They take 6.8 percent of us. If a person is in a serious car accident, being in shape drops their chances of dying by 80 percent, according to a study in the Emergency Medical Journal. If the docs have to operate—regardless of whether it’s an emergency or a planned surgery—fitter people also face fewer surgical complications and recover faster than unfit people, say scientists in Brazil.

I was so wounded by the scars left by the disease of invisibility I internalized as a child that I had no connection to self.

Resentment will do nothing except tear us apart inside. No one ever found serenity through hatred. No one ever truly recovered from the effects of alcoholism by harboring anger or fear, or by holding on to grudges. Hostility keeps us tied to the abuses of the past. Even if the alcoholic is long gone from our lives or has refrained from drinking for many years, we, too, need to learn to detach. We need to step back from the memories of alcoholic behavior that continue to haunt us. We begin to detach when we identify the disease of alcoholism as the cause of the behavior and recognize that our ongoing struggle with unpleasant memories is an effect of that disease. We, too, must find within us compassion for the alcoholic who suffered from this terrible illness.

Sometimes people’s diets take on a religiosity of their own. I remember a man once telling me that he could never “go plant based” because he could never give up his grandma’s chicken soup. Huh? Then don’t! After I asked him to say hello to his bubby for me, I told him that enjoying her soup shouldn’t keep him from making healthier choices the rest of the time. The problem with all-or-nothing thinking is that it keeps people from even taking the first steps. The thought of never having pepperoni pizza again somehow turns into an excuse to keep ordering it every week. Why not scale down to once a month or reserve it for special occasions? We cannot let the “perfect” be the enemy of the good. It’s really the day-to-day stuff that matters most. What you eat on special occasions is insignificant compared to what you eat day in and day out. So don’t beat yourself up if you really want to put edible bacon-flavored candles on your birthday cake. (I’m not making those up!40) Your body has a remarkable ability to recover from sporadic insults as long as you’re not habitually poking it with a fork.

Your optimal heart rate for aerobic training is determined with the 180-Formula as follows: 1. Subtract your age from 180 (180- age). 2. Modify this number by selecting from the following categories the one that best matches your health and fitness profile: • If you are recovering from a major illness (heart disease, any operation, any hospital stay, etc.) or if you are on any regular medication (see below), subtract an additional 10. • If you have not exercised before, have exercised irregularly, have been exercising with injury, have regressed in training or competition, get more than two colds or cases of flu per year, or have allergies or asthma, subtract an additional 5. • If you have been exercising regularly (at least four times weekly) for up to two years without any of the above-mentioned problems, use the (180- age) number. • If you are a competitive athlete and have been training for more than two years without any of the above-mentioned problems and have made progress in competition without injury, add 5, The heart rate obtained by using this formula is referred to as the maximum aerobic heart rate.

Few of the French soldiers who fell ill of the disease recovered.

Yet even that number understates the horror of the disease, a horror contained in other data. Normally influenza chiefly kills the elderly and infants, but in the 1918 pandemic roughly half of those who died were young men and women in the prime of their life, in their twenties and thirties. Harvey Cushing, then a brilliant young surgeon who would go on to great fame—and who himself fell desperately ill with influenza and never fully recovered from what was likely a complication—would call these victims “doubly dead in that they died so young.

The true test of a high altitude researcher is how well they can recover from the long term effects of high altitude disease.

Mustapha Mond paused, put down the first book and, picking up the other, turned over the pages. “Take this, for example,” he said, and in his deep voice once more began to read: “’A man grows old; he feels in himself that radical sense of weakness, of listlessness, of discomfort, which accompanies the advance of age; and, feeling thus, imagines himself merely sick, lulling his fears with the notion that this distressing condi- tion is due to some particular cause, from which, as from an illness, he hopes to recover. Vain imaginings! That sickness is old age; and a horrible disease it is. They say that it is the fear of death and of what comes after death that makes men turn to religion as they advance in years. But my own experience has given me the conviction that, quite apart from any such terrors or imaginings, the religious sentiment tends to develop as we grow older; to develop because, as the passions grow calm, as the fancy and sensibilities are less excited and less excitable, our reason becomes less troubled in its working, less obscured by the images, desires and distractions, in which it used to be absorbed; whereupon God emerges as from behind a cloud; our soul feels, sees, turns towards the source of all light; turns naturally and inevitably; for now that all that gave to the world of sensations its life and charms has begun to leak away from us, now that phenomenal existence is no more bolstered up by impressions from within or from without, we feel the need to lean on something that abides, something that will never play us false-a reality, an absolute and everlasting truth. Yes, we inevitably turn to God; for this religious sentiment is of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other losses.”’ Mustapha Mond shut the book and leaned back in his chair. “One of the numerous things in heaven and earth that these philosophers didn’t dream about was this” (he waved his hand), “us, the modern world. ’You can only be independent of God while you’ve got youth and prosperity; independence won’t take you safely to the end.

The fading relevance of the nature–nurture argument has recently been revived by the rise of evolutionary psychology. A more sophisticated understanding of Darwinian evolution (survival of the fittest) has led to theories about the possible evolutionary value of some psychiatric disorders. A simplistic view would predict that all mental illnesses with a genetic component should lower survival and ought to die out. ‘Inclusive fitness’, however, assesses the evolutionary value of a characteristic not simply on whether it helps that individual to survive but whether it makes it more likely that their offspring will survive. Richard Dawkins’s 1976 book The Selfish Gene gives convincing explanations of the evolutionary advantages of group support and altruism when individuals sacrifice themselves for others. A range of speculative hypotheses have since been proposed for the evolutionary advantage of various behaviour differences and mental illnesses. Many of these draw on ethological games-theory (i.e. the benefits of any behaviour can only be understood in the context of the behaviour of other members of the group). So depression might be seen as a safe response to ‘defeat’ in a hierarchical group because it makes the individual withdraw from conflict while they recover. Mania, conversely, with its expansiveness and increased sexual activity, is proposed as a response to success in a hierarchical tussle promoting the propagation of that individual’s genes. Changes in behaviour that look like depression and hypomania can be clearly seen in primates as they move up and down the pecking order that dominates their lives. The habitual isolation and limited need for social contact of individuals with schizophrenia has been rather imaginatively proposed as adaptive to remote habitats with low food supplies (and also a protection against the risk of infectious diseases and epidemics). Evolutionary psychology will undoubtedly increasingly influence psychiatric thinking – many of our disorders fit poorly into a classical ‘medical model’. Already it has helped establish a less either–or approach to the discussion. It is, however, a highly controversial area – not so much around mental disorders but in relation to social behaviour and particularly to gender specific behaviour. Here it is often interpreted as excusing a very male-orientated, exploitative worldview. Luckily that is someone else’s battle.

who are married, have close family and friends, belong to social and religious groups, and participate widely in these networks—recover more quickly from disease and live longer. Roughly eighteen studies show a strong connection between social connectivity and mortality.” Devoting more time and energy to being with the people in our lives whom we find most nourishing, Cohen says, has health benefits.30 He also urges patients, to the extent possible, to reduce the number of emotionally toxic interactions in their day, while increasing the nourishing ones.

His [Crowley's] grief was profound. And he himself was far from the peak of health. It seems that all his recent traveling weighted heavily on his already weakened constitution from past illnesses. He was recovering from the debilitating after-effects of malaria, with raging migraines and throat pathology (for which he received surgery). Therefore, Crowley needed pain medication for an assortment of rare and exotic diseases and conditions. The fact that in Crowley's time certain extremely strong medications were regularly prescribed, even for polite and proper English ladies, does not deter Crowley's detractors from trying to paint him as a crazed drug fiend.

bedrock of recovery is abstinence from addictive, mood-altering chemicals. But it is also true that for sobriety to be achieved and maintained, our loved one needs to work through multiple layers of dysfunctional thoughts and behaviors. She must replace unhealthy attitudes and belief systems with new ways of thinking and understanding. And she must acquire new skills for long-term management of a chronic disease.

The love Nora and I shared was certainly grand. We built our own fantasy worlds. We would sometimes role-play. At times, she was the captive and I was the rescuer who traveled the world and swam the seven seas to save her. Other times, she was the nurse who attended to my needs as I recovered from a deadly unknown disease, which was miraculously cured by love and a soft kiss from her luscious lips. We shared everything with each other. We found happiness, we found comfort, we found security, and we found love. Together, we would let our imaginations soar beyond the heavens. We imagined what our wedding would look like, and the songs we would dance to. We named our future kids.

High Altitude Observatory Disease (HAOD) cannot be recovered from. It is a lifelong disease that is managed through treatment and it may eventually kill you.

•  Addiction is a chronic medical illness that attacks the brain, damaging key parts of the cerebral cortex and limbic system. •  With standard traditional treatment, the chance of recovering from addiction and maintaining that recovery is 20–30 percent. •  With the new Recovery Science approach to treatment, the chance of recovering from addiction and maintaining that recovery can approach 90 percent. •  Seventy-five percent of alcoholics are not in treatment, even though alcoholism is nearly as life threatening as heart disease and cancer.

Most patients who have had an acute infection expect to pass through a variable period of convalescence before they regain their usual health. An unlucky minority recover from the symptoms of acute disease only to be assailed by a new illness; a post-infectious syndrome.

Fifteen years after leaving her husband, Frances—who never remarried—found herself in the headlines, accused of being a conniving homewrecker. In a lawsuit filed in March 1922, asking for $25,000 in damages, Mrs. Marion Mehren of 2971 Second Boulevard, Detroit, accused Frances of alienating the affections of her husband, Paul Mehren. According to Mrs. Mehren’s allegations, “the woman lawyer took her husband for automobile rides, permitted him to visit her at her apartment . . . and accepted gifts of groceries from him.” When Mrs. Mehren confronted her husband and “accused him of being too friendly with Mrs. Keusch,” he flew into a rage and “told her to ‘go ahead and get a divorce.’”9 For her part, Frances brushed off the accusations, “declaring that Mehren was nothing more than a chauffeur and a servant.” Six years earlier, while she was recovering from a knee injury, Mehren “scrubbed the floor of her apartment, washed dishes and performed other menial work.” Occasionally, she “employed him to take her for drives while she was convalescing.” She “paid him for everything he did for her,” as well as “for all the groceries.”10 The story took an even juicier turn during Mrs. Mehren’s court appearance that September, when she admitted to physically assaulting her alleged romantic rival. As she told the judge, she and her husband were out in their car when she spotted Mrs. Keusch, who called out “Hello, Paul” as they drove past. “Jumping from the car,” the enraged wife—who had known “her husband was going with another woman” ever since “he left home for three days in July, 1920”—had set upon Frances and badly “scratched her face.”11 Four years later, in August 1926, Frances Kehoe Keusch died of heart disease—chronic myocarditis.12 The scandal she had been involved in might have set tongues wagging at the time. Compared with the enormity perpetrated by another Kehoe sibling just one year later, however, it was a trivial matter indeed.

Why did they believe? Because they saw miracles. Things one man took as chance, a man of faith took as a sign. A loved one recovering from disease, a fortunate business deal, a chance meeting with a long lost friend. It wasn’t the grand doctrines or the sweeping ideals that seemed to make believers out of men. It was the simple magic in the world around them.

Whatever we may say, all of us suffer from disturbed sleep at times. Some in truth hardly sleep, though some who sleep copiously swear that they do not. Some are disquieted by incessant dreams, and a fortunate few are visited often by dreams of delightful character. Some will say they were at one time troubled in sleeping but have “recovered” from it, as though awareness were a disease, as perhaps it is.

Sleep is crucial to a healthy immune system. It boosts your ability to fight off disease and infection. And when you’re sick, it allows you to heal and recover.