Adaptation to chronic illness.

ABSTRACT

Adaptation to chronic illness is making the best of a bad bargain. The patient who deals successfully with chronic illness is the one who continues to live and function as fully as possible until death is appropriate and inevitable. Good medical care can help, but only if the patient meets the challenges of adaptation--acceptance, the sick role, compromise, and dying. Sometimes the patient can adapt to a new role but the family cannot; denial or nonacceptance on the part of a spouse or family can constitute a tremendous adaptational complication. Ironically, the healthy helpers around the patient, including the physician, may also fail to recognize the magnitude of the challenge of compromise and too easily criticize the patient for meeting it with difficulty or only partially.