On the meaning of health II
Nowadays we hear a lot about the “healthcare system”. It is usually meant as the collective body of human resources that delivers “healthcare services” and the facilities that house them. But is “health” the right particle in those naming conventions ?…The reality is of a system that deals with disease: (assists) cure when possible, and otherwise provides mitigation and palliation. Prevention, especially secondary and tertiary prevention, are a part of it, but primary prevention is minuscule overall. And even that may not be as close to “health” as we would like. So in fact we are dealing with a “disease management system” rather than a healthcare system. And when we take into account WHO’s own health definition (see previous post), it is clear that the “healthcare system” is truly the whole society.
Thus a key fact is the ability to recognize “health” or “healthy”. Can this be done externally ? Is “healthy” the absence of identifiable disease ? Could that ever apply to psychological troubles and imbalances ? How about the social part of the WHO definition of health ? It becomes readily apparent that we have a very large gap between our acceptance of the larger, philosophical definition of health and the ability to put it into practice, at either individual or collective level, within the current framework. And that is because we have had no tools to assess “well-being” against an absolute benchmark.
We have the intuitive understanding that all judgement depends on the quality of the judge’s awareness. And “healthy” is such a large, definitive kind of label that the awareness has to be at an absolute level for a proper judgement. Otherwise it is just a matter of how much we can ignore at any given time until an imbalance grows to the point of giving us a trouble that we cannot ignore anymore. When all we had was our senses, we could only detect so many physical issues. Then we had X-rays, and we saw a bit more. Then we had CT scans, and we saw more. The MRI came along and we saw even better. And then the molecular knowledge came and we realized that the amount of information generated needs large computers to sift through. And on and on it goes. And we haven’t even started to talk about psychological and psychiatric issues, for which we could barely agree on a naming convention, let alone a holistic framework.
Thus in order to really start the subject of “health” we need to anchor our awareness to an absolute reference point. This is only possible when we transcend the clouds of our ego and conditionings and break free in the clear light of the Self, where the absolute facts about inner being are revealed effortlessly: when the light turns on, we can simply see for ourselves.