HEALTH: IT'S THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN YOUR LIFE…DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT REALLY IS?
by Dr. Ben Lerner

Almost no one knows what the definition of health really is. Therefore that which they believe about health cannot be true.
--Dr. Ian Grassam

What is health? To have and understand the meaning of health, you must first answer this question. Doctors and hospitals offer health checkups through which they provide expensive exams and tests in an effort to create methods for the "early detection" of disease and thus promote "health". Unfortunately, early detection is still after the fact, and the treatments involve more prescriptions and surgeries. Intravenous drugs and prescriptions are often given, even to the elderly and children, despite the risks and in the name of "health" and "wellness".

To experience health you have to first define what health really is. Most people would say that they are healthy when they exhibit no signs of pain, no runny noses, or no presence of headaches. In other words: "I'm healthy when I feel good." In today's fad-diet-and-home-exercise-infomercial world, health has also come to mean losing weight or physically looking good. There are three enormous problems with this common misconception:

1. If you conceive "healthy" as looking or feeling good, what means do you take when you feel bad? Most likely, if you're like the millions of other Americans, you take a drug to feel better. When your symptoms disappear, you assume you're healthy again. Yet, as you know by now, drugs do not cure illness, they only eliminate the symptoms that allow your body to tell whether you are healthy or unwell.

2. Because of the overconsumption and immunity to medication, patients commonly don't exhibit any symptoms or warning signs until it is too late. When my father died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-two, he died without any prior symptoms of heart disease and had recently passed a medical evaluation. His doctor informed us that in many of the people who have a serious heart problem, the first sign is a heart attack. Then, in two-thirds of those, the patients die before any attention can be paid to the underlying problem. As my family discovered, this type of diagnostic is unacceptable and results in testing that begins too late for most patients.

3. Those who hold the common misconception that no symptoms of a disease means there is no disease present is a major health care mistake. Although you may not exhibit a symptom, or may not have been diagnosed with a disease, does not mean that pain, sickness, and disease are not in your future.

Painful conditions and deadly illnesses develop for years without any warning before surfacing. This type of thinking will, without argument, eventually shorten your life and/or make the last few years extremely unpleasant.

The following is a list from the Merck Manual of Medical Diagnosis. These are some of the most common diseases we face today and may all be present in the body without any signs or symptoms noticeable to the victim:

Heart arrhythmia
Glomerulonephritis (Kidney disease)
Atherosclerosis (Plaque in arteries)
Hypertension (High blood pressure)
Osteoarthritis
Ovarian cancer
Benign prostatic hypertrophy
Ovarian cyst
Breast cancer
Paget's (bone) disease
Cardiomyopathy
Spinal degeneration
Polyps of large bowel
Cervical cancer
Prostate cancer
Cholelithiasis*(Gall stones)
Pulmonary valve stenosis*
Renal calculi*(Kidney stones)
Coronary artery disease
Renal (kidney) failure (chronic)
Diabetes mellitus
Retinoblastoma* (cancer of the eye)
Diverticular (colon) disease
Scoliosis (Curvature of the spine)
Emphysema (lung disease)
Tooth decay
Fibroid tumors of the uterus
Valvular heart disease

As the Merck Manual shows us, being free from symptoms does not guarantee health. Instead, it shows that some deadly illnesses and diseases manifest in manners that are so subtle, even the patient cannot tell they are sick. Ignoring your body and basing health on the presence of symptoms will keep you aloof from possible suffering or early death.