HEALTH, HALE AND WHOLE – a new medical paradigm
Medicine has witnessed over a hundred years of increasing fragmentation of the patient into smaller and smaller parts, from the study and treatment of the whole person to the reductionist study of the cellular condition of the diseased cells within the individual, and even to the viewing the individual simply as a “member of a herd” in public health vaccination programmes!

This process, of increasing focus on smaller and smaller parts of the individual’s being, has been driven by two major forces. The first was identified very clearly by Lord Horder in the 1930’s. He saw how the rise of the specialist and the demise of the General Practitioner would lead to such fragmentation and loss of understanding of the more complex nature of the sick person. The other driving force that has coincided with this specialisation, has been the increasing reliance on laboratory tests and diagnostic machines of every conceivable kind that has driven out the broad-based clinical judgment of the experienced doctor at the bedside. It was once said that one could judge the skill of a physician by the number of tests he demanded; the more tests the poorer the practitioner.

All this does not mean there hasn’t been incredible progress in our understanding of disease and our ability to isolate and identify the source of disease, but this impressive new competence has come at a heavy price for the patient’s care and treatment.

Added to this increasingly analytical approach has been the fact that the doctor’s training demands such a vast encyclopaedic knowledge of pathology, there remains little time to study and learn the science and art of ethology; the promotion and education for health. The consequences arising from this lack of education and understanding of health promotion are perhaps the most damaging factor in our so-called National Health Service today. This was recognised by the Government in 2004 at the International Health Workers Conference in Brighton, when the King’s Fund were given the task of finding ways of transforming the NHS from a sickness service to a health promoting service. The lack of public health education by the medical establishment has been compounded by the growing patient dependency upon medical solutions to every health problem; “a pill for every ill”.

Patients have become “passive rabbits” relying increasingly upon their doctor to ‘fix them’ with little or no effort or work on their part. Under such pressure, the doctor has usually succumbed to prescribing whatever will give instant relief to the demanding patient, regardless of the long-term effects on their health. Thus, blame for this sad situation cannot be placed at the doctor’s door but the guilt must be shared by both patient and doctor playing this hazardous game that puts the total health of the patient at risk, progressively increases the medical demands on an already overburdened system and leads to widespread over-prescription of life-saving drugs. The profligate over-use of antibiotics has been around for at least a decade with the frightening possibility that we may be losing the battle against many infective agents that have become immune to the common antibiotics. Recently the same criticism has been made of over prescription of asthma medication for children. In a New Zealand clinical study (Middlemore & Green Hospitals – March 25th 2007) it was found that almost forty percent of asthma diagnoses were false and the medication used was not indicated. The unfortunate outcome of the latter is that in many children the use of their asthma medication can exacerbate their symptoms further, requiring more and more medication.

Finally, our leaders in government who are responsible for allocating resources have to seek advice from the experts in the relevant field, thus the problem grows as more and more resources are allocated to a failing health service because the advice given is based on an imbalanced practice and understanding of the fundamentals of health promotion by the medical establishment. Those practitioners in the natural health field of medicine who are helping the public take more responsibility for their own health are not heard and perhaps are not considered of any significance in a system that is based on current established medical practice.

There needs to be a paradigm change in our thinking about health, this I shall discuss later. Health is related to being “hale & hearty” in old English terms. Hale is in fact old English for “whole”. Perhaps health is about becoming a whole person in mind, body and spirit?

Michael Lingard BSc. DO. HP.
(Health Practitioner)
TotalHealthMatters