Medicine and Health are Very Different

I was giving a seminar at a school and I asked a group of students what they thought of when I said the word health. When asked what health meant to them, some said healthy as in doing healthy things. Others had specific ideas about what things can lead to health. Some said some things that actually disturbed me.

The most disturbing of the answers was: medicine. The fact that medicine and health were associated isn’t what made me think. That actually makes sense. The disturbing part that made me really think about our current state was something that came on the follow-up questions I asked.

When I asked them to elaborate on what “medical” meant to them, I was shocked to hear the answers. I heard: “Medicine that you need to get your health.” I also heard: “Medicine is what you get when you need to get healthy.” One student simply put it this way: “Medicine is what you get when you get sick.” When I asked about health, this student went right to sickness.

The more I think about this, the less surprised I am about the answers I got. Kids today are seeing the worst in health. They are actually seeing the best in medicine. As a nation, we are continually advancing in the field of medicine. We are doing things now that we would only dream of doing just a few years ago. I am impressed and even grateful for our medical advancements. We are doing great things. That isn’t the problem.

The problem is not our advancement in medicine. The problem we have is the reason that we have needed the advancement. We are becoming more and more dependent on these advances in order to live normal lives. There are people today that have more access to education and technology that can help them prevent illness, but instead, we are just giving them more drugs and using different technology to treat the symptoms that are brought on because they refused to use the education or technology to help them stay healthy in the first place.

The Difference Between Medicine and Health

The biggest difference between medicine and health is the time that it is utilized. Medicine is used to primarily to treat issues that are already happening. The body has become weak and medicine is used to get it back to full strength. More accurately, medicine is used to treat a symptom. When something is wrong on the outside, medicine helps change how it looks and allows you to feel like the symptom is gone. The symptom may be gone, but the root cause may still be wrong internally. Until that is fixed, the symptom will come back. It may come back as a different symptom.

What is the solution for this situation? You guessed it: another medicine. There is a medicine for every symptom and you can continue to take more and more as your symptoms continue. You may even get a medicine to counteract what another medicine is doing to you. Most medicines cause symptoms of their own.

Health, when done right is proactive. Health is the habit of doing things that help the body and mind. The more you do these things, the healthier you will be now and the healthier you will be tomorrow. Many of the needs that arise are simply things that we should’ve taken care of. Most medicines are given to reverse symptoms that are caused by lack of health. In other words, health allows you to take care of problems before they become problems.

The problems that we are dealing with are real, but they are coming up with more and more ways to administer medicine. There are many conditions that are serious and that people don’t have much control over, but that is not the norm. The norm is to spend more money and commit more research to drugs and procedures that can help bring people back from the brink of symptoms caused by their own choices.

Take a look at the commercials that are on TV or the ads in magazines. Not only will you find countless drugs and reminders that you “need” to take them in order to be healthy, but you will even find new conditions that you didn’t know existed. I’m not saying that there aren’t serious issues out there that medication is helping, but we have started putting more effort into finding the problem and throwing another medicine at it than we are putting in trying to solve the problem.

The scariest part about the entire medicine vs. health debate is that we have known for years what we need to do to keep health going strong. In fact, we are only in this situation now because we have not taken care of our health. I don’t know which came first, the chicken or the egg. We’ll call the lack of focus on our own personal well-being the chicken and the emphasis on the latest and greatest drug the egg.

No matter which came first, we have a problem. We have a big problem. People are no longer taking care of their health because medicine will “take care of them” when something goes wrong. This is true, medicine will take care of you when you are sick.

It will also cost you, your family and your company more and more money while you have more problems. You can just take more medicine as you add problems, so no worries, right? Wrong.

The only way to live healthy is to do healthy things. You can’t simply take a pill or have a surgery and become healthy. You can take a pill and mask a symptom. You can have a surgery to fix a problem. Without healthy habits, that problem is only going to come back, just as the symptom will return.

Medicine is great. We have seen incredible advancement that saves lives and allow people to do things that they wouldn’t have been able to do in years past. I’m not saying we should throw out all the technology. I am saying that we need to wake up. Our health is not dependent on medicine. Our health is in our hands. It always has been and it always will be in our hands.

Remember this: Avoiding problems is easier, less expensive and just plain smarter than waiting for them to appear and trying to fix them. Health is not just something you think about when you need medicine. Health is something you think about so you don’t need medicine.