 Sometimes when people are not getting better, despite all of the standard medical treatments, we have to do the one thing that is the most uncomfortable. We have to look in the mirror. Now in this video I thought I would elaborate on this famous quote and why it has many many implications for healing if you're struggling with a chronic illness. Hey guys, I'm Dr. Alex Hine, Doctor of Acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine and author of the health book, Master of the Day. Now before we jump into this video, I've put together two very important links right below the video. The first is for a free guide, which is five daily rituals that can potentially help you add years to your life with traditional Chinese medicine. The second is if you'd like to become a patient of mine locally in Los Angeles or virtually via telemedicine, you can contact my private practice and clinic right below. So let's recap for just a sec or rewind rather. Yes, there are incurable diseases right now, but the context for this quote is that often when you're treating chronic diseases and chronic people who have chronic diseases day after day, you begin to see the correlation between certain personal actions and certain very stubborn chronic diseases and chronic illnesses. Very often it is ourselves keeping ourselves sick through our own personal habits. Now sometimes those habits are obvious, right? Like a diabetic who's eating garbage all day and doesn't plan to change even after they cut off a toe or a foot or sometimes amputate an entire leg. Many people will never change. Even if it leads them to an early grave, that's fine. I'm not here to force people to change as long as they understand the risks of not changing. But so often those habits are mental, not just physical or material habits. So there are some interesting mental habits that keep people sick. For example, you have people who don't actually want to get better. They're actually so satisfied with their pity party, feeling poorly every day, complaining and not doing everything about it. They don't actually want to get better. You have people who actually want to die or even don't even care if they live. You have many, many people profiled in Bernie Siegel's book, A Surgeon, Love Medicine and Miracles where he says he has a whole questionnaire so that he can determine if this patient actually even cares about living. Because if they don't, there's seems to be a correlation with the human will to live and to some degree their disease prognosis, not every time, but there's a general correlation. If you want to live and you want to get better, you're going to take actions to get better and to live. You're going to want to change. You're going to want to invest in seeing an alternate opinion or a third opinion or alternative doctor like me. But a lot of people, frankly, based on their actions, they don't care. They don't really care if they live or die. They just don't want to do anything. There are people who just hate their lives and like a little kid that hits their thumb and looks to mommy to cry so that it can get attention. They love being in the pity party of feeling ill and that becomes their identity and it becomes their story. It becomes even depressingly where they get their value and their purpose and meaning from because suddenly they were an invisible person just working their boring nine to five job. Now they get all this love, their parents, their old friends, their children. Everyone comes back together to help them. It's where they get attention and self-esteem and still other people, the mental habit that keeps them sick is that their primary care physician or specialist said, there's nothing we can do. There's nothing in medicine and they take that as the word of God, the final word, the period, the end of the sentence and they stop searching. So sometimes it's the mental habit. The way that a person is that keeps them ill less so than their physical habits like what they eat or their exercise or their sleep. At the same time, there are very clear physical habits, physical archetypes that keep you sick. For example, there's the achiever, the person who the second they feel better, they're out running marathons again, they're working 60 hours of work, they're building their startup company even though I just undid the damage of the last five years and I told them, take it easy, move slow for the next couple years, not months, years. They just went into remission from their cancer and they're out climbing mountains again and running marathons when the whole message of their life was you need to slow down. There are people who are the glutton archetype, right? They love drinking, they love eating, they love smoking, they love every substance that can change their state and yet the whole message and measure of their life was quote unquote gluttony, this stagnation, there's just so much they're putting in their body, putting in their life, not only physically in their body, they've gained so much excess weight from eating too much rich food and too much food or the wrong food, but on top of that, there's the emotional stagnation, their place is cluttered, their life is cluttered, it's over scheduled, it's overbooked, it's all just too much. You may also be the victim, the victim again is the kind of person where you know frankly, they're not willing to change and they don't even want to look at themselves at all. I had a patient that was dying of cancer and she came to me and she said, you know, my family wants me to do all these weird alternative therapies, like one of them is going to therapy and discussing my childhood traumas and I don't have an opinion on that, but I said, so are you doing it? Why not just do everything that will give you a better quality of life? And she said, I don't really want to dig that stuff up. So this woman who has given a six month diagnosis that was terminal never came back to me, sure enough died and was so uninterested in improving herself and working on herself and maybe clearing some emotional stuff that it would have just made her feel better guaranteed and made peace with people in her life. She was willing to go to the grave and not even do something that could help her even just on an emotional level. So some people, they don't change at all and they're completely unwilling to look at themselves. These are people who really don't want to get better. And so you can lead a horse to water, but you can't force it to drink. So my prompt for you is to reflect on what habits or ways of being, whether they are mental and emotional and psychological, the ways you view the world or your life, whether they are explicit as in you say them out loud or you're aware of them or they're implicit, you don't even know, you're not consciously aware of them, but you know, you're doing them. Or what habits are you doing in terms of your diet, if you have acid reflux, insomnia, anxiety, or cancer or heart disease, which of those patterns is making you an incurable person rather than having an incurable disease? And which of those habits do you think if you change them even a little bit may lead to a better prognosis or inch towards healing in the future. That's your reflection point for today. So don't forget to check out those two links right below this video, you guys, those other related videos, and I'll see you soon.