The health care “crisis” a few years ago centered on the idea that 40 million people were without health insurance. The focus was on health insurance as though it produced health, but most of the time it only produces sick care.
The focus on sick care rather than health is due to the lack of a good, workable definition of “health” itself. Health is not the absence of disease. The correct definition of “health” is an intense interest in life and abundant energy to pursue that interest.
Using the correct definition, most people in today’s society are not healthy. They are tired, overweight, lack energy and don’t have an intense interest in life. If you have the correct definition of health, finding a new drug to treat a disease is less important than avoiding that disease in the first place. Prevention is far more important than treatment.
Having the correct definition shifts the focus from paying for hospital treatment to ensuring people know how to improve their health themselves – through diet, detoxification, exercise and lack of suppressive stress.
As long as the established authorities believe health is a lack of symptoms, the problem of how to treat more and more people will continue to grow out of control. Once they have the correct definition for “health,” they can exert their considerable power to get individuals to do those things that have produced health consistently for thousands of years. Those things are not expensive. Knowledge of diet and detoxification or cleansing is not expensive to provide.
Rather than burden our society with larger and larger health care costs that are really sick care, we need to teach the authorities that knowledge of diet, detoxification or cleansing and the successful handling of suppressive stress is the correct approach. That approach will reduce health care costs and increase the number of people in our society who have an intense interest in life and an abundance of energy to pursue it, making more productive people.
These ideas are not new. They are as old as Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, who practiced in 400 BC. You may not be aware of it, but the original Hippocratic Oath is not the same as the current one that doctors take. It required doctors to swear they wouldn’t perform surgery! Google it for yourself. There have been several doctors who have discovered again what Hippocrates taught: Food is your best medicine. Or more accurately, fasting when a person is sick is the best medicine.
Let’s start by redefining health as an intense interest in life and abundant energy to pursue it. From that beginning, health will improve across society and health care costs will be reduced.