If your test comes back negative, you’re glad because “They found nothing.”
Is that really true? Was nothing found?
Yes, the diseased condition or problem they were looking for isn’t there. Then what is there? Health. And health is not nothing, it’s something. Something was found.
It’s popular to think of health just as the absence of disease. I remember being struck by this years ago while in a “health” food store. Every product was geared not on wellness, but on treating or warding off sickness.
Most agree that our health care system is primarily designed for the treatment, management and sometimes prevention of disease rather than establishing and maintaining health.
Recent efforts to promote healthy lifestyles as a path to wellness mostly emphasize nutrition and exercise. There’s been little shift in how we think of health. People still see these lifestyle changes as strategies to evade disease.
Accepted logic says that disease is inevitable and you deal with it either through mainstream or alternative treatment, management and prevention. But that’s upside down. What about gaining a better understanding of health itself?
Health and wellness are our normal state of being. Shouldn’t we begin with health as inevitable, lasting and powerful and disease as a detour? Or at least with health as the rule and sickness as the exception?