The American Chronic Pain Association site says the group has been around since 1980, but I hadn’t run across them until yesterday. I spent some time on their site; they have some really good resources and a long list of…
Being an Active Part of Your Own Health Care Team, Part II
It has only taken me ten years since my first article to return to this topic! I always intended to do so, but life got in the way. In that first article, I largely addressed medication issues. Now we’re going to…
Being an Active Part of Your Own Health Care Team, Part I
People who have chronic or complex health issues need to take an active role in their own health care. That doesn’t come naturally to everyone, and in fact, it runs counter to the traditional way of interacting with “Doctor God”…
Fight Brain Fog!
Or, at the very least, give yourself more resources to fight it! Cognitive abilities are like muscles, in that they have to be developed and exercised regularly, even stretched to keep them flexible. We can’t necessarily avoid the cognitive deficits that…
Hope for Pain Relief
I’ve known of mindfulness practices for several years, and read Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness by Jon Kabat-Zinn several years ago. It is one of the books I’ve…
Long Term Opiate Use Safe; One Woman’s Experience With Savella
There are two great articles from Karen Lee Richards in HealthCentral’s Chronic Pain Connection newsletter today. The first, Long-Term Opioid Therapy — What Are the Effects?, brings us the results of Dr. Forest Tennant’s ground-breaking study. He evaluated 24 chronic…
Tips and Tools for Working From Bed
I’ve never encountered this website before, but it was linked from a blog carnival, and the article is pretty good: Because Sitting up is for Suckers: 70+ Tools, Tips and Hacks to Work from Bed I still miss my laptop! And…
Review: Women, Work and Autoimmune Disease
I read Women, Work and Autoimmune Disease by Rosalind Joffe and Joan Friedlander a few months back, but for some reason, my review on Amazon took a while to show up, and I didn’t think to keep a copy for…
Free Screen Magnifier Software
This isn’t where I usually get geeky, but I think this utility might be useful to many readers. I get notices from the Giveaway of the Day and Game Giveaway Of the Day sites each day as to what they…
The Value of Education for Chronic Illness Patients
Paula Kamen, author of All In My Head, talks about the value of education in coping with chronic illness in an excellent editorial in the New York Times, Leaving the Rabbit Hole. This passage, in particular, spoke to me: The worst…