100 Foot Well

In the Midwest wells are common.  We drill them for farms, houses, even industrial applications.  The deeper your well, the sweeter the water.  So let’s say you run a farm operation and need a good supply of fresh water but it need not be especially appealing to the human pallet.  Perhaps you water fields;  so in that instance you might drill 100 feet in order  to get a good steady supply of water but not really water you would serve in a household which might require a depth of 150 feet.

Wells are important

Wells are a big business in Indiana.  With the cost of an average residential well in 2013 estimated to be around $8,000 and rising the person drilling the well or buying a well attached to a house wants to know that the water they will be consuming is as free of industrial contaminants (heavy metals, and benzene are two big ones) as is humanly possible.  It is not uncommon for well testing to be the number one thing done prior to any land exchange where commercial water is not available.

So how deep is your Diabetes or Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) well?  I know many days mine is pretty shallow.  When it is shallow, I get along but I don’t pay proper attention to the underlying factors that shape how I feel.  Sometimes it is an emotional challenge that makes we realize how shallow my well really is.

Email cures

This week I got an email inviting me to look at a miracle cure for RA.   My well is usually deep enough to avoid such nonsense, but I had a minute and I like to indulge fantasies so I took a look.   What happened was that the content of the email made me angry.  The email and attached video essentially said that RA is my fault.  The proprietor suggested that I had surrounded myself with the need to self-destruct.  Once surrounded (or invited in) I let this negativity take advantage causing my RA.  The power of this cure was that if I sought out the negative energy and dispensed with it, I could keep this energy from doing further damage.

Now the proprietor of the video did say I need to turn this energy away by continuing to take medication and follow my doctors’ advice, but I also need to think more positive lest it do much more damage in my life.  The truth is I got angry enough about this self-destruction theory that I dashed off a not well meaning note to the proprietor.

Complete Junk

You know from the day we are diagnosed with a chronic disease we are faced with this stuff.  The miracle cure or the “if only you” statements.  If only you do this you will feel better or get this or that; it is the nature of people who want to be helpful but really are not helpful at all.

If my well was deep enough, I think I could have cast this off and gone on placing my energy somewhere more positive.   My well was not however deep enough this week to cast it off and go on thus I engaged in a meaningless exercise that I thought would make me feel better.

My response

I sent the person who emailed a note and I did not mention RA or Diabetes.  What I did instead was tell them how they could make their presentation even better (something I know nothing about).  I told them about pacing, and I included several “if only you” statements.  I told them to change this and rearrange that.  It was a tactless exercise in commentary.  They will not read it and if they want to sell this crap to more people they should not do any of the things I suggested.  But I could not help myself.  I figured if they were going to tell me a bunch of nonsense about RA, then I had license to tell them a bunch of nonsense about selling fake ideas and false hope.

In the end I felt better, let’s face it I invested a little time to send an email with crazy ideas that told someone else how to destroy their false advertisement.  For affect I called myself an expert in email marketing just to drive home my point.  Surely if they are an expert in what causes RA I can be an expert in email advertising.

I hold no illusion that my note will be read, but on the off chance it is I placed this line in the end of all the rubbish I wrote.

“Further, I want you to know that your claims are ridiculous and hurtful, blaming the very people who have chronic disease for causing it flies in the face of all available scientific evidence and runs counter to common decency.  Please stop sending this out, you are spreading false information and with it false hope, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

I like to think I deepened my RA well this week.  Hopefully I will get to sweet water one day and this stuff will not bother me so much, but obviously I am not there yet.   Maybe I added a foot or two to my reserve because I stood up to such crap.  I hope so.

-30-

rick

Take away for March 28, 2016

• When we have a chronic disease we sometimes receive advice that is not always helpful
• We need to have a good understanding of our disease to be able to ignore bad ideas from well-meaning but misguided helpers
• If-only statements can be especially annoying
• Writing marketers letters is likely a waste of time, so at least make it fun if you feel you must do it