Once seeing the title of this article, you may be questioning what in the world does it mean to "embrace and accept your thyroid disease" and what would it mean to embrace or accept any disease for that matter?

Certainly I am not of the belief that we should be accepting of a disease that might invade our bodies and become a part of us or that we should appreciate a disease for doing so. What I am saying is that once we have experienced the onset of a disease and have been diagnosed, we should reserve ourselves to the fact that the disease has indeed become a part of us, at least for the time being and it is very important that we find positive avenues for dealing with the illness, otherwise, we will find ourselves in a tremendous struggle and negative battle against something that at least for the time being, we do not have complete control of.

I once heard an Osteopath Dr., who is also a Christian, tell a patient not to anguish about their disease, which was a form of cancer and potentially life-threatening. He told this patient that for the time-being, it was better to simply go with the flow and not battle against the disease with constant worry and struggle to fight it off in attempt to get better because this tends to exhaust your energy reserves and cause you to lose heart more easily, than if you simply settle into it and allow treatments you are taking, to do their job. I thought this was excellent advice and especially with the fact that this same Doctor had experienced that very same form of cancer he was advising the patient about and he experienced full remission and is still living well, several years later.

In my case, the disease I have experienced the onset of, is Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, an inflammatory autoimmune thyroid disease that causes hypothyroidism. This disease hit me especially hard because of the timing of the onset being at an extremely stressful and busy period of my life. It affected me greatly both physically and emotionally and I found it very hard to even accept that I had this disease. I found out after diagnosis approximately four years ago, from the date of this article (it's now Feb 2007) that it would also require treatment, taking replacement hormone pills, likely for the rest of my life and this too was very hard for me to accept. Like anyone else, I instead wanted a quick fix for the problem, some way to overcome it and get rid of it immediately. I found it very difficult to even reserve myself to taking the medication and in the back of my mind, I kept wanting to believe the Doctors were all wrong and that it was an incorrect diagnosis. I went on like this for the first several months and just as the Osteopath Doctor described, it caused a lot of frustration to build in me and I found myself getting exhausted from all of the worry I was allowing myself to experience.

At one point, it occurred to me that it was possible that if I learned all I could about this disease, I might find all possible avenues for helping to cope with it and possibly even overcome it in my life. This was for me, part of embracing the disease because my wanting to learn all I could about it, was part of the aspect of acceptance that needed to take place.

The internet is an incredible resource of information for any subject and is true of medical information as well. No one should ever be discouraged from educating their selves about a disease they have but they should of course study only that information that is reliable, such as that found on the more reputable mainstream sources. You should study medical information on your disease, carefully and slowly and compare the information together with many reliable resources, so that correct information you find, is strongly confirmed.

I also realized at one point that I could also learn from other patients who had my same disease and so I began to read on thyroid disease and hypothyroidism forums and message boards. This was another step in my embracing the disease rather than experiencing the negative effects of attempting to constantly struggle against it. After reading on many of these forums, I eventually registered as a member on some of them and began to correspond with other patients. This came as a great comfort to me because patients many times feel very alone and isolated when they experience the onset of a disease and by finding others who have the same disease, whom they can correspond with, they no longer feel as alone with it.

For many of us, the steps toward accepting and embracing our disease, has helped us become "patient advocates" for others suffering the same diseases. This acceptance and embracing only means we are doing so for the time-being, all the while our hopes being that better and more effective treatments are developed and that medical science finds ways to conquer more and more diseases. Many of us are also willing and open to divine intervention, if we believe in a higher power who can perform supernatural healing and I certainly do. We only accept the disease, so that we can learn about it for the time-being and this also helps take much of the fear out of it as well.

You do not fight and struggle against something you accept and embrace because continual struggle against something you do not have complete control over by your natural, human powers, will cause frustration, fear and exhaustion. In reality, our only option until remission, cure or supernatural healing takes place, is to accept and embrace and let our treatments also work their purposes.