A broader view of health

Former pro­fes­sor, now author and prac­tic­ing physi­cian, Leo Galland, MD [see Organic Connections, Nov–Dec 2008], explains in his book Power Healing, “Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the heal­ing pro­fes­sion in Europe was not called med­i­cine; it was called physic (from the Greek word physis, mean­ing nature). Physicians were pro­fes­sors of physic and, con­se­quently, were trained to be philoso­phers of nature. Medicine (from the Latin verb medico, lit­er­ally trans­lated, ‘I drug’) meant the treat­ment of dis­ease with drugs; it was only a small part of the physician’s work, and the least highly regarded.”

OK, so we’ve got health being essen­tially a good men­tal or phys­i­cal con­di­tion. I’m not quite sure why the “or” is in there. Wouldn’t a broader view of health take into con­sid­er­a­tion how the car (body) is run­ning as well as the con­di­tion of the dri­ver (you)?

Then we’ve got health­care, where we get into main­te­nance and improve­ment of phys­i­cal and men­tal health, with a tie-in to med­ical ser­vices. Let’s stop right here for a more in-depth examination.

In some older schools of med­i­cine, notably Eastern, the health­care pro­fes­sional got paid as long as you remained well. Just the oppo­site of what we’ve got in America. So much for main­te­nance. You’re pretty much on your own for that. How about improve­ment? Well, if you’ve been in a traf­fic acci­dent and you take your car to the body shop, they can fix it up and you could cer­tainly say that it has been improved from when you brought it in. But if you hadn’t been in an acci­dent and you brought your car there, could the body shop improve your car? I doubt that many peo­ple search out med­ical care who are feel­ing good yet are seek­ing to achieve a new, higher level of health. That’s more the realm of nutrition—probably some­thing the old pro­fes­sors of physic knew more about than today’s doc­tors of medicine.

So we find our­selves with a “mod­ern” health­care sys­tem where the “small part of the physician’s work” of treat­ing dis­ease with drugs has become the largest part. We’ve got about one drug­store for every 5,300 peo­ple (not count­ing drug­stores in super­mar­kets and online phar­ma­cies) and wall-to-wall drug ads on tele­vi­sion. To put this into per­spec­tive, total US pre­scrip­tion drug sales in 2008 were $286.5 bil­lion plus $41.63 bil­lion in OTC drugs, giv­ing a com­bined total of $328.13 bil­lion. Meanwhile, the total sales of all organic prod­ucts, food and non-food, were $24.6 bil­lion. As a nation, we are spend­ing roughly 87 per­cent more on drugs than we are on organic prod­ucts. No won­der drug giants can afford to spend nearly $5 bil­lion yearly on drug ads (that’s five bil­lion).

Despite the best that mod­ern med­i­cine has to offer, some­how America, as rated by the World Health Organization, was in 28^th place in com­par­i­son with other coun­tries by com­mon mea­sures used to gauge our health­i­ness. But we did rank high in a cou­ple of cat­e­gories that I find both sur­pris­ing and alarm­ing. Out of 194 coun­tries, America is the 9^th high­est in obe­sity and ranks 29^th in the world for infant mor­tal­ity rates.

Needless to say, this is not a show­ing to be proud of. But my point is not to bash doc­tors or drug com­pa­nies. Something clearly needs to change. Does “the sys­tem” sim­ply need more money? That seems to be the default Washington answer.

I sub­mit that the roots of the prob­lem lie in our too-limited def­i­n­i­tions of health and health­care. An increas­ing num­ber of physi­cians believe this and we are see­ing the growth of “inte­grated” med­i­cine. The American Association of Integrative Medicine says, “Healthy means more than just the absence of dis­ease. The human being is a fusion of body, mind, and spirit—one depen­dent upon the other for opti­mal qual­ity of life.”

Dr. Galland says that “the out­come of all health care is strongly depen­dent upon four pow­er­ful influ­ences in the lives of each per­son.” He cites rela­tion­ships, diet and lifestyle, a healthy envi­ron­ment (pro­tec­tion from chem­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal tox­ins) and detox­i­fi­ca­tion (the body’s abil­ity to self-purify).

There is a grow­ing con­sen­sus within the med­ical com­mu­nity that an exclu­sive focus on drug treat­ments sim­ply isn’t working.

At Duke University’s Duke Integrative Medicine, for exam­ple, the role of phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals in patient treat­ment is considered—but so are sup­ple­ments, pre­ven­tive med­i­cine, com­ple­men­tary and alter­na­tive med­ical treat­ments, and the areas of nutri­tion, exer­cise, rela­tion­ships, phys­i­cal envi­ron­ment, per­sonal growth and spir­i­tu­al­ity, and mind-body connection.

There are numer­ous other exam­ples, but the mes­sage is clear. Man does not live by drugs alone. A broader view of health in the twenty-first cen­tury will con­sider man’s spir­i­tual and phys­i­cal health, his or her sur­round­ings and inter­ac­tions, and will uti­lize time-honored method­olo­gies that aim to restore nat­ural func­tion (con­ven­tional med­i­cine aims to replace body func­tions through arti­fi­cial hearts, dial­y­sis and drugs).

What we know as “con­ven­tional” drug-based med­i­cine has only been the con­ven­tion since the early 1900s (a mighty short con­ven­tion by his­tor­i­cal stan­dards). Today, in the wake of how our addic­tion to chem­i­cals in man­u­fac­tur­ing, agri­cul­ture and lifestyle has rav­aged our health and our envi­ron­ment, we are start­ing to look at health­care in a less dog­matic light. This opens the health­care door to nutri­tion, tra­di­tional Chinese med­i­cine, natur­opa­thy, home­opa­thy, herbal med­i­cine, Ayurveda, chi­ro­prac­tic, exer­cise, mas­sage and more.

If we are really look­ing for health­care reform, we need to look fur­ther than the doctor’s office, drug­store, hos­pi­tal and insur­ance com­pany. There’s a whole world out there and some of our best and bright­est are begin­ning to dis­cover it.

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