When Disease is Bigger Than a Body
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When Disease is Bigger Than a Body

I had a crew from Good Morning America in my home yesterday morning to film an interview about the documentary, What the Health. Along with everyone else, I wait to see what sound bites survive from roughly an hour of detailed commentary. In case you are wondering, the gist of my impressions, of the film’s mission and methods, is that the former is admirable, the latter quite questionable. We can leave it there, both because the GMA producers will do the rest, and because at present – I really have another matter on my mind.

I am routinely chastised in my various social media channels for posting political content or commentary, something I concede I am not overly inclined to do in the first place. I am, after all, a health expert, not a political scientist- and that is by choice.

On the other hand, I was an American before a doctor, a human before that. I have a perfectly robust riposte to those disapproving Facebook “friends,” admonishing connections on LinkedIN, and dissenting fellow tweeters: what, exactly, do you think health is FOR?

One of the great and common mistakes in medicine is to adopt the view that health is a virtue, implying that ill health is a vice. I have seen far too many bad medical things happen to the best of people to sanction any such nonsense. There is no place in genuine care for an admonishing wag of the finger.  Everyone prefers good health to bad; failing to get there is an injury to which the insulting burden of victim blaming need not be appended.

A related mistake is to think or imply that health, per se, is the prize. Perhaps- goes this argument- health is not a virtue, but the laurels claimed by those with the right combination of pluck and luck. This, too, is misguided. I know many people who have dodged innumerable slings and arrows of outrageous medical misfortune to live lives of deep meaning and happiness that have enriched all around them. I admire these people greatly. We all know people who put perfectly intact health to less replete purpose.

Health is neither virtue, nor prize; it is means to an end. Other things being equal, good health makes it far easier to do the things you like to do, whatever those may be. Other things being equal, healthy people have more fun.

Health is the means; quality of living is the ends.

And, so, personal health and the politics of our time are inextricably conjoined. Public health and public policy are ineluctably linked. Political poison that assaults our senses and sensibilities, policies that degrade our environments, positions that undermine civility, and proclamations that menace the essence of humanism itself- are one step worse than bad for health; they are directly injurious to what health is…for.

I not only refute the contention that abstinence from political commentary is the rightful place of health professionals; I repudiate it. Health and what it’s for are the inevitable consequence or casualty of politics and policy. The rightful place of health professionals is to renounce the complicity of silence when evil assaults the very thing we have pledged ourselves to protect.

I am not interested in a career change to political science. I prefer topics decisively in my native professional purview to those connected along troubling tangents. But I renounce the irrelevance of those tangents. They are the very lines conscience follows to find the connections between pernicious politics and maladies of bodies, and the body politic alike. Sometimes, disease is simply too big to fit within the skin of only one of us.

Where the deeply disturbing erosion of our civics commingles with rising reliance on antidepressants and rampant use of opioids- silence in defense of health and the higher aims it serves will invite every manner of illness to prevail. To the critics of every alternative to such silence, my answer is: what the health, indeed.

 

-fin

David L. Katz

Director, Yale University Prevention Research Center; Griffin Hospital

Immediate Past-President, American College of Lifestyle Medicine

Senior Medical Advisor, Verywell.com

Founder, The True Health Initiative

Follow at: LinkedIN; Twitter; Facebook

Read at: INfluencer Blog; Huffington Post; US News & World Report; Verywell; Forbes

Thank for sharing, I was not aware Einstein hijacked this genuine quote when claiming "The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything"

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Richard Foster

Business Owner, Certified Prosthetist Orthotist at TGG Prosthetics and Orthotics

7 年

I applaud your distinct virtue of speaking the TRUTH and your continued effort to do so! All of us are relegated to the chance of being found in the need of medical care that we do not even realize might exist before such need. The point of healthcare is to help us minimize opportunities for otherwise unhealthy situations and maximize the quality of our health so that LIFE is possible. Those that think they are immune to the malady of running the gambit of this world are surely short sighted and misguided. This is not a time to be silent when so much is at stake. Thank you for your voice!

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Michelle Traub, MA, RDN

Communications Manager * Health Writer * Proofreader * Sunset Lover ?????

7 年

Bravo!!! "The rightful place of health professionals is to renounce the complicity of silence when evil assaults the very thing we have pledged ourselves to protect." Could not agree more. Thank you for being a voice of reason and true supporter of the lives you have sworn to first do no harm.

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Christie Capin

Director at aLIGNE Advisory, LLC

7 年

What a great article! Thank you for your voice, as a human, humanitarian and medical professional. We have work to do - not staying silent - but raising concerns in a peaceful, non- violent way!

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