Chronic Illness

There is no easy fix when it comes to chronic pain. Opioids are often the first, addictive resort and surgery rarely achieves the pain free outcome promised. But while there is no single fix, there is a way out and it starts with understanding the reason for your pain. This is the powerful approach of The Pain-Free M.i.n.d.s.e.t, where NHS pain consultant Dr Ravindran brings his 20 years of experience to offer you an effective set of techniques that will help you take back control and overcome your pain.

Marian Schembari was thirty-four years old when she learned she was autistic. By then, she’d spent decades hiding her tics and shutting down in public, wondering why she couldn’t just act like everyone else. Therapists told her she had Tourette’s syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, sensory processing disorder, social anxiety, and recurrent depression. They prescribed breathing techniques and gratitude journaling. Nothing helped. It wasn’t until years later that she finally learned the truth: she wasn’t weird or deficient or moody or sensitive or broken. She was autistic.

The Effortless Sleep Method is the approach insomniacs all over the world have been waiting for. This hugely effective method offers a simple and permanent solution for long-term and new insomniacs alike.

To the world's public health authorities, Covid-19 would either be a deadly disease for some, or it would be a simple respiratory illness for most—cleared up in a couple of weeks. But then tens of millions around the world got sick and stayed sick. With scientists and doctors caught off guard, these patients often found solace only in themselves, organizing support groups across continents while ill in bed. An innovative band of patients researched the disease themselves, flipping the script and illustrating a new paradigm for research.

By making a few simple, manageable changes to your diet, you may be able to reduce or fix your rheumatoid arthritis symptoms. Many foods contain powerful, natural anti-inflammatory properties to alleviate your RA symptoms. Because inflammation is the root of all pain, by reducing it, you will reduce the pain. This can ease swelling in your affected joints, allowing normal movement of your body part, and even help boost your brain function and improve circulation.

If you have autoimmune disease, live with terrible fatigue, constant pain, and you need to take back your health, then you're going to want to hear Heidi's story. Many of us are told: But you don't look sick, or Get up, you're being lazy. Or perhaps dismissed - as I was - with: Come back when you're worse and I'll put you on steroids. Fortunately, there are better solutions available!

At the age of 27, Whitney Dafoe was forced to give up his life as a photographer who traveled the world. Bit by bit a mysterious illness stole away the pieces of his life: First, it took the strength of his legs, then his voice, and his ability to eat. The Puzzle Solver follows several years in which he desperately sought answers. Whitney's father, Ron Davis, PhD, a world-class geneticist at Stanford University whose legendary research helped crack the code of DNA, suddenly changed the course of his career in a race against time to cure his son's debilitating condition.

In Sleepyhead, science writer Henry Nicholls uses his own experience with chronic narcolepsy as a gateway to better understanding the cryptic, curious, and relatively uncharted world of sleep disorders. Charming, eye-opening, and deeply humanizing, Sleepyhead will help us all uncover the secrets of a good night's sleep.

With chronic disorders among American children reaching epidemic levels, hundreds of thousands of parents are desperately seeking solutions to their children's declining health, often with little medical guidance from the experts. What's Making Our Children Sick? convincingly explains how agrochemical industrial production and genetic modification of foods is a culprit in this epidemic.

In Own Your Health, Glen narrates his own journey to health, tells the stories of how his parents saved each other’s lives and how his wife Joanna overcame lupus, explains why the science of nutrition is more settled than you think, suggests the best way to deal with doctors, takes on some leading historic opponents of the plant-based diet, blows apart the silly and misguided attacks on “carbs,” and gives us an action plan to reverse the epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, while obliterating demand for the kind of food-raising that risks future pandemics.

This is a story of transformation from profound and debilitating fatigue to freedom and wellness, written by a Chartered Physiotherapist. Jill's unique experiences as a qualified professional, a sufferer and someone who has recovered thanks to her own dogged determination to do so, gives her insights that can help others with this awful condition. Most books available give guidance on how to live with fatigue, Jill shows you how to take control and transcend the current narrative, to return to living a happy and joyful life.

Can you really cure chronic pain without drugs, surgery, or therapy? Surprisingly, often the answer is yes. While chronic pain can have a physical cause, this book, written by a leading UK physiotherapist and chronic pain specialist, reveals how very real, even debilitating, pain can frequently be caused by our brain in response to repressed or avoided emotions as a result of current and even past experiences. This process is at the root of many common complaints.

When Amy B. Scher was struck with undiagnosed late-stage, chronic Lyme disease, the best physicians in America labeled her condition incurable and potentially terminal. Deteriorating rapidly, she went on a search to save her own life - from the top experts in Los Angeles and the world-renowned Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis to a state-of-the-art hospital in Chicago. After exhausting all of her options in the US, she discovered a possible cure - but it was highly experimental, available only in India, and had as much of a probability of killing her as it did of curing her.

Vinh Pham is a world-class physical therapist who has worked with a broad range of clients. Early in his career, he discovered a disappointing truth: most of his patients came to him already in pain. They had lifestyle habits that misaligned their joints and tightened their muscles. And the recent epidemic of prolonged sitting—which represents an all-day assault on the body—has only made things worse. A precise and simple toolkit for tweaking the way we move (or refuse to move), Sit Up Straight outlines a process that starts with a daily posture regimen.

The Ultimate Guide to Sex and Disability is the first complete sex guide for people who live with disabilities, pain, illness, or chronic conditions. Useful for absolutely everyone, regardless of age, gender, or sexual orientation, the book addresses a wide range of disabilities - from chronic fatigue, back pain, and asthma to spinal cord injury, hearing and visual impairment, multiple sclerosis, and more.

On July 22, 2009, a special meeting was held with 24 leading scientists at the National Institutes of Health to discuss early findings that a newly discovered retrovirus was linked to chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), prostate cancer, lymphoma, and eventually neurodevelopmental disorders in children. When Dr. Judy Mikovits finished her presentation the room was silent for a moment, then one of the scientists said, "Oh my God!" The resulting investigation would be like no other in science.

In his new book, Energetic Diagnosis, Dr. Neil Nathan, renowned physician and bestselling author of TOXIC, delivers his groundbreaking thesis on diagnosing disease and chronic illness using the patient’s personal energy fields as the launchpad for treatment. An individual’s energy is often overlooked when treating difficult-to-identify disease. Dr. Nathan puts forth the premise that patient evaluation should be highly personal, beginning with a thorough analysis of events leading up to sickness, including lingering mental trauma.

Allison Alexander, who has struggled with a chronic illness since she was a child, wants to see herself in her heroes and searches for examples of sick characters in pop culture. She weaves her own painful experiences with stories from other chronic sufferers, engaging with how society values healthiness, how doctors don’t always have answers, and how faith, friendship, and romance add pressure to already complicated situations.

As many as 2.5 million Americans suffer from ME/CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and fibromyalgia), devastating chronic illnesses that to date has no test for diagnosis. A lesser-known condition, hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, considered to be a genetic connective tissue disease, affects every system of the body, particularly the nervous system. These debilitating diseases can be so difficult to properly diagnose that patients, often bedridden with pain, exhaustion, and many other symptoms, go through further hell when they are not believed that they’re sick.

Let’s talk about your vagus nerve, a large branching nerve that connects your brain to all of your major organs. It transmits information in both directions, so both your brain’s orders and your organs’ reports to the brain go through the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is responsible for calming you down after a stressful situation, controlling the inflammation levels in your body, regulating your digestion, and much more. As you see, a lot can go wrong in your body if the vagus nerve is somehow blocked or not active enough.