The modern world would have you pop a ‘pill and flop back to work’. It’s almost like there is no time to pause and recover. The government stats bare this out; sickness per employee is dropping still. It is below four days a year. Hurrah for productivity! Hurrah for progress! But are we really getting better?
The government stats also bemoan the number of people who present at over worked A&E with flu like symptoms’, because they simply don’t know how to be ‘ill at ease’, that is how to stay at home and recover properly.
Of course, if necessary we, patients, should seek right medical support for urgent or critical illnesses, but there is also a case for being ‘patient at home’ with ourselves, by arming ourselves with proper rest rather than harming ourselves with over work (which also includes over working the emotional berating we can put ourselves through for not being ‘better enough’. There is a sense of social exclusion driven by being perceived as ‘feeble’ or a ‘shirker’.
Many of the pharmaceutical peddle this view throughly highly advertised ‘miracle cures’ and have us believing we should bounce back instantaneously. Before they existed, like back in my 1960’s childhood all the kids with mumps and measles would meet up and play together. We would keep ourselves isolated in community!
But today, kids, even big kids like you and me, are wheeled down the doctors for antibiotics for a sore throat. Why? Because our busy, important world demands it!
Instead, honey & lemon, gargling with salt water, warm rest and fluids will suffice, best done of course, quietly without grumbling or bowing down to demands to be perfectly fit!
In essence we just have to be a bit kinder to ourselves and others. To encourage us all to take better care of ourselves. Let’s not threaten each other with terrible things that might happen if they don’t get better, quick!
Ideally, they should rest at home, sparing the rest of us, too! Maybe, if you make just one resolution this year, forget wearing yourself out at the gym and, instead, make life a little easier by embracing the art of being ‘ill at ease’.
‘There is one consolation about being sick; and that is the possibility that you may recover to a better state than you were ever in before.’ Henry David Thoreau
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