10 steps for coping with a chronic condition
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Newsweek readers
10 steps
for coping with a chronic condition
It pays to organize your approach
to heart disease or any chronic medical problem.
(This article was first printed in the December
2003 issue of the Harvard Heart Letter.
For more information or to order, please go
to http://www.health.harvard.edu/heart.)
Dealing with the pain and aggravation of a broken
bone or burst appendix isn’t easy. But
at least there’s an end in sight. Once
the bone or belly heals, you’re pretty
much back to normal. That’s not true for
high blood pressure, heart failure, diabetes,
arthritis, osteoporosis, or other chronic conditions.
With no “cure” in sight, they usually
last a lifetime.
You can live with a chronic condition day to
day, responding to its sometimes swiftly changing
symptoms and problems. Or you can take charge
and manage the disease instead of letting it
rule you.
Earlier this year, the pharmaceutical company
GlaxoSmithKline commissioned a Harris poll to
survey 3,000 adults and 1,000 doctors about living
and coping with chronic conditions. The results,
presented as a report called “Chronic Care
in America,” offer five helpful strategies
for coping with a chronic condition. We’ve
included four of these, and added six of our
own (in red).
- Get a prescription for information. The
more you know about your condition, the better
equipped you’ll be to understand what’s
happening and why. Instead of turning to the
Internet — the Wild West of health information — direct
your questions to your doctor or nurse. If
you want to do more in-depth research, ask
them about trusted sources of medical information
on the Web. If your doctor won’t give
you the information you need, you might want
to start looking for a new doctor.
- Make your doctor a partner in care. We’d
put this one more bluntly: Take responsibility
for your care, and don’t leave everything
to your doctor. One way to do this is to listen
to your body and track its changes. If you
have hypertension, learn to check your blood
pressure. If your heart has rhythm problems,
check your pulse. For heart failure, weigh
yourself every day and chart your symptoms.
This kind of home monitoring lets you spot
potentially harmful changes before they bloom
into real trouble.
- Build a team. Doctors don’t have all
the answers. Seek out the real experts. A nurse
might be a better resource for helping you
stop smoking or start exercising. You’ll
get the best nutrition information from a dietitian.
- Coordinate your care. In an ideal world,
the specialists you see for your heart, your
diabetes, and your arthritis would talk with
each other every now and then about your medical
care. In the real world, this doesn’t
usually happen. A primary care physician can
put the pieces together to make sure your treatments
are good for the whole you.
- Make a healthy investment in yourself. Part
of the treatment for almost any chronic condition
involves lifestyle changes. You know the ones
we mean — stopping smoking, losing weight,
exercising more, and shifting to healthier
eating habits. Although these steps are sometimes
relegated to the back burner, they shouldn’t
be. In the Chronic Care in America survey,
the people who made such changes were more
likely to be successfully managing a chronic
condition than those who didn’t. Investing
the time and energy to make healthy changes
usually pays handsome dividends, ranging from
feeling better to living longer.
- Make it a family affair. The lifestyle changes
you make to ease a chronic condition such as
high cholesterol or heart disease are good
for almost everyone. Instead of going it alone,
invite family members or friends to join in.
- Manage your medications. Remembering to
take one pill a day is tough; managing 10 or
more is daunting. Knowing about the drugs you
take — why you take them, how best to
take them, and what problems to watch out for — is
as important as learning about your condition.
Merely reading a book about prescription drugs
sometimes prompts more worries than it allays.
Talking with your doctor, nurse, or a pharmacist
can put drug information into perspective.
- Beware of depression. Dark, dreary moods
plague a third or more of people with chronic
diseases. Depression can keep you from taking
important medications, seeing your doctor when
you need to, or pursuing healthy habits. Read
up on the signs of depression. Let your doctor
know if you think you’re depressed or
heading in that direction.
- Reach out. Doctors, nurses, and other health
care professionals aren’t always the
best reservoir for information about what it’s
like to recover from open-heart surgery or
live with heart failure. To get the real scoop,
look for a support group in your area and talk
with people who have been through what you
are facing.
- Plan for end-of-life decisions. If the diagnosis
of a chronic condition, or life with one, has
you thinking about death, channel those thoughts
to the kind of care you want at the end of
your life. Spelling out whether you want the
most aggressive care until the very end, or
whether you’d prefer hospice care and
a do-not-resuscitate order, can save you and
your loved ones a lot of confusion and anguish
later on.
(This article was first printed in the December
2003 issue of the Harvard Heart Letter.
For more information or to order, please go
to http://www.health.harvard.edu/heart.)
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