What is health? - Chapter 1
Changing perspectives
According to Stone (1979) there are a number of questions that cannot be answered in concrete terms. For example, the question of how we maintain, protect and recover health, as long as there is no clear meaning to health and how it can be measured. Most people will not realize that 'health' has / can have a totally different meaning for other people, cultures, social classes, etc.
Mind-body relationships
Holes for the skull drilling process were sometimes found in skulls from the Stone Age to allow the evil spirits that caused diseases to be released. Illness was also sometimes interpreted as a punishment of the gods by the ancient Hebrew texts.
The ancient Greeks saw body and mind as a whole, but did not attribute illness to spiritual matters. Hippocrates was one of the first who talked about a balance between the four bodily fluids, also called humours (mucus, blood, yellow bile and black bile). Each humour has a different trait. In addition, the humours are also linked to seasons and the four conditions dry, wet, cold and warm. Mucus is connected to winter (cold and wet) and large amounts of mucus is linked to a calm temperament. Blood is connected to spring (wet and warm) and large amounts of blood are linked to an optimistic personality. Large amounts of yellow bile are associated with an angry temperament and belongs to the summer (hot and dry). Finally, black bile is related to sadness and autumn (cold and dry). If the juices are in balance, a person is healthy. Hippocrates also recognized the link between (healthy) eating and health and that physical factors can influence the mind.
Galen, another influential Greek, talked about the physical basis of diseases some 300 years after Hippocrates. The bodily fluids would not only affect our character, but would also be responsible for certain diseases. The mind plays no role in the development of a disease. The occurrence of a disease is also called etiology.
In the Middle Ages, health was again seen primarily as a function of spirituality. Illness was declared as God's punishment for misconduct or by evil spirits who had taken possession of someone, as they used to think. Individuals had little or no control over their health.
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Renaissance period, much attention was paid to individual thinking and doing. The scientific revolution around 1600 caused a lot of developments in physical medicine. Statements for illness had an organic and physiological perspective, psychological explanations were not present.
At the beginning of the 17th century, Descartes came with dualism. According to Descartes, body and mind are separated, but interaction between the two was possible.
Doctors were there to protect and heal the material body and spiritual scholars to protect the non-material mind.
Dualists, such as Descartes, saw the body as a machine. This so-called mechanism implies that behavior can be reduced to the physical functioning of the body. This approach is the basis for the biomedical model, which assumes that disease
.....read more
