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The Will to Get Well
Published in The Stethoscope Hears All Tells All, Volume 5, Number 20, October 6, 1927.
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Every patient who starts the fight against tuberculosis should have the will to get well. He may get well without it, but he will shorten the necessary period of treatment and be surer of recovery with it, and the process will be less tedious. Someone has said that the treatment of tuberculosis consists in doing all the things that one does not want to do, and leaving undone all the things that one wants to do. While this statement is greatly exaggerated, yet the successful treatment of tuberculosis requires the foregoing of most of the usual pleasures and activities of home and business life, and the following of a program entirely apart from that followed by people generally. To be able to lead such a life requires on the part of the patient the will to get well. He must want health and life, and must want it so much that be is willing to follow his program no matter how restricted it may seem; and follow it long enough for healing to become established.
The will to get well will make it easy to follow a rest cure while others are going about with their usual activities; it will furnish the ‘NO’ which is so often necessary when friends are urging the patient to overstep the rules; or when his own desires seem to be getting the upper hand. The will to get well makes a positive force for prosecuting the cure instead of a passive compliance or an opposition.
The program for cure which has been established in sanatoria embodies the experience of those who have been most successful in treating tuberculosis, but requires the will to get well on the part of the patient in order to make it effective. The will to get well carries with it a sufficient reward in increased chances of cure. In early tuberculosis a physician who understands the disease and a patient with the will to get well need face failure in only a very few instances, and in the more advanced cases success will crown their efforts sufficiently often to make the disease one which has lost much of its hopelessness. On the other hand, without the will to get well the guidance of the ablest physician may be unavailing, and simple cases of tuberculosis may readily pass on to become incurable.