Which cures more illnesses? Drugs, or Healthinesses?
When we think of a cure, we almost automatically reach for drug. We’ve been well trained by drug salesmen and their followers. At the same time, we should know that most drugs make no attempt to cure any disease, that most drugs cannot cure any disease, and that most cures do not come from drugs.
Where do most cures come from healthing. Yes, health is a verb: to improve healthiness. Most cures come from improvements in healthiness. Most intentional cures come from intentionally improving healthiness.
Most cures come from healthing, from healthy actions; some come from healthy inactions.
What is a healthiness? According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, healthiness “the quality or state of being healthy,” a noun form of healthy. Oxford is less informative.* No examples are provided, because the term is rarely used identify a specific healthiness.
Examples of healthinesses include:
- a healthy state of fitness – physical healthiness
- a healthy weight, not overweight, not underweight – weight healthiness
- a healthy state of mind – mental healthiness
- healthy consumption of foods – dietary healthiness. Note: this noun describes a process, a verb.
- having sufficient Vitamin C to meet the bodily needs – Vitamin C healthiness
The action, the verb, healthing, that indicates working to maintain a healthy level of a healthiness and also to regain healthiness, to health ourselves, when a healthiness is deficient, excessive, or otherwise out of alignment.
Healthing Cures
Healthing cures are “actions that improve our healthiness to cure illnesses.” We can see these for each of the above examples:
- We can health our body by improving our physical healthiness with healthy exercise and rest. When our bodily healthiness is so low that it is causing an illness, healthing our body can cure.
- We can health our weight by gaining or losing weight. When our weight is so out of balance that it is causing illness, this is a healthing cure
- We can health our state of mind when our current mental status is so far out of balance that it is causing illness, a mind healthing cure.
- We can health an unhealthy diet by choose healthy foods and avoiding unhealthy foods. When our unhealthy diet is causing illness, healthing our diet can cure.
- when we don’t have enough Vitamin C for health, and illness occurs, we can health our body by consuming sufficient Vitamin C to meet the bodily needs – a nutrient healthing cure.
Healthing, healthiness cures can be slow. When our body is deficient in muscle tone – it can take months to health, to cure the body deficiency. In other cases, it can be quick. When our body is super stressed from overexercise, a short period of rest can cure. Note: both of these cases might occur without any judgement of illness – only judged an illness when more severe.
When we are dehydrated, drinking healthy water can cure our illness. This is a status cure – we change the status of our bodily healthiness and the illness is cured. Of course drinking healthy water does not cure every case of dehydration – only those that are cured by drinking healthy water. Although this seems obvious, it is important.
Healthing ourselves, improving our healthiness, can cure illness when an illness is present, when illness is caused by an absence of healthiness. When no illness is present, improving healthiness often prevents illness, but that’s a topic for another post.
It seems so simple, because it is simple. Cures of elementary illnesses, those with a single cause, are generally not medical. In most cases, no doctor is required to cure. Living things, dogs, cats, snakes, and trees know how to health their bodies without resorting to a medical professional. Our bodies are so sensitive that, in most cases, they remind us to drink water BEFORE any illness occurs. But sometimes, for many different reasons, we might fail to drink enough water. If we catch the problem, the illness before any further damage is caused, the cure is trivial.
This same model can be applied to thousands of measures of healthiness. In diet, there are over 100 nutrients essential to healthiness. If we don’t maintain a healthy level of Vitamin A, B, C, or any other vitamin, or of iron, or copper, or zinc, or proteins, or fats, or air or water – we can become ill, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly.
But healthiness is much more than just diet and body. We must also constantly health – maintain our healthiness – of mind, of spirits, of communities and even of our environment. All six causal domains: diet, body, mind, spirits, communities, and environments require healthiness, lest illness occur.
When our air is so unhealthy that it is making us ill, we need healthy air. In most cases, we correct unhealthy air before illness occurs and we act quickly to find healthy air and prevent the illness. This prompts us to ask:
When does an Illness Exist?
At what point does is unhealthy air just unhealthy air – like smoking, or standing by the campfire – and at what point does unhealthy air cause illness? The theory of cure uses a simple model.
An illness is present when we seek a cure.
When we accidentally breath in some heavy smoke, and cough and move away, we don’t see an illness, just a symptom cause. We don’t need a cure, because we moved away before any serious damage has occurred. The signs and symptoms of illness: coughing, sneezing, perhaps watery eyes, but if these disappear quickly because we moved away from the smoke – it’s not really an illness to be cured. It’s no longer present.
Is illness only present when damage has occurred? This is the model used by our medical systems. Most diseases cannot be diagnosed until significant damage has occurred. Many cannot be diagnosed unless there is significant danger of damage occurring. But this can miss many cases of illness, and their cures.
In the theory of cure, an illness is present when immediate actions are not enough to get relief from negative signs and symptoms. A cure is an intentional action with positive expectations.
For example, someone might suffer persistent headaches at their workplace. But there is no smoke. Analysis might reveal that there are high levels of carbon-dioxide at the workplace, perhaps only at certain times of day. These headaches don’t go away until the air is healthed. When the air is healthed, the headaches are cured. It might be that the level was never high enough to cause measurable damage, but it was high enough to cause persistent negative signs and symptoms.
False Cures
It’s too easy, and certainly too common that we confuse the words cure, cured and cures. Cure can be a noun, a substance or treatment, a solution to a problem (noun); or a verb, an action the produces a cured state, past tense: cured.
A false cure could be something that is marketed as a cure, but does not cure. A false “cured” occurs when the patient, doctor, or someone else believes the illness is cured, but it is not cured. These cases can be (falsely) declared cured with or without identification of the cure or cures.
A cure is an action that addresses the cause of an illness, producing a cured stat or status.
There are two types of false “healthiness cures” we need to be aware of.
The first is an actual cure – only our belief in the cause of the cure is false. The second is a partial cure, but one that misses the actions necessary for complete cure.
Wrong Cure-Cause
A false cure can occur simply because we are wrong about the cause and the cure. Maybe we improved our healthiness by specific actions – and the illness went away. But the cause was actually addressed by something else. These cases can be difficult to understand – but we might gain understanding when the illness occurs again and the false cure doesn’t work. Either we were wrong before, or we are wrong now. Unfortunately, healthiness cures are generally ignored by doctors and medical systems, or declared anecdotal, false. Every actual cured case is a real case, a story, an anecdote.
Note: this type of false cure is not as common as we might think. Most of the time, we can quickly figure out the cause of our illness and health the cause, producing a cure – so often, so easily that we ignore these simple cures. We are more likely to notice when a cure fails.
Wrong Level of Cause
The second false cure occurs when we misjudge the level or layers of cause. In a previous example, we cured dehydration with water, but
We might be dehydrated because, every day, we don’t drink enough water. In this case, drinking water cures the current dehydration status, but the illness appears to return a few days later. What happened? An illness is not a thing, it cannot go away and return.
The cause reoccurred. A new case of the illness status occurred.
The unhealthy drinking (or not drinking) water process was never addressed. The fundamental cause of both cases of illness was the same, but it was a cause of a process illness – not just a status illness.
A process illness requires a process cure – drinking sufficient water every day. The illness was not just a status of “not enough water” it was a process of “not drinking enough water on a regular basis” This distinction is important, because a process illness requires a different healthing cure, to drink sufficient, healthy amounts of water EVERY DAY.
Domains of Healthiness
In an earlier paragraph, I mentioned the six domains of healthiness: diet, body, mind, spirits, communities, and environments. Each of these domains has many different healthiness factors which, when out of alignment or balance, can cause illness. In each case, if the cause is an elementary status that has not yet caused any damage, the cure is trivial. Health (improve the healthiness of) the factor that is out of alignment and the illness is cured. In each case, it is also possible to suffer from a process cause – where the cure is not just a simple change of status, but a change in life processes.
Lets look at some status and process causes of illness causal domain:
Diet
Our nutritional needs are extremely varied. In addition, our healthy bodies can tolerate wide variations in consumption of healthy nutrients. In many cases, our bodies have many systems to maintain nutrients for when they are needed. As a result, a simple deficiency of a nutrient does not cause immediate illness.
Water is essential and without water, most people suffer signs and symptoms of illness and might even diet within a few days. Note: it is possible for some people in specific circumstances, to survive for much longer periods without water.
When our water status is deficient, consumption of water provides a simple cure.
However, when our water consumption patterns, lifestyle, or processes are deficient, the illness can take much longer to create observable signs and symptoms, and the status cure might appear to cure and then later fail. The process cause requires a process cure.
Vitamin A is stored in the body for long periods of time without consuming Vitamin A does not cause illness. Illness occurs when our Vitamin A stores are used up. Ancient Egyptians, and many other cultures learned the cure – eating liver restores a healthy Vitamin A status, curing “night blindness caused by Vitamin A deficiency,” a status cure.
One of the classic dietary cures, the cure for scurvy, illustrates another important reality about healthiness cures. As James Lind famously said:
“I do not mean to say that lemon juice and wine are the only remedies for the scurvy; this disease, like many others, may be cured by medicines of very different and opposite qualities to each other.” (Lind, 1771)
Every illness has many potential cures. Our medical systems often want to find a mythical “the cure” for “the disease.” This can be a powerful tool for finding and promoting profitable treatments, but it is ignorant of most actual cures.
There are also many healthy negative action that can cure. Ongoing overconsumption of alcohol can lead to chronic hangovers. The cure is a negative process, to stop the ongoing overconsumption.
Body
Dietary consumption of alcohol can provide benefits in spirit and community healthiness, with little danger as long as we stay within our limits. However, if we have consumed too much alcohol, our body becomes toxic. The first cure is to vomit – to remove the alcohol from the body. We tend to think of vomiting poison as “being sick,” but it’s actually a healthy cure. We were already sick, the process of vomiting cures the illness.
The body is very active physically and this is where we most easily recognize the need for exercise and rest. When we don’t get enough exercise, the cure is exercise. When we don’t get enough rest, the cure is rest. Lack of exercise doesn’t cause illness until after it has continued for some time. Overexercise – absence of rest, can have negative consequences much more quickly. As a result, rest is often a status cure for an immediate problem – one we might not even judge to be an illness. Exercise on the other hand, is usually a slow process cure. Both exercise and rest are also important cure components of many injuries, where rest provides for recovery and exercise for rehabilitation.
Mind
Our medical systems currently try to treat (not cure) mental illnesses with drugs for the body – and give up on curing. There are many mental healthiness cures – and like all healthiness cures, some cases require immediate, one-time, status cures while others require lifestyle cure processes. In addition, however, because mental illnesses are rarely identified by cause, there is plenty of room for cure confusion.
Elementary depression – having a single cause, for example, might have a dietary cause, a physical – bodily status cause, a mental cause, a spirit cause, a community cause or a toxic environmental cause. In each case, it is labelled a symptom, or where severe and prolonged, a disease of the mind. Each different cause requires a different type of cure.
In the theory of cure, a mind illness has a cause in the mind, in our beliefs, our memories, or our mental calculations. The cure might be to change the belief, dismiss the memory, or repair the mental calculation.
Depression might be caused by a fatalistic belief – perhaps that our spouse is unfaithful, or that we are going to die, or that some irrecoverable disaster has occurred. These causes are in the mind – and the cure is to health the mind.
A person who believes they are going to die might fall ill and die – unless they can change their beliefs, change their mind. The change needed might be simple, short term, when a natural positive attitude takes over, or it might need to be an intentional action, supported by ongoing commitment to the battle.
One of, perhaps the most common mental causes of illness is belief in ourselves and failure to believe in ourselves. When our belief in ourself is too strong, we might take excessive risks and become ill. Is this the cause of some cases of “tennis elbow,” where the cure is simply “stop doing that?”
Spirits
In the theories of healthicine and of cure, spirits are the driving forces of life. All living things have the spirits of life, the spirit to life, grow, learn reproduce, and evolve. When individual loses these spirits, it dies. When an individual dies, it loses the life spirits. Like all aspects of healthiness, healthy spirits exist on a gradation from very near to death to so powerful that they create illness. Healthy spirits are somewhere in-between. Workaholism and burnout are spirit illnesses – that can often lead to other illnesses as well. Burnout can be a one-time, status illness, cured by simple removal from the situation or rest – but might lead to suicide if not attended. Workaholism might cause less severe illnesses, but these are often more difficult to cure, because they require the maintenance of ongoing process cures.
Communities
We seldom think of our communities as a domain of illness causes – until it happens. What is the cause of spouse abuse? Elder Abuse? Child abuse? The illnesses that result are often cured with medical attention and healing – as if they are simply status injuries. But these illnesses, when they are systemic in a local community, can only be cured by changes to the community. Sometimes, a one-time cure, like a divorce or other separation is sufficient to cure. In other cases, if separation from the community is not possible, an ongoing cure may be required.
In addition, communities can be afflicted by illnesses. Is war an illness? Is peace the healthy cure? Or is “agreement to tolerate each other” an ongoing cure, one that requires ongoing maintenance by both sides? We can expand our understanding of illnesses and cures and benefit from increased understanding.
Environments
When a mining company dumps poisons into a river – many people (as well as plants and animals) might fall ill. Curing the individual cases is important, but the higher level cause must also be addressed. And a process cure might also be needed to ensure such events to not occur again and again.
There are many simpler environmental causes of illnesses – illnesses with environmental cures.
SAD – Seasonal Affective Disorder – can be caused by the absence of sunlight in winter. Many cases can be cured by simple daily exposure to a lamp that simulates sunlight. This cure can be viewed as a blend between the status cure and a process cure, because it provides daily relief that is no longer needed when spring comes and the sun improves our healthiness.
Summary
There are many healthiness cures, cures that are brought about by improving healthiness status or healthiness processes in our diet, body, mind, spirits, communities and environments.
Modern medicine ignores these cures – they are not “medical.” To study cure more effectively, more thoroughly, to learn to understand all cures for all types of illness, we need to begin with studies of the simplest, most common cures.
Health is the best medicine. Healthing is the best cure.
Note: Health is also the best preventative, but that’s another story.
to your health, tracy
Author: A New Theory of Cure
* When Oxford’s online dictionary is queried for “healthiness” the response is: “Thank you for visiting Oxford English Dictionary To continue reading, please sign in below or purchase a subscription. After purchasing, please sign in below to access the content.”