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Your Own Health The foundation of all health is based on each individuals taking responsibility for their own health. This part of the site is examines the nature of health and its origin or aetiology. What we all intuitively know is that, "Health is not just an absence of disease." |
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No one can make you healthy, your health is your responsibility.
"Health is not the absence of disease"
For a hundred years we have fought disease with medicine and have neglected health.
"This great achievement of making the progress of dying easier, smoother, less painful and more prolonged, has only been effected by working on the basic assumption that the process of dying, common to men, begins at the cradle or earlier, and ends in the grave: that man is, in fact, born but to die. What is the result? Marriage becomes an economic disaster: pregnancy a 'disease of nine months duration': birth a major accident, clumsily designed, demanding interference and anasthesia: infancy the opportunity for repression: childhood a breaking-in to the curb and bit: adolescence a docilisation, a taming to fit the animal for the circus cage of society. In fact in every phase of society and civilisation and at every step, means are adopted to anticipate, to prevent or to correct the emergence of any mystery locked up in the seed of humanity; as though living were some ghoulish supernatural thing of which we were afraid or ashamed. We have remedies for everything: even for living. And so successful are our remedial procedures and preventatve measures that the great majority of us are almost 'cured' of that fell disorder, living."
G.Scott Williamson MC MD from" SCIENCE, SYNTHESIS and SANITY"
Health is based on happiness - from hugging and clowning around to finding joy in family and friends, satisfaction in work, and ecstasy in nature and the arts.
Dr Patch Adams from "GESUNDHEIT!"
"The arrival of a good clown exercises more beneficial influence upon the health of a town than of twenty asses laden with drugs"
Dr Thomas Sydenham 17th century physician.
Salutogenic Medicine, or what makes us good swimmers in the river of life?
Pathogenic medicine is aimed at rescuing people, at great expense, from a raging river, without taking into consideration how they got there and why they are not better swimmers. In contrast, - seen from the perspective of health education - people are seen to jump into the river of their own volition, while at the same time refusing to learn to swim.
Salutogenic medicine looks at this metaphor differently; the river is the steam of life. None walks the shore safely. Moreover, much of the river is polluted, literally and figuratively. There are forks in the river that lead to gentle streams or to dangerous rapids and whirlpools.
The question arises:" Wherever one is in the stream - whose nature is determined by historical, social-cultural, and physical environmental conditions - what shapes one's ability to swim well?
"We are all terminal cases. But so long as there is a breath of life in us,
we are all in some measure healthy"
Our health is determined to a large degree by experiencing the world we live in with :
A sense of comprehensibility, a sense of manageability and a sense of meaningfulness.
Aaron Antonovsky (1923-1994)"
Nature tops the list of potent tranquilizers and stress reducers.
The mere sound of moving water has been shown to lower blood pressure.
Art, nature and imagination are fundamental to health care. ..So much healing goes on through their influence - on both care-giver and patien t- that it is important to include these great medicines at the core of our medical work.
Art has a great power to uplift, communicate, enhance understanding, educate, and impart beauty.
Nature, the attending physician, will help us explore beauty and inspiration....Often I have gone outside with a psychotic person and hugged a tree for a long time or rolled down a hill.
Nature tops the list of potent traquilizers and stress reducers.
Dr Patch Adams
Imagination
...no universe is more vast than the imagination. Three thousand million years of computer design could not begin to contain or simulate imagination. Everbody can stimulate imagination; it exists in every person. Like the physical body, imagination can become flabby if it is not exercised and appreciated.
Below are some ideas on "Imagination Keep Fit"
A glorious sense of wonder through contemplation and study of nature, humanity, the arts and life itself.
Curiosity about everything and everyone.
Exploration of all areas of interest, however briefly, and saying yes at every opportunity offered.
Sharing ideas with every available person and studying ideas very different from one's own
Develop enormous sense of play and improvisation, with huge quantities of goal-free experimentation
Tinkering in every artistic medium
Restructuring of thought; time away from rehashing problems , worry , fear , and doubt.
Imagination gymnastics , such as picturing the world where chlorophyll is some coler other than green ... maybe thirty different shades.
Restructuring one's life towards happiness
Rebuilding Self, Family, Community, World.
The most distressing health problem for many people is the combination of boredom , and fear, and loneliness .
Our health is damaged most by loneliness and lovelessness .
If relationships with our families, friends, and ourselves are not going well, no amount of physical health can compensate .
Huge numbers of physically healthy people lead miserable lives .
Conversely, if relationships to family, friends, and self are strong and sustaining, then even a dying person can enjoy the bliss of community.
The key to a happy life
The most revolutionary act anyone can commit is to be happy.
I refer not to a moment of joy during one of life's peak experiences but to a basic pattern of enduring happiness.
It takes no greater effort to be happy everyday than to be miserable.
Each of us chooses the background hues of his or her own portrait.
A person can choose to be happy or miserable.
Unfortunately, a paradigm of suffering and unhappiness seems to have dominated human awareness during the last 5000 years, with the basic, underlying feeling that life is a struggle.
However this could change and happiness could become the foundation from which life is launched.
We can choose a paradigm of happiness in which all our thoughts, feelings, and actions are infused with joy.............
Happiness
I am interested in happiness because I am a physician.....Psychiatry is the science of the mind , but I have been unable to find even one paragraph devoted to happiness in psychiatric textbooks. And I never hear medical professionals prescribing happiness to the mentally unhealthy, which, to me, means all who are unhappy. Journal ads promoting tranquillisers and "talk therapies" are merely helping patients cope with their problems.
Only a paradigm of pain would accept such Lilliputian goals.
Friends or playmates
The most Important ingredient in my personal recipe for happiness is my friends.
Everybody needs friends or playmates with whom to have fun.
In the pain paradigm , folks often say they are lucky to have a few friends.
For the happy , however , every living soul has that potential.
Hobbies
Hobbies are also a key to a happy life; very simply, they are organised happiness, a personal decision to explore some particular aspect of life.
Hobbies provide outlets for wonder and curiosity for our creative selves.
In the paradigm of happiness, all of life's interests - including work and family - become hobbies.
Joy and beauty.
It takes great effort to reject joy and beauty; it is not a passive act.
With all the potential for happiness in this world, it is astonishing that people are so bored and lonely.
I do not intend to trivialise sadness or anxiety but simply to say that we choose these ways of life.
People who feel sad tend to blame external events over which they have no control.This is irresponsible. Such individuals become accomplices to the paradigm of pain when they sing out the "script" of victim.
Yes, the terrible things that happen are painful. Choosing to give up, however, is what makes these experiences continue to wound us.
Dr Patch Adams
The Doctor and the Public Happiness
Address to Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh 1936
It is somtimes said that one of the greatest advances made in modern medicine is the recognition of the importance of the psychological factor in the patient's disease & his treatment.
Some folk speak of this as if it were a new discovery. Whereas it is as old as Hippocrates, was well known to Celsus & Galen, and was stressed by Sydenham and Boerhaave.
A healthy nation tends to be happy, and a happy nation tends to be healthy.
We live longer,and more healthily, than we ever did. But that is not everything.....surely the problem is how to live more happily? There is the Ministry of Health & The Department Of Health, surely, in the long view, this should be a Ministry & Department of Publtc Happpiness? Let me state ...the essentials of public happiness.
1 Enough of the right food in the belly, 2. Easy access to the fresh air, 3. Shelter, but shelter at a rent which leaves something to buy food with, 4. Leisure for play, 5. Tranquility, and 6. A chance for all of us before birth.
Lord Horder
Healthcare is at a crisis, just as family life and community are in crisis .
We don't want to be a Band Aid for the ailing health care ; we want to change the system ,
to bring about a peaceful revolution .
Dr Patch Adams from "GESUNDHEIT!"