What is health?

September 26th, 2007

Here’s a nice article from the New York Times Sunday Magazine (9/16/07) entitled “Do We Really know What Makes Us Healthy?”
The author, Gary Taubes, argues that the long-term clinical double-blind epidemiological studies that are medicine’s gold standard are rather poor at delivering what we really want to know: what causes health and what causes illness.
Perhaps part of the reason is the extremely limited scope of these studies - which by design can only study the correlation or association between two variables, such as smoking and cancer, without knowing if there is a causal relationship.
The holistic approach proceeds in the opposite direction. We start with an understanding of what is health, which includes the physical, but also the emotional and the spiritual dimensions of the human being. This allows us to have an idea of what health is, rather than simply focusing on health as the absence of disease. More on this important topic to come!

Puran & Susanna

Entry Filed under: Health