Health and a fulfilling life
Today, when discussing health, it is essential to ask why so many diseases exist in a world that prides itself on its continuous social, economic, political, and technological advancements. Biological and psychological mortality on the planet is becoming increasingly frequent and acute, affecting all of humanity without distinction of race, age, culture, sexual orientation, or socioeconomic status.
The numerous international health organizations continue to highlight the success of health policies implemented by countries and praise the scientific advances achieved in health; however, the prevailing health problems are far from being controlled and overcome. Clinically, exacerbations and increased virulence of cardiovascular, digestive, hepatic, and renal diseases are observed; in addition to these, mental disorders such as anxiety, depression, and dementia are also prevalent.
The prevailing severity of the existing health crisis makes it imperative to produce reflections that clearly explain why physical and psychological disorders persist, continue, and worsen; likewise, to determine the aspects and circumstances that are preventing these imbalances from being confronted and definitively overcome; and also to indicate the procedures that individuals must implement to take charge of their own health.
Uncovering the root causes of the current health crisis requires abandoning the one-dimensional, linear, and narrow perspectives that continue to be used to explain it. These approaches only produce schematic and segmented analyses that fail to contextualize and provide depth to the crisis; they merely address the problem through the lens of the health-disease dichotomy, thus ignoring the complexity and systemic nature of the circumstances that are producing and perpetuating the biological and psychological distress.
Explaining health problems in a holistic way requires adopting perspectives that organically connect the diverse circumstances and aspects that structurally produce and maintain this critical lack of health. It is this integrated interpretive approach that makes it possible to perceive the multiple causes contributing to the breakdown and erosion of health. Diseases do not represent isolated causes; they represent the integrated breakdown of diverse contributing factors. Diseases are systemic. Structurally, the root causes of physical and psychological imbalances must be located within the existing societal system. The current social order does not make health the vital principle from which existence should unfold.
When the dynamics of the prevailing socioeconomic system are observed and evaluated, it is perceived that the parameters that support it do not enable health; primarily, the premises that activate societal development are based on the production of goods, consumption, physical beauty, body aesthetics and the accumulation of capital.
These principles continue to shape, energize, and produce the orientation that defines the experience of living; these premises ultimately delineate and generate the raison d'être that gives meaning to existence. Within this context, it is very difficult for people to consider health as an essential and vital frame of reference for their lives. The current social framework does not promote health as one of the cardinal values of existence.
Essentially, the prevailing societal atmosphere only demands compliance with established societal requirements; these demands lead people to subsist focused primarily on fulfilling established social demands, regardless of the negative implications for their health.
Continuing to meet societal demands becomes an action that denies any possibility for individuals to become aware of the importance of generating and preserving a healthy life. The lack of resources to grasp the essential importance of health leads to unhealthy lifestyles and the continued consumption of harmful substances and products that disrupt and erode the body in a generalized way, resulting in illness and eventual death.
Social actors don't deliberately reject healthy living; they simply lack the intellectual resources to understand that they must maintain a connection with health. Promoting and embracing healthy living requires developing an awareness that allows for a comprehensive understanding of the factors and circumstances that enable it, while simultaneously recognizing the factors that hinder it. People must understand that denying health and allowing illness to persist only reveals the social frameworks within which they exist. They must grasp that their status as social products becomes the very factor that negates their well-being, and that they can only survive by perpetuating the physical and psychological imbalances they experience.
Maintaining health means living consciously. Health represents an integrated whole that not only considers illnesses and their causes but is also related to the life framework and social context in which one exists as a life experience.
Systemically, it is by integrating the multiple dimensions of the social, economic, ideological, political, and culturally established that we can explain the diverse causes that generate the biological and mental imbalances people experience. Illnesses, in and of themselves, not only represent the absence of health, but also reflect the consequences of existing based on the founding and driving principles of the socially established order.
Individuals must create the intellectual conditions that make it possible to value health and its preservation. They must create these conditions because, within the existing social framework, there are no conditions to promote the exaltation of healthy living.
It is by cultivating one's own health that one can achieve the conditions necessary for a productive and successful life. Cultivating health is a conscious personal endeavor; it is the work that enables the development of human potential and the continuous generation of transcendence.
Dr. José Esteban Roa Vivas.
esroavi@gmail.com
+58 414 683 6522