According to published reports in the New England Journal of Medicine and the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine {NCCAM}, more than 40% of Americans use some form of complementary or alternative medicine {CAM}. What is considered to be CAM is any form of practice not yet typically taught in medical schools or available in American hospitals, some of which include: stress management, nutrition, Chinese Medicine, and herbal medicine. In 1997, Americans spent more than $27 billion out-of-pocket on these therapies, exceeding the out-of-pocket spending for all U.S. hospitalizations. CAM was sought most frequently to either prevent illness or deal with chronic illness.

For Life: More Stories of Lupus will focus on how people cope and heal. To cope with the depression, pain, sorrow and anger that can come with having a chronic illness, the people in this documentary chose some form of ritual, prayer or art. Some of them also use complementary medicine to augment their mainstream medical treatment. Having choices for treatment, be it Chinese herbs, visualization, meditation, chanting, Qigong, or Ayurvedic medicine, provides an important coping strategy to live with a long-term disease. And, even if their disease is not eliminated through CAM, people living with a chronic illness can learn that they can get better emotionally and spiritually. Even though this goes against the ideologies taught in western medicine, this is healing.

But, what is a chronic illness? The underlying connection between all chronic illnesses is time; a chronic illness can span years or an entire lifetime. Yet, people living with a chronic disease, their caregivers, and families are faced with the ongoing challenges of adapting and coping daily.

Three years ago, Cindy was taking fifty-seven pills a day. She was suffering from ulcers, glaucoma, high blood pressure, depression and migraines; many of these symptoms being side effects from the medications that she was taking at the time. Today, Cindy is taking twenty-two pills, and has undergone a mastectomy due to complications of the disease and the medications. Her connection with her husband Walt has been strained since their relationship shifted to patient and caretaker in 1997. They are finally sleeping in the same bed again after three years of Cindy sleeping in a hospital bed that was placed in their bedroom. Prayer and community outreach are just a few ways Cindy copes with her illness. Although Walt's faith wavers, he finds his support from the community on the Internet. Cindy says that faith is one of the gifts that keep her alive.

When we visited Michelle in 1997, she still had lesions covering her body from the lupus; many people thought that she had AIDS. She weighed 105 lbs., and barely had any hair. Today, she's gained some weight, is lesion-free, and has her hair back thanks to a girlfriend who bought her vitamins. However, Michelle, with only 15% lung capacity, is a single mother with three children (ages 10, 12 and 16 years) living on welfare. Unable to get a lightweight portable oxygen tank, her oversized one is an albatross to her. All the children help with Michelle: doing the laundry, grocery shopping, and helping their mom get dressed and take a shower. Michelle draws wolfs [lupus is Latin for "wolf"]. She wants to have an art exhibition of her drawings to raise money for lupus research and bring lupus awareness to the public. Drawing takes her away from the physical pain and helps her relax. In addition, she uses visualization and meditation to maintain her sanity. To maintain her health, she takes lots of vitamins daily.

For Sharon, an African American Professor Emerita of the College of Education at San Diego State University, she couldn't fathom taking a kidney from her son and potentially jeopardizing his well being three years ago. Her kidney failure, due to the complications of lupus, meant self-dialysis four times a day. Sharon received a kidney transplant last year from a donor in San Francisco. She has discontinued teaching due to the kidney failure. Sharon works with a naturopath, and turns to writing, singing and prayer to discover other aspects of herself and a different focus to contributing to society.

Teenagers are known to sleep a lot, but Libby, a teenager with lupus, slept between 16-20 hours a day for the first 2 1/2 years of her illness. Her mother, a single parent and a practicing psychiatrist, had to juggle hours of seeing patients while trying to be available when her daughter was awake. During that time, Libby was not well enough to attend school. Today, she goes to school, partial days, once or twice a week. Everyday Libby needs to rest. By pursuing Libby's passion for filmmaking, she's doing what makes her most happy.

But, what happens when a caretaker gets ill? With Diane, she had five separate primary breast cancers simultaneously, and was really sick during the six months of chemotherapy. It was very hard on both Libby and Diane, particularly since Diane is Libby's primary contact. Diane needed lots of help herself. Thanks to friends, Diane and Libby moved through that challenging period of time. But, Diane also has asthma, type II diabetes and osteoporosis.

Brian was living well with lupus when we interviewed him three years ago. He had just received a kidney transplant, but this was after he survived seventeen hospitalizations during a twelve-year span of disease activity. His mother and father have been an integral part of his healing process. Brian is adapting to many changes in his life: his kidney transplant, his newborn baby, and a new business that he's launched.

Although men do get lupus, it is a chronic autoimmune illness striking mostly women in the prime of life between the ages of 18 and 45. A chronic inflammatory condition, lupus is a disease in which the immune system is literally out of control-the person's body is attacking itself. It's a systemic disease meaning any place in the body can be attacked by the immune system. The spectrum of symptoms ranges from a mild rash and joint pain to kidney failure or as fatal as a brain aneurysm. Mimicking a variety of different diseases, its diagnosis is difficult to make. People may suffer for months or years before their problem is identified and treated. And early diagnosis can save lives.

Western allopathic health care is still a disease-based system that focuses on eradicating the painful and debilitating symptoms of an illness. And in the acute stages of lupus, allopathic medicine is life-saving and critical. If someone has organ involvement, conventional pharmaceutical treatment is essential for reducing the escalation of disease activity. A remission is sometimes possible with western medicine; however, a definite cure is unusual with a chronic disease. Choosing what types of pharmaceutical drugs to use is difficult for patients that it's even more daunting to also consider the less familiar domain of complementary medicine-especially if your western physician is against it. But there's more to disease and prevention than biology, there's a mind and body connection. And, complementary medical practices like Chinese medicine, qigong, yoga, imagery and stress management can serve to facilitate healing within the world of western medicine.

Stories of Lupus, the first documentary, was an excellent vehicle for educating people about lupus, drug treatments, and the challenges people face living with this mysterious and elusive disease. What Stories of Lupus didn't address is how people cope and move into the process of healing and living with a chronic illness. Because of its unpredictability and extremes of disease symptoms, lupus serves as an ideal model for documenting the major impact a chronic illness has on an individual and the entire family. The purpose of For Life: More Stories of Lupus is to address the more universal issues associated with living with any chronic illness and to show how people can transcend the disease to a higher level of existence.

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