Why is healthcare defined as care for illness?
College on Health
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What is healthcare?
Health = being healthy, physical well-being*.
Care = the efforts and endeavours one employs, the effort one puts into maintaining or making something as good as possible*..
So healthcare should mean:
The effort and commitment to be healthy and to keep one's health in good condition.
The healthcare should, by definition, be concerned with health.
But the strange thing is that healthcare now means something completely different.
* Source: The Dikke Van Dale
Healthcare does not exist
Healthcare: medical care and nursing*.
Medicine: science that deals with the nature and causes of diseases and with the means of curing diseases (= medicines)*.
Due to this change in definitions, it is understandable that healthcare today is only concerned with illness.
But if you look at it that way, there is no such thing as real health care.
Health care would should be concerned with health and should have as its goal that people not sick become.
Source: The Dutch dictionary
Lifestyle & deficits
Through this distortion of the definition of the word 'health care' we no longer see that there is no health care.
There is no such thing as healthcare, as this word should be defined.
What we see today is by definition sickness-care.
And this disease-care only concerned with disease.
Because illness is the norm, almost All the research money and attention to the phenomenon of disease.
Medical students get virtually only education about diseasesand hardly about real health.
Medical students receive their diploma without being able to define what a healthy person is.
In the meantime, only a minimum of research money and attention to how to stay healthy.
If we would invest all the attention and research money in the subject of healththen the current sickness care largely redundant become.
We are the normal are going to find 57% of people with a chronic condition has.
If we were to focus on health, it would quickly become unacceptable be seen.
Health versus disease
Because there is little focus on health, the definition of 'healthy' unclear.
It is not easy to find a dividing line between "healthy" and "sick pull.
What is healthy?
How to define a optimal physical condition?
A dehydrated body or a body with nutrient deficiencies is in a suboptimal condition.
As long as this is not visible and recognised, it still falls within the definition of healthy.
Only when this sub-optimal condition becomes visible and evident do we speak of a disease.
But how to define 'healthy'?
The dictionary* has different meanings for the word 'healthy.
Most meanings mainly explain which it is not:
- Without bodily injury, unharmed
- by no body defect hindered
- not afflicted by illness, in a state of physical, mental and social well-being.
But what is it?
The definition of the World Health Organisation (WHO) from 1948 reads:
Healthy is a state of complete physicalmental and social welfare and not merely the absence of disease or other physical defects'.
This already comes close to what the definition should be.
Even more complete would be:
Healthy = state of complete physical wellbeing, where the body is sufficiently hydrated and has all the nutrients in sufficient quantity so that all the biochemical processes of our metabolism run smoothly.
If all existing knowledge and resources would be used to achieve this state for as many people as possible, then our health care system actually lead to health.
Source: The Dutch dictionary
