How Long-term Health Issues May Affect Your Ability To Start and Maintain a Business

Starting, running, and maintaining a business can be difficult on its own. It can get extremely difficult when you are also dealing with a chronic health issue. Work and progress can be tough when you have trouble maintaining focus or energy and you don’t feel one hundred percent. Medical insurance is also expensive, and can be catastrophically expensive in certain scenarios.

For entrepreneurs facing these health issues while trying to grow a business, experts generally agree on one principle: health issues should be addressed promptly and properly, rather than ignoring them to focus on your business. Running a successful business while managing a health issue is certainly possible if the right steps are taken, and this article will look at a few examples of health issues and control tactics that afflicted entrepreneurs can take to balance the health and business difficulties.

Health Issues that Can Impact Your Productivity

Chronic Diseases

Chronic Diseases are defined broadly by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) as conditions that last one year or more and require ongoing medical attention or limit activities of daily living or both. Chronic diseases are the leading causes of death and disability in the United States. The top ten common chronic diseases/categories consist of:

• Heart Disease & Stroke
• Diabetes
• Arthritis
• Alcohol-related Health Issues
• Cancer
• Obesity
• Alzheimer’s Disease
• Smoking-Related Health Issues
• Tooth Decay

These types of diseases can significantly impair your ability to operate a business. The physical toll of some of these diseases can debilitate someone from moving about the world in daily life. Not only that, but the cost to treat these diseases can be unsustainable.

Psychological Conditions

Psychological Conditions, referred to commonly as mental illnesses or mental health disorders, encompass a wide range of mental health conditions, or disorders that affect your mood, thinking, and behavior. The five most common types of mental health disorders include:

1. Anxiety Disorders. These cause people to experience distressing and frequent fear and apprehension, and include:
   • Generalized Anxiety Disorder
   • Generalized Anxiety Disorder
   • Panic Disorder
   • Post-traumatic stress disorder
   • Social anxiety disorder
2. Mood Disorders. These disorders cause people to feel persistent and severe symptoms of mood change that can disrupt their daily lives, and include:
   • Major depression
   • Dysthymia
   • Bipolar disorder
   • Substance induced mood disorder
3. Psychotic Disorders. These disorders affect the person’s ability to know what is real and what is not, and include:
   • Schizophrenia
   • Schizoaffective disorder
   • Brief psychotic disorder
   • Delusional disorder
   • Substance-induced psychotic disorder
4. Dementia. These disorders cause people to experience a decline in cognitive abilities that attack thinking and memory, and include:
   • Parkinson’s disease
   • Frontotemporal dementia
   • Huntington’s disease
   • Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome
5. Eating Disorders. These disorders are complex mental disorders that cause unhealthy eating habits to develop, and include:
   • Anorexia nervosa
   • Bulimia nervosa
   • Binge eating disorder
   • Pica eating disorder
   • Rumination disorder

Obviously, psychological conditions can cause severe issues for anyone who is trying to build a business. These conditions can interfere severely with a business owner’s decision-making, motivation, and availability.

Traumatic Injuries

Traumatic Injuries are physical injuries that onset suddenly and with the severity to require immediate medical attention. These types of injuries can come in any form and can significantly impair your ability to carry on with daily living.

These types of injuries can include:

• Broken bones
• Lacerations
• Crush injuries
• Amputations
• Facial Trauma
• Crush injuries
• Concussions
• Traumatic brain injuries

Any of the above injuries could cause a business owner to be unreachable for extended periods of time. Traumatic brain injuries, for example, can occur suddenly, then cause significant long-term issues if they are left untreated. Traumatic injuries occur frequently in the form of car/truck accidents and workplace injuries.

Managing A Business with Long-Term Health Issues

Any of the health conditions or concerns mentioned above can relate both to the manager’s health and the viability of the business. A few ways to help manage these concerns are:

1. Set Manageable Goals. This means figuring out what limitations you may have due to your health condition, setting goals that can be accomplished. The goals that you set should be compatible with your recovery plan. Work with your doctors and care providers to determine what is possible, and do not over-extend yourself during the recovery period. For chronic injuries, ensure that your goals account for all treatment and time needs. This can include delegating tasks.
2. Adapt Your Business to Your Needs. Instead of ignoring your illness, disease, or condition, modify your business to account for your needs. This can include automating tasks that you formerly had to complete manually. It can mean focusing your personal energy on certain aspects (i.e., design or mapping) and outsourcing other parts. You can modify your operational procedures to fit your needs by modifying the normal chain of communication while you are in recovery, to ensure you can rest.
3. Prioritize Your Care. This is the single most important part of running a business while dealing with health problems. Some business owners are inclined to neglect aspects of their care/recovery to benefit the business – which of course can negatively impact their health.

Prioritizing care may be difficult to plan when in the throes of building a business. Business owners can prioritize their recovery and avoid neglecting it once injured by working with competent personal injury lawyers like Morrow & Sheppard LLP.

If you have been wrongfully injured and suffered a brain or spinal complications, or any other type of injury, the attorneys at Morrow & Sheppard LLP are accustomed to working with business owners who need to maximize their treatment while balancing their duties to their employees/customers. This can be particularly difficult if you are seeking reimbursement or damages from the ones who caused your injury. Do not let a traumatic brain injury or a spinal injury go untreated simply because recovery seems too time consuming or complex.

Speak with an experienced trial lawyer at Morrow & Sheppard LLP for a free consultation if you face any of these issues. We work with every type of client and can help coordinate medical treatment to fit your precise lifestyle needs.