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October 24, 2004
Despite proof to the contrary,
Despite proof to the contrary, many doctors still cling to the germ theory of disease and to the necessity of drugs to combat germs [. . . . ] Hasn't the time come to expand our notions of illness and treatment beyond Pasteur's bacterial infection theory? Can it be possible that germs are merely a concomitant of disease, present in all of us but able to multiply in a sick individual because of disturbed function? [, , , ,] I came to the conclusion that germs do not initiate a diseased state of the body but appear later after a person becomes ill."
Henry Bieler, Food is Your Best Medicine
I'm the last person to assess the medical validity of the above statement, but it interests me because it seems as much a philosophic as a scientific conundrum. I've been thinking lately about health and how to define it. This article makes the point that when we describe ourselves as healthy today, we often mean that we have been repaired, shored up, rather than that we are sound organisms. To that extent, our definition of health is largely negative--marked by the absence of disease, injury or pain--not by any positive, verifiable presence of health. What factors constitute health, as opposed to detracting from it? One of the potential problems with this question is that historically the answers have tended in the direction of the eugenic and the racial; health ends up defined according to the aesthetics of whatever group the investigator is trying to promote (so we see, for example, health defined in terms of the shape of one's nose or the cast of one's skin or the outward manifestations of one's intellect). And if we have a less (explicitly) eugenic representation of health today, it is still one that works backwards from the aesthetic standard of the supermodel and the celebrity. Can we define health positively without resorting to aesthetics?
A corollary to this train of thought is how to define healing. I've always been struck by the passage in Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time in which Luciente, the representative of a utopic future, scoffs at our notion of medical side effects" "But [. . . ] all are effects! Your drug companies labeled things side effects they didn't want as selling points. It's a funny way to look at things, like a horse in blinkers." Can we really even know how to cure ourselves if we don't have a positive model of health to serve as a standard?
Posted by Miki at October 24, 2004 09:00 AM