If I found the cure for dystrophy tomorrow, I would do a telethon in four weeks for acute pain that in this country is a bigger problem than cancer, heart, sickle cell, anemia, name it. It is - it's hitting 70 million Americans.
My doctor felt that the main contributing factor was so many years of malnutrition, especially during my formative years, even before I got into modeling.
Today it has been estimated that the average 70 year old has four chronic conditions and consumes an average of 35 PBS scripts per year for those conditions.
As far as protecting yourself against Alzheimer's disease, well, it turns out that fish oil has the effect of reducing your risk for Alzheimer's disease. You should also keep your blood pressure down, because chronic high blood pressure is the biggest single risk factor for Alzheimer's disease.
We are the ones who have high blood pressure, ulcers, and heart attacks, not cats.
Medical treatment is emergency care for symptoms that have developed over a long period of time. The symptom is the flower on a plant. Treating the symptom is picking the flower, while the plant remains untouched.
Stem cell therapy has the potential to treat a multitude of diseases and illnesses, which up until now have been labelled 'incurable.'
Old people have fewer diseases than the young, but their diseases never leave them.
It's no longer a question of staying healthy. It's a question of finding a sickness you like.
It's just so bizarre how in this world if you have asthma, you take asthma medication. If you have diabetes, you take diabetes medication. But as soon as you have to take medicine for your mind, it's such a stigma behind it.
Chronic disease like a troublesome relative is something you can learn to manage but never quite escape.
We can now diagnose diseases that haven't even manifested in the patient, and may not until the fifth decade of life - if at all.
I was 52 years old. I had diabetes and incipient arthritis. I had lost my gall bladder and most of my thyroid gland in earlier campaigns, but I was convinced the best was ahead of me.
With a spinal cord injury, which most people don't really know about... there are many, many complications that actually lead you through your life, and sometimes you're up, sometimes you're down.
We all know that as we form thoughts, they form deep channels in our minds and in our brains. Chronic pain is an example. If you burn yourself, you pull your hand away. But if you're still in pain in six months' or six years' time, it's because these circuits are producing pain that's no longer helping you.
I think many people with a chronic illness would prefer not to have their chronic illness, simply because it's high maintenance.
Obamacare does much more than provide coverage to the previously uninsured - it improves the quality of coverage for all of us. Critical cancer and other health screenings are free. Women and people with disabilities or chronic conditions are no longer charged more - or priced out of the market altogether.
Poor diet and sedentary behaviour have led to an increase in obesity and lifestyle-related disease and a huge rise in chronic medical conditions.
I don't know whether other asthma sufferers find this, but I've noticed that even when I've got my asthma under control, I often develop another problem such as an ear, chest or sinus infection and sometimes even joint pains.
When the Veterans Affairs Department implemented a program to provide home-based health care to veterans with multiple chronic conditions - many of the system's most expensive patients to treat - they received astounding results.
Life begins at forty, but so does arthritis, and the habit of telling the same story three times to the same person.
In an aging world with more chronic disease, health and healthcare are enormous opportunities that we want to focus on.
In medicine you go from dying to chronically ill. You don't go from dying to better than you ever knew you could be. That just doesn't happen.
Those who become mentally ill often have a history of chronic pain.
But Gulf War Syndrome is not one cause, not one illness. It is many causes, many illnesses.
