Blog Articles About coping

5 Tips for Coping When Your Illness Takes Over

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over my five decades with autoimmune arthritis, it’s that it ebbs and flows. There are times when everything’s as great as it can be, others when you enter the abyss, and everything in between. Having a chronic illness is much like being on a roller coaster, except slower and…

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How Mental Health Resources Can Help You Live Better With RA

RA affects your physical health, but also your mental and emotional health. In one of my new articles for HealthCentral, I took a look at the mental health resources that can help you heal and move forward: “Living with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is not easy. Adapting to the repeated changes and losses that can accompany…

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Facebook Live: Guilt and Chronic Illness

So many of us feel so much guilt. As you know, I wrote a post about guilt — particularly writer guilt — a little while ago, but I couldn’t get it out of my head. So I took at the Facebook. In this month’s #AskLene, we talked about guilt, chronic illness, and how to let…

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CAPA Creates New Methotrexate Tool for People with Inflammatory Arthritis

Dawn Richards presenting the CAPA methotraxate tool at the Annual European Congress of Rheumatology “We all have a story about methotrexate,” said Dawn Richards, Vice President of the Canadian Arthritis Patient Alliance (CAPA) Steering Committee. This medication has been around for a long time and is considered the gold standard for treatment of inflammatory arthritis….

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New Ebook – 7 Facets: A Meditation on Pain

Pain is a funny thing. Not just to live with (in which case it’s not always very funny), but in terms of the myths and the silence surrounding it. Talking about pain is uncomfortable, especially for those who don’t have it. Pain is hard to understand. You can’t measure it, it’s difficult to describe and…

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The graphic shows the torso of a white man in a white coat with crossed arms. The title of the post is Nothing More Than Feelings: How Doctors Minimize RA Reality. The post is about the concept of catastrophizing "When a patient feels it is okay to truly say how the disease impacts their life instead of feeling pressured to buck up and underreport their symptoms, the doctor is more likely to fully understand the patient’s reality." My take on the concept of catastrophizing in rheumatology.

Nothing More than Feelings: How Doctors Minimize RA Reality

Updated August 30, 2020 Catastrophizing is a popular concept in medicine, particularly when dealing with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and chronic pain. You’ll find endless studies and articles on the concept, described as negative self statements, feelings or coping strategies. For instance, someone saying “this is the worst pain I’ve ever had” or “what if I can’t…

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