What is Health?

Health comes from within. Blah blah blah, some new age spiritual crap.

You cannot be healthy if you do not want to be healthy. Health is not just some base level need like food or water or shelter which you need to refresh everyday, but the system within which these needs exist.

Your health is a day by day practice, a month by month habit, and a life-long mission. Faith and virtue are no different from health.

Give me a reason to talk about the hierarchy of needs and I’ll leap at the opportunity. Call it pseudoscientific crap if you’d like, but at least then point to a better model for how we grow. I bet you can’t.

What I’ve had trouble grappling with here is just how exactly we meet our needs, or more specifically, how often. I used to think that we only met the “basic needs” every day, eating three full meals, sleeping in a warm bed, and drinking enough water. However, I’m coming to realize that they are a part of our health, not just physically but emotionally and spiritually. If we want our relationships to flourish, to feel a sense of pride in our work, or to develop deep and lasting relationships with our loved ones, we have to practice these needs daily, form habits that persist beyond months into years, and work for our entire lives.

There’s a beauty in this kind of health. It is temporary, the virtue we cultivate, the heights we achieve, the families we form, the friends we make, the safety we feel and the meals we enjoy. All of it will be gone in the end, but also if it lasts it will be because of the work we do to make it last.

Is health making virtue last? Is it self-actualization before death? Is it not knowing but trying?

Next time I add to this, I’m going to be talking about balancing the humors, blood-letting, and the lapis regia so understand this will be as close to real science as I get here. You cannot be healthy if you do not want to be healthy, and I really have no desire to be interact with the American-processed-slop machine.

Humors, Blood-letting, and the Lapis Regia

I was only really half joking. If we established last time that health comes from within and a desire to be healthy, I think it’s important to talk a little about what that might look like historically and today. If I had a drug to sell you, I would probably tell you that before modern medicine, we really didn’t know anything at all actually about health and that all doctors wore really badass masks that looked like crows because people thought that birds would carry you to heaven after you got the plague and that the only way to be healthy is by taking a strange mixture of chemicals that you can’t pronounce in pill form… but I don’t sell drugs so I’ll tell you what I actually think.

Before we had the modern scientific process, highly educated doctors, and all the nice rigor that emerged out of Enlightenment thinking we basically only had Alchemy, Medicine, and Religion. Of course, medicine took a special role out of the litany of practices within health, science, biology, anatomy and chemistry but in general there was not the rigid systemization that we have today.

In a nutshell, the old doctors really didn’t understand that biology and psychology were different things, or how the different things in your body affected one another. They came up with theories that spanned across modern disciplines, like psychology and anatomy. One idea “the humors”: four liquids in your body (blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm) that when unbalanced in your body would also affect your mood and mind. This is actually where we get the word humor from, being “in good humors” would mean your “humors” were properly balanced. Additionally, if one of your humors became “corrupted”, it might become the cause of a disease.

Now, to be crystal clear, knowing what we know now, this stuff is nearly out there. As late as the 1800’s it was written that (from wikipedia):

“The people who have red blood are friendly. They joke and laugh about their bodies, and they are rose-tinted, slightly red, and have pretty skin.

The people who have yellow bile are bitter, short tempered, and daring. They appear greenish and have yellow skin.

The people who are composed of black bile are lazy, fearful, and sickly. They have black hair and black eyes.

Those who have phlegm are low spirited, forgetful, and have white hair”

This kind of blank hypothesis and conjecture lead to practices like bloodletting, where massive ammounts of blood were drained from sick patients in an attempt to “balance the humors”. George Washington actually died after losing like, half his blood in an attempt to cure him of what was probably a sore throat. That’s a pretty crazy way for the father of the nation to die.

Undoubtedly, this kind of philosophy lead to deaths of error, but on the other hand, did we really know better? Would the doctors besides Washington have been able to cure him, absent a time machine or a magic potion? We still don’t really know what he was ill with, we definetely don’t really know what killed the first president, and that’s the scary thing when it comes to health. We never really know how we’re going to go or why, just that at some point we will.

And that’s why we’ve made up stories about health, and science, and all the things we can’t explain. The Lapis Regia, or the Philospher’s stone, or magnum opus, or one of the half dozen other names I’ve seen, all seem to be this legendary rock of ancient power which grants both immortality and perfect health to the one who possesses it, kind of like the Holy Grail but for alchemy. There’s a funny kind of paradox here that I enjoy immensely. We used to believe that health was about the complicated interplay of liquids in the body, the balancing of emotions as an analogue for the balancing of the body, but also that just a magic stone was the real and actual cure to eternal life and youth.

But maybe there is some truth in that. Bloodletting turned Washington’s evening ride in the rain into the morning he wrote his last will, and yet it was what was tried and trusted at the time. Perhaps if he had held just a bit more faith that a magic rock could cure him he would’ve seen 68.

The same could be said about Steve Jobs, brilliant CEO of Apple, who despite having every doctor in the world at his side urging to take the well trodden path, sought out new and alternative medicines to cure his cancer, possibly costing him his life.

I’m not really arguing here one way or another, and I’m not really sure that would be the point. Health is a constant communication process between the mind, the soul, and the body, and ultimately, where that conversation leads you is your business, not mine.

Still, it’s important to have a story about your health deeper than “Wow my insurance is really expensive, I hope I can keep affording it” or “I eat healthy because I don’t like looking fat, but once I get married all bets are off”. At one point, health was simultaneously the most complicated science, and also the simplest philosophy. Caring about health matters because we believe it matters, not because we want to increase a bottom line at a pharmaceutical company. It is engrained in our cultures, the mixing of science, philosophy, and medicine through alchemy has known roots in Asia, Africa, and Europe, with unknown roots and influences beyond, and it in turn shaped the development of philosophy, religion, and medicine in Europe, around the Mediterranean, and as far away as China. Despite that distance, health is also just taking a few moments to drink something warm and clean, to rest deeply, or to exercise with purpose and passion. It’s a balance.