
What Flannery O’Connor taught me about chronic illness - fern12
https://electricliterature.com/what-flannery-oconnor-taught-me-about-chronic-illness-5dd75130df15
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dang
Here's another Flannery bit from yesterday:
[https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/01/18/stifle/](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/01/18/stifle/).
Frivolous, but amusing. She was a great letter writer.

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DoreenMichele
_her publisher, Harcourt, Brace, had requested a picture for the back of the
book jacket. “They were all bad,” O’Connor wrote to the poet and translator
Robert Fitzgerald and his wife, Sally. “The one I sent looked as if I had just
bitten my grandmother and that this was one of my few pleasures, but the rest
were worse.”_

It is a good read. I can identify with a lot of it.

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bgilroy26
Steven Sparrow's essays[1] made Ms O'Connor's short stories more accessible to
me

[1] [http://flanneryoconnor.com/on.html](http://flanneryoconnor.com/on.html)

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pdfernhout
It's possible that the author suffered from what might be called "vegetable
deficiency" disease.

See for example this MD who cured her Lupus with better nutrition:
[https://www.forksoverknives.com/stroke-doctor-reversed-
lupus...](https://www.forksoverknives.com/stroke-doctor-reversed-lupus-plant-
based-diet/)

Or this other MD who cured her MS with better nutrition:
[https://terrywahls.com/](https://terrywahls.com/)

See also for general background: [http://media.wholefoodsmarket.com/news/the-
whole-foods-diet](http://media.wholefoodsmarket.com/news/the-whole-foods-diet)

Vitamin D deficiency is also common. But obviously there might be other
deficiencies (or in a very rare case some genetic disorder).

Or there can be an undiagnosed chronic infections. Here is an MD who cured
himself of chronic Lyme with better nutrition plus herbs plus antibiotics:
[http://www.lymebook.com/lyme-disease-solution](http://www.lymebook.com/lyme-
disease-solution)

Bottom line: mainstream medicine has only become good so far at treating the
first two of these three major health situations:

* accidental trauma (based on learning from US battlefield experience in surgery)

* acute infectious disease (mostly by quarantine, sanitation, and increasingly-less-effective antibiotics -- until maybe phage therapy becomes common someday)

* chronic disease like autoimmune disorders, cardiovascular disease, or cancer (usually caused by the Standard American Diet, but maybe also interacting with some other factors including exposure to toxins etc.)

All that said, part of healing is mental or spiritual -- so reading good
stories can indeed help with that in a variety of ways.

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autogn0me
good country people

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keeptrying
Skimmed the piece. Was there any real imsight about dealing with chronic
illness?

