José Manuel Felices, doctor: “We must enjoy the moment we have now and live without fear of what may come”

Medical training relies on textbooks, protocols, and years of study, but some of the deepest lessons are not learned in the classroom. “My greatest lesson isn’t in books, nor from my colleagues, nor even from medicine itself,” Dr. José Manuel Felices confesses in an interview with AS. “I’ve learned it from my patients.”

At the hospital, he explains, he faces people going through extreme situations every day. And yet, many of them maintain an attitude that surprises him.

“After becoming ill, they continue to approach life with hope,” says the author of ‘Radiografía de una vida sana: descubre la ciencia detrás de la salud y la Felicidad’ (X-ray of a healthy life: discover the science behind health and happiness), that was recently published. That outlook does not mean denying the illness, but rather choosing how to live with it.

For Felices, this way of confronting adversity is one of the keys to recovery. “It doesn’t make them give up on living a healthy and happy life,” he notes, adding that the desire to reclaim one’s life works in favor of the medical process. Attitude alone does not cure, but it supports and strengthens treatment.

Putting problems into perspective

This experience has led him to put many everyday conflicts into perspective. “Since getting to know certain cases, scratching my car or my boss giving me a dirty look seem like trivial problems,” he admits bluntly. Not because they are not annoying, but because “they have a solution and they’re not going to define my life.”

The truly important problems, he explains, are those that change the course of one’s life in the long term. Even in those cases, he says, seeing how patients face them with support and determination invites deep reflection about fear of the future.

The final lesson is an invitation to live in the present without anticipating catastrophe. “We must enjoy the moment we have now and live without fear of what may come,” he concludes, convinced that if hardship arrives, that will be the time to face it, not to suffer over it beforehand.

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