Let's look at Health differently?
By Dr. Joseph
Strauss
We desperately need to look at health in a different way.
The current system of health-care, which is actually disease care, doesn't
seem to keep people healthy and its costs are skyrocketing. Why do
we wait until we lose our health and do something about
it?
HEALTH AND
DISEASE
Science acknowledges
both entities and non-entities. However, its attention is always
directed toward the entity. Lets look at some examples:
Heat is an entity. It can be
created by building a fire or burning fossil fuel. It can be
measured BTU's or calories. Cold, on the other hand, is
merely the absence of heat. You cannot create cold. It merely
is what exists when heat is withdrawn. An air conditioner withdraws
heat from a room leaving a room with a lack of heat. If you stand
outside an air conditioner, you can feel the heat that has been withdrawn
from the room.
Sound is an
entity. We can create it by clapping our hands, speaking, or turning
on the radio. It is measured in decibels. Silence, on
the other hand, is the absence of sound. It is a
non-entity.
Light and darkness are probably the best
examples. Light is an entity. We can create it by
striking a match or flicking a switch. Darkness, on the
other hand, is the non-entity. It is only manifested when the light
is turned on, what happens to the darkness? It doesn't collect in a
small pile in the corner or slip under a crack in the door. It
simply does not exist when there is
light.
Science deals with entities. But somehow when medicine began to
investigate the issues of health and disease, they chose to make disease
the entity and health the non-entity. Maybe its because that the
manifestation of disease are so much more noticeable than the
manifestation of health. Regardless of why, the fact is that
health is the normal state of an organism, so that when an organism
manifests a lack of health, it catches our attention. Its very much
like our analogy of light and darkness. We take light for
granted. We think nothing of walking into a dark room, flipping on
the switch and have it suddenly be bright as noon-day. But it
becomes a normal act of everyday life. The same is true for a
properly functioning healthy body. We do not go to bed at night and
say, "Wow, my respiratory system really worked well today!" As we
lay our head on our pillow at night very few of us reflect how our heart
beat over 100,000 times during the course of the day.
We take health, like light, for granted. It is only when the two are gone and the accompanying manifestations of a lack of light or health are evident, that we begin to act.
Two Approaches to Health
There are two general categories used throughout history that
approach the physical well-being of the human race. One reflects
health restoration (we call ADIO) the other reflects disease treatment (
we will call OIBU).
ADIO(Above-down-inside-out)
This
acronym represents the health
restoration approach. It acknowledges that health is the result
of a power or principle greater than or "above" our finite, educated
mind. It also understands that the physical manifestation of this
principle in the human, the electrical energy of the nervous system, flows
over nerves from the brain "above" - "down" the spinal cord and "outward"
to all parts
OIBU(Outside-in-below-up)
This
acronym represents the disease
treatment approach. It attempts to control the body and its
function or malfunction from the outside. Those that practice this
approach believe that and educated mind is better equipped to run the body
than the principle that created it. While they may not admit this,
their actions bespeak an outside-in viewpoint. Let's look at the two
in more detail.