Are you healthy, and what does it actually mean? It seems that around 20% of the US population experience chronic pain, or pain persisting past normal healing time. To this we can add around 18% of adults with mental health issues and, to make it all more glooomy, 45% live with one or more “chronic conditions” such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes or cancer.
If you close your eyes, connect with your breath and quickly scan the body from feet to head, do you feel a wholesome sense of well-being? Are you relaxed and at peace with yourself, is the inner voice calm and accepting, friendly and benign?
According to the well famous WHO, health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. Holistic medicine sees health as also comprising emotional, behavioral, environmental and spiritual factors. In this context, a healthy individual is someone who has all basic elements in place to feel grounded, connected to others and with the potential to fulfil all human needs according to Maslow’s definition.
If this sounds like much, don’t worry, I am not trying to make you feel bad implying you’re not healthy. In a philosophical sense, life presents a number of challenges and we can only do our best, or do what we feel is right to meet these challenges. Nothing is ever perfect and a “healthy” level of acceptance of the good and the bad might bring some peace of mind and ultimately more well-being.
My personal journey to better health started with a panic attack I experienced while in the office in London. It felt like my body was rebelling and reacting independently from my mind and at the time I thought I was going to die of a heart attack. I couldn’t breathe in enough air, I had intense chest pain spreading to my shoulders and neck and to me, as well as to the London underground staff who ultimately rescued me and called an ambulance, this all looked very serious.
The following 2 or 3 months were total physical and mental hell, the period in life I felt most sick. But that was the beginning of something much better, was actually the push towards more self awareness and clarity, a blessing in disguise.
I found Yoga and felt empowered enough to go through a massive change in lifestyle and value system that brought changes in diet, career, location and life goals.
Looking once more at the WHO definition of health, we can separate 3 aspects of it which I’d love to analyse independently.
The physical aspect is the most straightforward and the easiest to measure with various tests and established methodologies. Conventional medicine is, to a certain extent, all about the treatment of physical ailments. You have a symptom, your doctor will diagnose a condition and recommend some pharmaceuticals aimed at a quick relief, or the management of that condition, if it is deemed chronic and long term.
What is a chronic condition is a bit controversial and particularly whether a chronic condition is curable and reversible or incurable according to conventional medicine. Type 2 diabetes for instance was always defined as irreversible by medical science until recently and “despite the growing evidence that reversal is possible, achieving reversal is not commonly encouraged by our healthcare system”, see more here.
If you know me a bit, you also know I have a rather inclusive view of healing and healthcare and I am not against conventional medicine, despite being critical of some of its forms.
The mental and psychological aspect of health is the one that many tend to ignore, for cultural reasons or because mental illness is less straightforward to diagnose than physical illness. For instance, the recent (2020) worldwide upsurge in mental health issues and symptoms doesn’t seem to bother health authorities as much as the victims of the infamous Coronavirus. The conventional expert view here is that “Many people can experience a new onset of – or an increase in – one or more symptoms of anxiety or depression, but not meet clinical criteria for a psychiatric disorder.”
There are technicalities, definitions and semantics to be taken into account. “Consider the diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). According to the DSM-5 (the official book of mental disease) symptoms must be present for at least 6 months – so no one who responded to the CDC survey in June 2020 would have met that criterion if their anxiety symptoms began, say, in March 2020”. According to the same expert, the term mental health pandemic in the context of draconian measures just reintroduced in many countries for the second wave of Covid-19 “is not really helpful or accurate”.
And considering prevention is normally very low on any conventional medicine agenda (apart from Covid obviously), you gotta be officially sick before anyone can really help you there, so wait for the 6 months and come back, please. Second wave lockdowns are therefore fully justified, it seems. Keep this concept in mind as we look at the third aspect of the WHO definition of health, social well-being.
What might the WHO imply with this esoteric, almost new age sounding utterance? Despite it being written in their own constitution, it wasn’t easy to find any ready made definition in the website.
Measuring social well-being doesn’t seem to be easy and might include the concept of social capital and the resources that reside within social relationships, being participants of social networks and particularly the absence of loneliness and social isolation, more here.
Is there a hierarchy of the 3 types of health, according to the WHO? I suppose there must be, as 2020 is a clear example of putting the physical health of a relatively small minority of people ahead of the social and psychological well-being of the majority. And moreover, is mental health to be considered as important or equal to physical health? Various organisations and research seem to suggest that, but yet again, the 2020 real life example indicates the opposite.
I think what some proponents of a broader definition of health imply is that mind, body and environment are highly connected and ultimately a strong imbalance in any one aspect of the 3 will lead to physical sickness, the one we can all more easily relate to.
Are you a healthy individual, then? If life is to be lived in the present moment, I might even go as far as saying that you are healthy if you feel healthy right now.
In this exact moment I am feeling whole and content, satisfied and alive. Right now, in this lovely coffee shop in Pai, Northern Thailand, as I approach the end of this post and I feel the mild sense of achievement this brings me, I am definitely healthy, despite a slight bloating derived by an unusually large piece of carrot cake I devoured earlier this morning.
Indeed health to me is much more a philosophical subject than a medical one, up to a point at least. Cheers everyone!