If It’s Just Going to Get Worse, Why Bother?

If your doctor says things are just going to get worse, you may wonder why bother doing anything about it? But taking care of yourself can actually lead to living a fuller life.

Summary:

Every patient is unique. The same diagnosis doesn’t equal the same approach to healing.

Chronic disease doesn’t mean you can’t heal. There is a great amount of healing that can happen, even in chronic degenerative illnesses.

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Transcript: If it’s just going to get worse, why bother?

Dr. Heather Tick: My doctor tells me that it’s just going to get worse. Why should I bother doing anything about it?

In medicine, we like to give a diagnosis. We’re kind of guided to do that because that’s how the system works. You can’t get insurance coverage for seeing a patient visiting unless you put down a diagnosis and it’s gotten to the point where we actually forget that most of these diagnosis are just things that we made up.

We saw a series of signs and symptoms. Signs or things that we see on the patient, symptoms or signs that patients complain about and we say, “Oh. These all fit together. Let’s call it X. Let’s call that one Y.” But in reality when we are faced with the patient, that person is a very unique individual.

It’s like saying that an oak tree and an elm tree and a palm tree, well they’re just trees, they all have the same diagnosis. They all have the same concept that can describe them but we know they are all very different structures and they are good for different things and in these situations of patients that they may need somewhat different approaches even when they have the same diagnosis.

So the other part of diagnosis is some of them are called chronic and so we end up saying that well, things can’t get better. But I have to tell you when I went to medical school – and I learn very little about actual healing – there is a tremendous amount of healing that can take place in people even when they have chronic degenerative diseases.

So we still have to do the best we can to nourish ourselves, our cells and our selves so that our parts of our body, our organs can heal. I’ve seen patients with many chronic diseases for so many years who have been able to live much fuller lives than they ever thought they could simply by taking care of themselves.