Taking Charge: Overcoming the Challenges of Long-Term Illness

As a person who has seen chronic illness from both sides of the physician's white coat, I highly recommend this book. This book will be useful not only to the afflicted, but also to those family and friends who must also cope with the "elephant" in the room--which begins to take up a larger and larger portion of the free space around the patient as time goes by, and as the physician(s) become more and more distant, letting you know that the are gradually withdrawing emotionally after the condition becomes one of those within medicine that, frankly, fill most of the charts on the walls of medical records offices.It is much to easy to succumb to the incipient blaming that comes as you repeatedly seek assistance and find little relief, or, worse, manipulation and financial and emotinoal rip-off throughout the health care system. You know it isn't the people...but it gets harder and harder.This book was first published in 1994, but is no less relevant today than then...and highly recommended. The subtitle: Overcoming the challenges of long-term illness....belies the secret greatest obstacle facing many patients in our "modern" society...how to achieve a sense of meaningful life in a society in which we are barraged with the illusion of youth, immortality, health-promotion with little scientific basis, and stereotypes of physical beauty. I would like to see comparisons to those who are "treated" in health-care systems that approach chronicity differently...

As a Licensed Professional Counselor specializing in counseling individuals coping with chronic illness, I have recommended this book to clients and to the public in my advertising. The book is worded in everyday language speaking to the reader. The content is to the point and not caught up in philosophy or jargon. It is well organized to not only validate a spectrum of emotional ractions but also to assist the reader to break an overwhelming experience into workable parts. The reader is respected as an already successfully coping adult who has been met with a crisis and needs support. Specific, useful coping suggestions are offered to the client. The book offers validation, a sense of direction, and hope of regaining control to the person or family confronted with a medical crisis.