Heroes Not Zombies

Doctors are taught to use two basic concepts – health and disease. Disease figures very predominantly on the medical curriculum. In fact, Davidson’s Textbook of Medicine is all about disease. There isn’t even an entry in the index for “health”. We create our “health services” around disease, with specialists who specialise in understanding and managing diseases of certain parts of the body. That’s why we have oncology departments, gynaecology departments, dermatology, cardiology, otolaryngology (ENT) departments and so on. Out in the world of Primary Care in the UK there’s an attempt to do it differently. Most Primary Care doctors work in “health centres”. However, especially since the introduction of the “Quality Outcomes Framework”, there’s been a further push towards concentrating on diseases rather than health.

This enormous emphasis on disease has led many doctors to act as if disease isn’t a concept at all. They treat it as if each disease is an independent entity. This is a misunderstanding. It’s also led to the development of so-called “evidence based” protocols for managing disease.

Where’s the attention paid to health (without reference to disease at all)? Where are the health experts as opposed to the disease experts? Have you ever wondered what a true “health” service would be like? One which addressed “health” either in addition to “disease” or as a first point of engagement with patients instead of the first point of engagement being once pathology has emerged? (and I do mean health as a whole organism state of being, not drugged psuedo-health!)

As I see it, it all depends on the timescale you consider. In acute illness, disease-focus strikes me as highly appropriate. It’s where we show the greatest effectiveness of pharmaceutical and surgical interventions. But in chronic illness, the disease-focus gets less and less useful. Here the emphasis needs to shift to a health-focus – and as health is a lived experience, that requires understanding and engaging with the human at an individual and whole-person level.

Disease is a biological dysfunction.

Health is a life state.

Disease impacts on health, and health impacts on disease. Don’t we need to address the issue of illness from both angles, emphasising what’s most important according to the time scale we’re considering?