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N-H-P
Fri, Apr-18-03, 11:57
Tutorial: Lesson #5-Health versus Medicine The Natural Health
position on personal health
----------

Health is about living the good life.

"Life is stress and stress is life". Throughout the ages
people have been born, have died, and in between have lived in
various stages of sickness and health.
http://home.naturalhealthperspective.com/vicissitudes.html
Experiencing aches, pain, and sickness is just a normal part
of being alive. Normal human experiences are simply Mother
Nature's way of reminding you that you are indeed still alive.

There is a growing tendency in our Western Culture to
medicalize problems that are not medical and to pretend to
understand phenomena by merely giving them a label? Life is
not a sickness as conventional medicine would like us all
to believe.

Medicine is about treating the sick.

Healthy people are *not* sick!

You don't need a string of advanced science degrees behind
your name in order to know how to live the good life. You are
not the first person to have faced the challenges of living.
Others before you, have already solved most of these problems.
Now, it is your turn. After all: "There is nothing new under
the sun." |Ecclesiastes 1:9|

The WordSmith dictionary defines medicine http://www.wordsmyt-
h.net/live/home.php?script=search&matchent=medicine&matchtype-
\=exact as "the science of diagnosing and treating illness,
disease, and injury."

Since the times of the Greeks, conventional medicine has
traditionally used the biomedical model. The biomedical model
is unequivocally reductionist in its approach.
----------

Reductionism: The idea is that you can understand
all of nature, by examining smaller and smaller
pieces of it. When assembled, the small pieces will
explain the whole.
----------

The biomedical model treats disease as a pathology that occurs
within the person. The doctor's function is to control the
pathology, repair the body and restore health. The limitation
of this model is that it excludes any psychological, social,
or ecological factors. Thus, the problem with conventional
medicine is that prevention clearly does not fit in with its
biomedical model of reductionism. This explains why most
physicians clearly do not like to treat anything that is not
clearly pathological in nature.

Everyone must decide for themselves, if what they are
experiencing is just an ordinary ailment of life or a major
medical problem. And, whether or not you want your doctor to
treat a "risk factor" as a disease.

"[The Internet and patients' empowerment] is shifting power
from doctors back to people.
http://home.naturalhealthperspective.com/empowerment.html
People may increasingly take charge, more consciously weighing
the costs and benefits of the "medicalisation" of their lives.
Armed with better information about the natural course of
common conditions, they may more judiciously assess the real
value of medicine's never ending regimen of tests and
treatments."

Moynihan R, Smith R. Too much medicine? http://bmj.co-
m/cgi/content/full/324/7342/859?view=full&pmid=119507-
16 BMJ. 2002 Apr 13;324(7342):859-60. PMID: 11950716

The choice is yours. Learn to deal with common problems as a
challenge of life, or hide from reality by turning to your
doctor for help every time you face one of life's ordinary
challenges. Healthy people choose to learn, to heal, and to
find their own way through the Normal Vicissitudes of Life.
--
John Gohde, Achieving good Health is an Art, NOT a Science!
http://NaturalHealthPerspective.com/ The ONLY Frauds in Health
are those who couldn't care less about prevention.

Peter Mora
Fri, Apr-18-03, 17:57
>The biomedical model treats disease as a pathology that
>occurs within the person. The doctor's function is to control
>the pathology, repair the body and restore health. The
>limitation of this model is that it excludes any
>psychological, social, or ecological factors.

Has it dawned on you that it is only with the advent of the
reductionist "biomedical model" that it has been possible to
separate out medical problems into pathological states,
illnesses due to "psychological, social or ecological
factors", and often a mixture of the two?

But I agree that there is an unfortunate tendency for normal
and abnormal life stresses to become channelled into
illnesses, and to become managed on a medical model. I suppose
this is also the only way out for some.

Peter Moran