When faced with a degenerative disease or life threatening illness, might hopelessness improve the quality of our lives?

On this Voices in the Family special, Dr. Dan Gottlieb explores healing through two channels: hope and hopelessness.

Diane Difulvio is a native Philadelphian who was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 1984, but didn’t let M.S. get the best of her. Dr. John Hansen-Flaschen is a Pulmonologist and Critical Care Physician at the University of Pennsylvania and counsels many patients at the end of their lives. Dr. Jerome Groopman, a chairman of the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and staff writer at the New Yorker Magazine, explains that clear-eyed and realistic hope puts us at peace in many situations.