There’s one common theme in the presentations I give to employers, health care workers and people challenged by invisible illness. It is the fact that illness is changing.
Acute Illness
When we think about common health problems we often consider things like the flu, common infections, viruses and broken bones. These are all conditions that are usually visible, temporary and of short term duration. These are also known as acute conditions and they’ve generally made up the majority of the health problems in our society.
However, due to the aging population and advances in medical technology (which keep more chronically ill people alive and productive) the majority off the world’s health-care issues are no longer acute conditions, but chronic ones. With each passing year chronic illness becomes more and more dominant, but our health and organizational policies are still geared towards the old way of viewing sickness.
What is chronic illness?
Like acute illness, chronic illness isn’t a diagnosis but a description of how the condition can affect the person. One difference is that acute illnesses are often communicable (or contagious), while chronic illness is not. But that’s not the most important difference. During the course of doing my presentations I’ve come up an acronym that helps describe the important features of chronic illness:
U-ILL?
Unpredictable
Invisible
Long Lasting
Contrast this with the description of acute illness. You can now see the problem we have with our assumptions about what it means to be sick. The game has changed. It has been flipped on its head. And not enough people have noticed.
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