Health and Disease: Two Sides of the Same Coin

 

Justification

This book is about health and disease, their consistency with each other, indeed, their common foundations, purpose, and tools.

They are like two sides of life, its integral projections, which an inflamed human mind has divided and spread to distant poles from each other, opposing one to the other and building an ostensibly impenetrable wall between them. Building a wall that does not actually exist. The distorted understanding of health and disease rules the medical world today and is the fundamental cause of many, if not most, errors in prevention, diagnosis, and treatment, with consequences often fatal for human life.

Of course, there is another approach, based on principles where health and disease are identified as integral projections of indivisible life. This approach is known as holistic.

Unfortunately, this approach, instead of being adapted and integrated into modern medical science and practice to become its integral component, when it (so-called modern medical science and practice) is based on a holistic foundation, is constantly rejected by it as a foreign body.

It has turned out that the forces aimed at implementing and developing a distorted understanding of health and disease with their global opposition to each other significantly outweigh the forces that understand them only as projections of indivisible life.

Another attempt to address this issue has been the emergence of a new branch in medicine called integrative medicine, which demands approaching disease by focusing on the person, including their physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being, rather than solely on the disease itself. In our understanding, its goal is to set the dominant, opposition-based, so-called official medicine on the tracks of a holistic, comprehensive approach to the individual.

Unfortunately, official medicine has come to treat integrative medicine in the same way as it does the holistic approach.

In the historical development, we have something similar to events that originated and then developed on European and related landscapes, when the Christian religion, with sword and fire, destroyed all dissent regarding its mystical, far from reality conception of the nature of the world and humanity.

We find ourselves on the side of understanding the nature of health and disease, where they, we must repeat, are only projections of a single indivisible (in other words, holistic or integrative) manifestation of life, for which the wall between them is illusory. This wall, built on false perceptions, does not exist in reality.

For us, there is no contradiction in so-called modern medicine, where disease is opposed to health, with holistic, integrative medicine, where disease and health are indivisible parts of life. In our medical science and practice, we approach disease from such positions, which, we are confident, do not impoverish but correct and transform into a comprehensive understanding of disease with corresponding changes in approaches to its prevention, diagnosis, and treatment.

Through our research into the non-contradiction of health and disease, we have not only become convinced of the existence of a philosophical basis and biological foundations for this concept, but have also significantly formalized them.

For us, this new understanding of health and disease is so crucial for the further development of medicine with a focus on scientifically substantiated directions that we could not help but set ourselves the goal of generalizing them and presenting them in the form of this book.

This approach to health and disease does not destroy the wall between them, because this wall, we must constantly repeat, does not exist, even if someone has constructed it in their imaginations. However, it opens up new understandings and new relationships between these two most important categories, without mastering which it is difficult to count on breakthrough achievements in our science.

As you read the book, you will notice places where the narrative is intensely concentrated. The purpose of this intensity is not desire but necessity—to sharpen the issue, to draw attention to the importance of your engagement not only in studying but in resolving it, so that the non-contradiction of health and disease becomes a decisive foundation for the further development of medicine.

Without these changes in the understanding of health and disease, we are convinced, not only will the medical community continue to stumble over the pervasive pitfalls of opposing them against each other, a fundamentally erroneous approach that prevents medicine from achieving the heights it has long deserved.

We hope that this book, in any case, will influence your understanding of the essence of the issues raised and will become an important impetus in your professional development and, through your actions, in enriching medicine by mastering these phenomena.

We want to express our sincere gratitude to our scientific colleague V. Shlyakhover from Israel, who found time to review this work and provided valuable suggestions that helped improve it, and a special heartfelt thanks to V. Danovsky, the talented designer of our books.

We gratefully accept comments and suggestions.

Iabluchanskyi M., Yabluchanskiy A.

Why does official medicine rely on the false opposition of health to disease?

How could this happen? Why is official medicine built on a false, groundless opposition of disease to health? Why have such notions taken hold of it, when fundamental scientific research and medical practice for centuries have provided and continue to provide countless pieces of evidence that health and disease have a common foundation, and that in the absence of health, the possibility of enduring a disease, let alone recovering, is out of the question?

The box opens easily. When sciences and fields within sciences, including medicine and its various branches, were emerging, they existed in isolation from each other for a long time. This development was uneven. Some fields progressed faster, while others lagged behind due to various circumstances.

When these fields eventually intersected with one another, instead of seeking understanding, finding common ground, and complementing each other to build a new philosophy, they entered into competition. This competition, like in other aspects of the development of human society, turned out to be uncompromising. Therefore, it was precisely that branch of medicine that is built on the opposition of health and disease and which today is called official medicine, that came to dominate. Other directions were pushed to the margins.

Let us not repeat ourselves, but simply remind that the matrix for such relationships among medical directions in their development were the inter-religious and inter-confessional relations within various religions. At the initial stages of the formation, and then for a long time during the development of human society, they were the legislators, and medicine in its development was under their captivity and pressure.

What precisely confirms that it is the form of medicine built on the opposition of health and disease that has been embraced predominantly by the World Health Organization is easily demonstrated by referring to the constitution of this organization.

The WHO Constitution declares that health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or physical defects.

We see that to be considered healthy according to this definition, one must meet a multitude of requirements, and one of the most important among them is the absence of disease. Therefore, being healthy means not having diseases. And if so, being sick means not having health.

It should be noted that the health as declared in the WHO Constitution—a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, not just the absence of disease and physical defects—is an unattainable dream, at least for the overwhelming majority of people. It is practically impossible to find a person who meets all these criteria simultaneously.

The World Health Organization itself understands that this notion of health, and therefore the alternative notion of disease, is not correct, as confirmed by the previously mentioned Constitution. After defining health in contradiction to it, the Constitution further adds that attaining the highest possible level of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being.

In light of the definition provided by the WHO Constitution of health as a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease and physical defects, it should be understood not as the essence of health, but as a certain goal, an unattainable dream of the highest possible level of health if you will. It's a dream to aspire to, but one that will almost never be achieved by anyone. Moreover, we are confident that it will never be achieved by anyone. Because if the WHO Constitution declares this highest possible level of health as one of the basic rights of every person, it also acknowledges the existence of other levels that do not reach it.

An example of these levels could be this well-known classification of individual health:

• optimal;
• with minor damages that do not require treatment;
• periodic acute illnesses that require treatment;
• chronic diseases that require treatment;
• life-threatening, requiring emergency medical assistance;
• clinical death, possible resuscitation;
• biological death.

By the way, it should be noted that this classification negates the opposition of health and disease. It clearly follows that health and disease are not opposed categories. They do not contradict each other; they are non-contradictory categories, but more on this in another chapter. For us at this point, it is important to note that the WHO Constitution's declaration of health is erroneous. The conclusion must be extended to official medicine as a whole, which brought this declaration to the WHO and legalized it within it.

Furthermore, we must emphasize that the WHO Constitution, by stating that attaining the highest possible level of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being, confirms that health is individual. But on one hand, this right must be skillfully utilized, and on the other, state institutions must ensure the feasibility of this right, not just declare it.

That the WHO serves as a public platform, a mouthpiece for official medicine, embodies its understanding of what medicine should be in the modern world, and the answer is obvious without further ado.

The WHO was created on April 7, 1948, and this day has now even been officially recognized as World Health Day, which is celebrated annually. Its primary goal is to ensure that all people can achieve the highest possible level of health. It is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for international public health. Its activities are part of the efforts of the international community to create a new world order and improve the living conditions of people. The initiative for its creation arose from the need for a coordinated approach to combating epidemics and other health protection issues that are borderless. It also deals with the preparation of health care standards, the formulation of public health policy, and providing technical support to countries in addressing these issues.

Everything written is the absolute truth. What is not written, but can easily be read from the context, is that it embodies the principles of official medicine, especially regarding the preparation of health care standards.

It remains to add that the recommendations developed and approved by the WHO primarily have a normative character, lobbied by official medicine. It is reassuring that although these recommendations carry significant authority, they are not legally binding. This provides a loophole for the existence and development of alternative medical approaches, although in our view, the time has come to build a unifying medicine.

Official medicine, although unsystematically, is nonetheless forced to change, and it is changing in the right direction. These changes occur without loud declarations, but with an expansion of ideas about the relationship between disease and health, which are used in the development and implementation of new approaches to prevention and treatment, which is a positive factor. As an example, one can cite personalized medicine, where the main player is no longer the disease, but the patient himself with his disease, health resources, and their interrelationships in the disease under various possible development scenarios.

The fact that official medicine uses holistic methods, which consider the person as a whole, including physical, emotional, social, and spiritual aspects, does not work in its favor. Because this is not enough. It will remain insufficient until the understanding of diseases in the unity and indivisibility of their pathogenetic and sanogenetic mechanisms is revised, and accordingly, the entire philosophy of prevention and treatment is changed.

In the following chapters, we will focus on this important, in our view, aspect, demonstrating the changes in official medicine. We are confident that a professional dialogue between different branches of medicine would facilitate a quicker search for and implementation of general principles, which could accelerate the creation of a personalized, yet all-encompassing, form of medicine.

It is good that various branches hold their own scientific, scientific-practical, and other events aimed at sharing experiences and fostering development, but it would be far better if they also regularly organized joint events, which would significantly accelerate the development of medicine as a whole.

You can learn more by reading our e-book 

Mykola Iabluchanskyi together with Andriy Yabluchanskiy