Life Beyond Chronic Pain By Jaime Heidel

Living with a chronic illness is hard. There are so many things that you have to consider. While medication can do wonderful things, it also comes with risks and side effects. Where possible, I prefer to make lifestyle changes to reduce my symptoms. Sometimes these are enough to manage my conditions and other times I need to take medication as well. Where I do have to take medication, I know I’ve done everything possible to help myself with lifestyle changes. Life Beyond Chronic Pain by Jaime Heidel* is a resource to help you, help yourself.

I have been given this product as part of a product review through the Chronic Illness Bloggers network. Although the product was a gift, all opinions in this review remain my own and I was in no way influenced by the company.

Jaime Heidel is the woman behind the blog I Told You I Was Sick. For many years, Jaime was told that she was making her symptoms up for attention. Sound familiar? I’ve definitely been in this situation myself and I know that many others with chronic illnesses have too. Jaime has worked tirelessly to make a difference to the lives of those with chronic illnesses, giving them the tools they need to help themselves. the book, Living With Chronic Illness, is one example of this.

As someone with chronic illness, I really liked that Living With Chronic Illness is a short book. with my cognitive difficulties, poor concentration and poor memory (caused my my conditions), as well as my Mears-Irlen syndrome and dyslexia, reading isn’t easy for me. The length of this book was perfect for me. I was able to read it from cover to cover in 1 hour and a half. Unfortunately, while the length of the book was ideal, I struggled with the formatting. The words weren’t evenly spaced, which made processing them difficult. I don’t know whether this is because I uploaded the book from a file to my Kindle. It may be that when you purchase from Amazon, the formatting is much better.

Life Beyond Chronic Pain had a few things in it that I’m not convinced about. “When you already have a chronic illness, your immune system isn’t functioning properly.” While I personally have a faulty immune system because of my asthma, eczema, hay fever and food allergies, I’m not sure how something like scoliosis, for example, would cause problems with a person’s immune system. This isn’t to say that the statement is incorrect, just that there wasn’t enough information given to convince me.

There were a lot of fantastic suggestions in Life Beyond Chronic Pain, for people to take any use in order to improve their health. One of the suggestions that I was most impressed with, was cutting out Aspartame. I don’t feel there is enough said about the problems this substance can cause. It’s also frustrating that it’s an ingredient in number of medications. You could be taking medication to help your symptoms and, if sensitive to aspartame, actually making yourself worse!

Once of the things I was also really impressed with about Living With Chronic Pain is that Jaime makes very clear that everyone is different and what works for one person, won’t work for another. An example of this was the suggestion of vegetable juicing. There are so few vegetables that I can eat because of my allergies and IBS that juicing just isn’t possible for me. While this is given as a great way to detoxify the body, Jaime makes clear throughout the book that you should take from the book what is suitable for you and not feel guilty about things that will not be suitable for your personal situation.

 You can purchase Life Beyond Chronic Pain by Jaime Heidel from Amazon.co.uk for £6.13.

Have you read Life Beyond Chronic Pain? Did you find it helpful?

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