"Now, when I meet a new patient, listen to his history, perform a physical examination, review his laboratory tests, and study his X rays, I am doing more than gathering and analysing clinical data. I am searching for hope. Hope, I have come to believe, is as vital to our lives as the very oxygen that we breathe. 

      For many people who cannot see hope, their vision is blurred because they believe they are unable to exert any level of control over their circumstances. When I encounter such patients, I try to discover why they feel so completely at the mercy of the forces around them. Helping them find hope harks back to the two elements of the emotion that Richard Davidson discussed: a cognitive, or "informational" one, and an affective, or "feeling" one.

      I learned that it takes much more than mere words to communicate information and to alter affect. 

      While it is a convenient construct to divide hope into a cognitive and an affective component, the two are tightly coupled. Feelings and emotions mold logical thinking and deliberate decision making. True hope, then, is not initiated and sustained by completely erasing the emotions, like fear and anxiety, that are often its greatest obstacles. An equilibrium needs to be established, integrating the genuine threats and dangers that exist into the proposed strategies to subsume them. Yes, unbridled fear can shatter a fragile sense of hope. But false hope is an insubstantial foundation upon which to stand and weather the vicissitudes of difficult circumstances. It is only true hope that carries its companions, courage and resilience, through. False hope causes them to ultimately fall by the wayside as reality intervenes and overpowers illusion. 

- Lessons Learned