By Mark Sherman MD

Health is a significant issue in all of our lives. Without health, a sense of peace, joy, and meaning will often elude us. It is not surprising then that the subject of health and wellness is so omnipresent. In our conversations and in our advertisements, in our news and in our politics, health is the topic that seems to interest everyone in some way or another, simply because it affects us all. A lack of health may manifest in different ways at different times for different people, and yet none of us are immune to the potential loss of health, no matter our income, ethnicity or education. But what exactly is this ‘health’ that we speak, write and read so liberally about? In my previous contributions to this column, I have focused on various aspects of wellness and dis-ease: nutrition, stress reduction, exercise, arthritis, depression, dementia…etc. I would like to back up a little, and return to basics. Let us ask the question, what is health?

The word ‘health’ derives from the Old German heilen, ‘to make whole’. It is a state of wholeness or balance. Health is not a static state, but rather one that is fluid and changing. Throughout the history of our healing traditions, health has always been respected as a delicate balance in life. Traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda of India, and ancient Egyptian and Greek medicines all saw health and wellness as a fluid homeostasis. Diet, exercise, emotion, sleep, sound, natural surroundings, weather, seasons, and even the planets and stars all affected the health and wellness of an individual and the community and environment in which he or she lived. If any of these factors were imbalanced, then dis-ease or illness would arise. Somewhere over the years, our Western culture has un-learned this basic definition of health as ‘wholeness’. Our allopathic medicine has mainly described health as the absence of dis-ease, or worse, as the absence of symptoms. In our reductionist, scientific practice of clinical medicine, we will tend to narrow our focus to the ‘health’ (or absence of symptoms) of an individual, independent of their community or environment. Narrowing even further we often consider only the health of one’s physical body, or even only of one’s physical organs and organ systems. Thus have we reduced our perspective from a balance of the entirety of a person, community, environment and cosmos, to seeing only livers and spleens and stomachs and nervous systems, and trying to find ways to make them work better. We have our heart specialists and our lung specialists, our kidney specialists and our brain specialists… And sometimes with our medications, tests and surgeries we manage to get those organs to work better. But is that really health? And who is looking after the whole?

It is easy to witness the lack of attentive care for the whole these days. We have global warming and depleted natural resources; species extinction and air, soil, and water pollution. We are witnessing an epidemic of cancer, asthma, heart disease and autoimmune disorders. Single parent families, homelessness and poverty are all increasing in places like Victoria, whereas access to health care, healthy food and good shelter are decreasing. And what do these problems have to do with health? Everything.

We can not help to heal a forest by caring (no matter how well) for a single leaf. We need a new philosophy. We need an old philosophy. Returning to health as wholeness requires us to broaden our minds, our hearts and our perspective. It is not something we can simply defer to our health practitioners and politicians. If we are to return to a true respect for ourselves, our communities, and our environment, then change must begin within each of us. Just as there is no real separation of body, mind and spirit, so there is no separation of individuals from their communities nor from their natural environment. What affects the wellness of one will affect the wellness of the other. Our challenge is to all become healers. To do this, we need to have an understanding of the illness. We must be able to realize and see the interconnectivity of all of life of which we are a part. And we must summon the courage and love to make the changes that need to be made in order to heal ourselves, our neighbours, our communities and our planet. We begin with you.

In this series of articles I will be presenting a framework in which to approach this healing work. Beginning with yourself, and expanding outwards from there, we will be examining the breadth of the dis-ease we are all facing with a focus on what we can do in our own lives to begin to move towards health.

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world" Mohandas Gandhi