What is health ?

We can reach an infinite number of therapies. Occidental medicine proposes as many specialities as of body sites, senses and psychic disorders. Alternative medicines offer as many therapies as individuals: personal development, acupuncture, massage, magnetism, channelling, reiki, etc. Each one, more or less seriously, promise to keep or find health.

And what is health, exactly?

On the website of French Ministry of Health, you won’t find any definition of health. How strange. It promises to give you something that gets no definition.

According to the World Health Organization, health is a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing, and does not consist only of one absence of disease or infirmity. (Constitution of the World Health Organization, such as adopted by the international Conference on Health, New York, June 19-22, 1946; signed on July 22, 1946 by the representatives of 61 States).

If we understand this definition in a strict way, who can say "I am in perfect health"? Almost nobody. Thus, we all have disorders. Happy to learn it...

Let’s have a look at oriental medicine. More subjective than Western medicine, its philosophy consists in reaching for energy balance: Yin and Yang for Chinese medicine, balance of 3 somatic energies (the bile, mucus and wind) for Tibetan medicine. These concepts may look strange for the uninitiated ones, because quite far from our Cartesian concepts. The main problem is that no scientific tools can measure those energy effects yet and thus, make it hard to demonstrate any significant effect. Moreover, depending on the therapist relevance and on the relation between therapist and patient, the success of these Eastern techniques is more uncertain than Western medicine. Nevertheless, considering how long those techniques have been in existence and their growing worldwide success, their philosophy strikes a chord to a lot of human beings, even scientifically misunderstood or denied. 

It’s quite “amazing” seeing that clinicians often die from a disease related to their own speciality: cardiac problem for cardiologists, cerebral degeneration or strokes for neurologists, cancer for the cancer specialists, etc. I don’t know any study that had focussed any attention to this but, in any case, this is an observation that is quite admitted in hospitals. Strange...

On the other hand, it is not rare to hear that spiritual guides suffer from this disease, or this other one. However recognized for their deep knowledge of the world and the relevance of their remarks, that does not prevent from any physical disease.

Being a “master” of physical body or of spirit / soul / energies does not prevent from anything. So, what is health? Perhaps, we have a wrong point of view.

It appears that all our lives consist in reaching a new health state which can be a mix between physical, mental and social well-being. For mental one, we can introduce various types of energies indexed by Eastern medicines. We all had experiences or tests in our lives which make us evolve/ grow up. It builds our psychic and social health that also influences our physical health. Theoretical sciences tell us that the world is in constant evolution, nothing is fixed, everything always changes. Our body and our mental take part of this process. Many people say "thanks" to their disease, they discover a new of thinking, a new meaning to their life.

Health is nothing else but a goal to achieve. But the main goal of our lives is the process to get there, to understand something ... What ?