When you are told by a doctor that you have a thing and it's a very deadly thing, the psychological component -- for both you and everyone you deal with -- is huge. The specter of death and the battle with it can blot out the sun, so to speak.
My experiences suggest that wresting your identity away from this pattern of thought is life giving and helps people survive in very practical terms.
It's not voodoo magic. It strongly influences the mental models that drive your decision-making process.
When people believe death is inevitable, they tend to make choices that help that become a self-fulfilling prophecy because they believe nothing they do will really matter anyway.
I used to spend a lot of time on chronic illness lists. I left all of them because it was a general truism that you couldn't talk about what worked since the absolute sickest people who had the most and worst horror stories were the same people who would outright mock things like removing carpeting from the house and going to all wood and tile floors or making dietary changes.
They were extremely dismissive of the idea that anything made a real difference and they insisted they couldn't be bothered with stuff like that because they wanted to "have a life" and their illness already took too much of their time as is. They simply didn't have time or energy for such "neurotic" and "obsessive" behavior.
It was absolutely verboten to point out that the people being proactive about diet and the like we're healthier than these people were. God forbid you should imply it was "their fault" that their prognosis was so extremely bad compared to the rest of the community. That would be cruel and would be "blaming the victim."
So I ultimately unsubscribed from whatever lists I hadn't already been thrown off of for the crime of suggesting that maybe us patients could do something effective without drugs, surgeries or a doctor's permission, like eat better and use non toxic cleaners and the like. I got off all the drugs and quit getting the email notices about another death in the chronic illness community.
