What is healthing? Healthing is the practice of improving healthiness. Improvements in healthiness are the best preventatives of illness, and can often cure disease without medicine,by lifting your healthiness out of the illness state.
Sometimes, health drops so low that an illness can be diagnosed. In the diagram, we can see that as healthiness drops, it moves into the range of many illnesses. Note that many diseases are ‘off the line’ of healthiness – that’s because we measure illness by symptoms, not by healthiness.
If you don’t drink enough water, you get the illness called ‘dehydration’. Symptoms include headaches and dizziness. The solution to this illness is not ‘medicine’ it is healthing. Drink a healthy amount of water – and the illness will go away. Dehydration is a nutrient deficiency, so severe that it becomes an illness. The same nutrient can lead to water intoxication when too much is consumed. You can die from water intoxication.
Many unhealthy imbalances – deficiencies or excesses, can lead to a crisis, when they are excessive. A minor deficiency of water consumption leads to minor symptoms. As the deficiency increases, symptoms increase. A severe deficiency of water consumption, or a severe excess of water consumption can lead to a crisis – where medical treatment may be required to prevent death.
A crisis is fast. A medical crisis requires quick powerful actions. Health is slow. Powerful, rapid actions typically do not improve healthiness – and can often make it worse. Before the crisis occurs – healthing is the correct solution, not medicine. A healthicine, drinking a healthy amount of water, prevents and cures dehydration. A healthing action, stopping excessive water consumption, prevents water intoxication.
A medicine or treatment that completely stops the progression of an illness is called a curative. Curing is the act of prescribing, administering or taking a cure. Treating is the act of fighting the illness, or the symptoms of an illness. Healing is what your body does, as or after it is damaged by an illness, or another event. Sometimes – the body can heal completely after an illness, sometimes only partially. Therapy is done to help or stimulate repair to damage due to an illness and recover lost functionality.
Sometimes a medicine can cure a disease. But, it is not possible to cure an unhealthiness with medicines. When there is no medicine to cure, doctors and patients often resort to fighting the symptoms of illness, when we should be healthing. It’s easy to treat symptoms instead of looking for the cause. All to easy. But treating symptoms of illness diverts us from the search for causes of unhealthiness. Treating symptoms ignores health and hides illness. Treating symptoms also leads directly to ‘side effects’. In the above diagram – when an illness appears to be ‘not on the line of healthiness’, medicines that only treat the symptoms can create more symptoms, more illness, because they actually cause a decrease in healthiness.
It can be difficult to determine if there is a medicine that can cure a specific illness. However, there are many cases where we know that no medicine can cure. There are many illnesses that can be cured, but not with medicine. They can only be healthed.
- illness caused by a nutritional deficiency, like dehydration;
- illness caused by nutritional excess, like obesity;
- illness caused by movement deficiency, like bedsores;
- illness caused by movement excess, like repetitive stress injuries;
- illness caused by mental activity deficiency, like depression;
- illness caused by excessive mental activity, like mania;
- illness caused by a deficiency of spirit or hope, like a death in the family;
- illness caused by an excess of hope and faith, when action is needed instead;
- illness caused by deficiency of social interactions, like distrust;
- illness caused by excessive social interactions, like partying;
Illnesses based in imbalance; deficiency or excess, cannot be cured by ‘adding‘ a medicine. Each of the above general causes of illness encompasses many specific illness, that cannot be cured by medicine.
Our medical systems often name an illness by the symptoms, not by the cause. Confusion can result from an diagnosis like ‘depression’ which can be caused by dietary deficiencies, dietary excesses, mental activity deficiencies, spirit deficiencies (deficiencies of hope), or even community deficiencies (deficiencies of social interaction). When we learn to classify illness by cause, we will become much better at healthing illness.
The only cure for illnesses caused by an imbalance of healthiness, is to restore balance: to improve healthiness.
It is interesting to note that one symptom: headache, can be caused by nutritional deficiencies, nutritional excesses, lethargy, overexertion, stress: overactive mental activities, loss of faith or hope, and even by noisy social interactions. A single symptom can have many different direct and indirect causes. Chronic headache is defined as an illness by medical textbooks, but without identification of the cause, we cannot know if it is chronic unhealthiness, nor which specific unhealthinesses might be the cause.
The only cure for these illnesses is improvement in health.
Healthing is the art of improving healthiness.
When we are well, we are ‘not sick’. We can always improve our healthiness. Everyone has some potential for ‘improvement in healthiness’. Our level of ‘unhealthiness’ is our potential for improvement. Unhealthiness is not ‘bad’, it is simply room for improvement in health.
Healthiness, unhealthiness, and improvements in healthiness are not limited to illness. As long as we are alive we have some levels of healthiness. Unless we are in perfect health, a very unlikely situation, we have some levels of unhealthiness, some room for improvement in our health.
Health is broad and deep. It ranges through the hierarchy of healthicine, from our genetics and nutrients, through our cells, tissues and organs, our bodily systems, body, minds, spirits and communities. In each layer, we have levels of healthiness and unhealthiness (room for improvement in healthiness).
Healthing cures illness by preventing it.
Healthing is a key to prevention. You might think that red wine and chocolate prevent heart disease. These are ‘statistical preventatives’, which, for the most part, are ‘statistical nonsense’, full of ‘statistical noise’. Statistical preventatives are based not on individual situations or needs, they are based on statistical surveys of large populations. Healthing prevents illness on an individual basis, by making the subject healthier.
Who practices healthing? If you are well, if you are ‘not sick’, who can help you become healthier? There are ‘health clubs’, but they typically address only a single aspect of healthiness – exercise healthiness. Health clinics don’t want to hear from you if you are not sick – they have too many sick people to deal with. You can buy ‘health insurance’, but if you are not sick, it won’t pay, won’t do anything to make you healthier. You can hire a ‘health coach’. Most health coaches practice specific subsets of ‘healthing’. An exercise coach gives advice on healthy exercise. A nutritionist can give advice on healthy nutrition. A spirit coach can help you lift your spirits. Each of these coaches practices a small subset of healthing.
Many, perhaps most, people who practice ‘healthing’ base all of their practice on studies of illness. Nutritionists, for example know little about ‘healthy’ nutrition – all studies of nutrition are based on illness. Give any nutritionist three potatoes, of different types, grown in different ways, or three different eggs from your local grocery – and ask which is ‘healthier’. There is no science of nutritional health that can answer those simple questions. That’s because there is no science of nutritional health – only sciences of nutritional illnesses. When it comes to the nutritional studies of a healthy diet – there is a plethora of theories, but no science, except those based on illness. Head over to your local library, bookstore, or pharmacy magazine shelf and scan the ‘health’ section. You will find many references to illness, statistical theories about the prevention of illness, but little – if any, actual references to health. Few books even have a useful definition of health – and magazines and newspapers, written by many different authors, have no incentive and no way to agree on a definition of health. As a result, ‘health’ is defined by illness. It’s a bit like trying to define ‘light’ by only researching darkness – and missing colour, hue, and saturation, entirely. Health is wider and deeper than illness. Illness is a monster that hides in the shadows and jumps out unexpectedly. Health is open, honest, true and slow. Health does not ‘attack’, it grows.
The World Health Organization, for example, studies illness, but not health. World Health Organization (WHO) statistics are devoted to disability and illness. They have no statistics for ‘cures’, much less for health improvements. A search for ‘cure’ on the WHO Global Health Observatory Data Repository finds obscured twice, and procurement 8 times. Cure is not found. Cures are ignored. Cures are not counted. Cures are irrelevant to the World Health Organization’s mission. Their definition of health: “Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” is absolute perfection, thus it excludes measurement. By definition, the World Health Organization excludes improvements in healthiness, and only measures improvements in ‘not sickness’.
There are no scientific studies of health – that are not based in illness or disability. There are many studies of illness. No one studies healthiness.
Today, no one practices healthing. Only you can practice healthing. Only you can health yourself. But it’s not easy. There are few books to improve your health – unless you are sick or worried about preventing illness.
We ignore healthiness, and as a result, we ignore unhealthiness as well, until it rises to a crisis, an illness. Then we want the ‘illness’ to be cured, or at least, the symptoms to be treated, while we continue to ignore the healthinesses and the unhealthinesses that lie underneath.
There may be books about healthing. There are so many books about illness, with health in the title, that it is difficult to judge any book from a healthicine perspective. In my research, I have seen only a very few books about healthiness, that go beyond the concepts of illness. I will name a few here:
Pain Free by Peter Egoscue
Somatics Thomas Hanna
Cure Tooth Decay – Ramiel Nagel
None of these books uses the word ‘healthing’. None makes reference to the concepts of healthicine – these words are not in any dictinary. But each of these books looks at health, health improvement, illness prevention, and even cures – from a health perspective. If you want to learn to health yourself – these books are a good place to start your research.
Maybe someday, there might be real, recognized, licensed ‘health coaches’, who practice healthing as a complete art. I hope so, but I’m not holding my breath – it could lead to a severe oxygen deficiency crisis.
to your health, tracy
Tracy is the author of two books about healthicine:
