What is Healthy?
Looking at the way medicine views health, it’s not hard to reach the conclusion that health is when you have no symptoms. When you are pain free, that is healthy. When you don’t have a fever, that is healthy. But is it really?
No Symptoms is Death!
I would submit the opposite, that having no symptoms is more like death, than health.
I really can’t say this message enough, so I thought another blog post would help. Listen to your body! Don’t just make it stop talking to you.
Is your goal healing? If it’s not, go ahead and stop reading. If your goal is just to make yourself numb, this post is not for you. But if your goal is to heal, to be healthy, then it behooves you to listen to what your body is telling you. The perception of medicine in the 60s and 70s was that it would eventually discover the keys to everything health related. That we can outwit the wisdom of the body with the right combination of medications. It’s called better living through chemistry. That promise has turned out to be only a dream.
That Dream is a Nightmare
The average person in America aged 18-34 is on medication (53%), and 3 are filled every year. Get into my age range, and that number jumps to 62%, and the number of prescriptions filled doubles to 6 a year. That number only climbs after that.
Instead of saving us, what we’ve witnessed is an explosion of chronic disease, ever increasing lists of medication, and a decreased quality of life as we get older. That is not the dream we were expecting!
When we experience pain, it is telling us something. When we have nausea, that is a different message, and when we spike a fever, still another message. It’s important for us to not feel like we’ve failed whenever we get a symptom. Having a symptom doesn’t mean our health is failing, but that something requires our attention. It’s the sign of a functioning system, at least at first it is.
Health is about the proper functioning of the body, not merely the absence of symptoms. The only state that has no symptoms at all is death. And you don’t deserve death. You deserve life, and what’s more, you deserve a Brilliant Life! Let it shine.