By

Larissa Gough

Health is a condition (or state) of balance, equilibrium and order, called homeostasis, in which the body/mind system functions normally.  Lack of physical pain and emotional suffering is a sign of health, which reflects a state of balance in the body/mind system.  To maintain health is to maintain normal, balanced and orderly functioning of the body/mind system. Anything that disturbs this delicate balance and order causes imbalance or disorder, disease, illness, sickness, malady, ailment.

Disease is a normal body response to an abnormal body condition where balance and order is disturbed and the body/mind system does not function normally. It is homeostasis disturbance. Suffering, such as physical pain and emotional distress, is a symptom (sign) of the homeostatic imbalance.  To cure the disease is to restore homeostasis.

If one studied the attributes of health (balance), he might be better able to understand the causes and processes of disease (imbalance). Unfortunately, medicine has not always placed as much importance on the nature of health as it has on the nature of disease. Physicians have been and are, for the most part, as little interested in health as soldiers in peace. Basically, all treatments of all diseases should be designed to stimulate and support the natural body’s trend toward health. The mainstream medicine is primarily designed to cope with the effects of disease rather than with the cause of disease. The actual causes of bodily disorders may continue go unnoticed because of preoccupation with diseased organs. It is much like an archer who is continually shooting arrows at a target.  After a time the target becomes battered.  Often ignoring the one releasing the arrows, the doctor tries to patch up the diseased organ so that it doesn’t look too bad, and makes it as painless as possible. However, the archer continues his fire. Sooner or later the “target” is beyond repair and must be removed.  With the removal of this target, the arrows of the archer then shift to another target for ultimate damage and destruction.

It is in the field of prevention and the support of health that the main focus of medicine should be. “A higher stage of medicine will be concerned with the identification and control those factors in the individual and in the environment that influence the ability to stay on optimal physiological paths, to resist the deviation from those paths, and to return to them.  Its efforts will be directed not so much at the so-called specific causes of disease as at the factors that permit them to become causes.  Its consent will be more with the elimination and control of factors contributing to susceptibility to illness in general than with the cataloging of diseases and their treatment in their endless variety.  It will combat disease by preventative programs for maintenance and improvement of health”.