Earlier in my ministry of healing as a physician, I learned that to help people, you need to motivate them to make lifestyle changes. Many times, when patients have a difficulty disease, they go through the stages of grief. As they do that, one thing that they often ask is, “Why me?”. Why do I have to be the one to suffer through all this. Those who have a spiritual background question God. Sometimes, they stop taking their treatments and caring for themselves altogether. For example, I have treated teenagers in the intensive care unit for Diabetic Keto Acidosis (DKA) caused by their refusal to take their insulin to manage their type I diabetes. They can’t understand how all their friends are “normal” while they are not. They ask, “why me?” What did they do to deserve a life-changing, incurable disease such as type I diabetes? They see their friends going about enjoying life without limitations while they are stuck at home watching their diet and injecting themselves with insulin to live. We all know that this view of things doesn’t help, but that’s where they are.
To give them a new paradigm that is more conducive to life, one of the things I do is show them people who have successfully lived with the condition and led lives of significance. To that, I turn to celebrities who have the same or similar diseases.
Below is a list of celebrities I have used with the conditions they have and how they have treated them.
- Sjogren’s – Venus Williams
- Pulmonary embolism – Serena Williams
- Melanoma – Spread to the liver and brain – President Carter
- Multiple Sclerosis – Anne Romney
- Lupus – Selena Gomez; Toni Braxton
- ADHD – Simone Biles.
- Will Smith – Hypertension. Reversed it with fasting and losing weight.
- Type I diabetes – Halle Berry (successful actress); Jay Cutler (Successful football player)
