In addition to following good medical advice, there are ways to help your mindbody maximize wellbeing and minimize the negative effects of illnesses and medication side effects.
I propose there are three main components that determine the difference between empowerment and helplessness consciousness during adversity: Especially important when dealing with the challenges of an illness.
Identification: To identify with a negative condition makes you the condition. This does not mean denial of an illness. Instead, it's recognition that you are more than what is not working well in your mindbody.
Attribution: The cause that you give your mindbody reactions will have a corresponding mindbody effect. When you do not identify with your illness, you can separate negative symptoms associated with your illness from other symptoms unrelated to your illness.
Outlook: Begin to see your illness as a transitional state that can be improved or cured by coauthoring wellness consciousness with your healthcare professionals. This does not mean to create false hope with illnesses that have no known cure. Instead, it is recognition that all illnesses will eventually have a cure. There are many illnesses that were terminal fifty years ago. While you wait for the cure, there's much you can do with the integrative wisdom of health professions and mindbody science. To live without hope is to limit the power to heal that your mindbody has learned in the past 50,000 years as modern Homo sapiens.
What are the mindbody processes that you engage when you embrace a different identification, attribution, and outlook of an illness? You allow your nervous, immune and endocrine systems to do what they know best without you restricting them with the psychoneuroimmunology of helplessness.
Examples:
Diabetes: You are "a diabetic" is replaced with you have a metabolic challenge with insulin. You are more than a diabetic.
Cancer: You "have cancer" is replaced with you have a challenge with how your immune system fights malignant cells. You are more than cancer.
What appears to be a semantic shift is much more than language gymnastics. Instead, it is consciousness of empowerment with tools of hope and resilience that have positive psychoneuroimmunological effects (how behavior affects nervous, immune and endocrine system regulation). But the shift I am proposing does not happen if it stays in your head. You have to transition into empowerment consciousness with actions that give your mindbody evidence that you are more than your illness. Always practice what I am suggesting in addition to what your healthcare professionals ask you to do. If you don't find meaning in what your healthcare professional tells you, find another healthcare professional who understands how mindbody processes can trigger our causes of health. It is a process that is not clearly understood, but frequently observed when patients become coauthors of their wellness. Remember, health science is based on the laws of average and standard deviation. Necessary but not sufficient to identify individual differences in how we process challenges.