Principles of Healthicine
1. Healthicine: the arts and sciences health and healthiness.
2. A “healthiness” is a specific measurable aspect of health. Healthiness is a measure of nearness to perfect health in content or process. Specific healthinesses can be in healthy, harmonious, inharmonious, balanced, deficient, or excessive. Because life, and health, are processes – healthiness scores are constantly changing.
3. Health is whole, consisting of healthiness and unhealthiness. Healthiness is measured on a scale between zero and 100 percent. Unhealthiness is the inverse of healthiness. Unhealthiness exists when healthiness is not optimal, or when healthiness is out of balance. All living systems are complex enough that some unhealthiness is always present. Living systems use balances – manipulating healthiness and unhealthiness, to move forward in life. Wellness is the absence of disease, not well defined in relation to healthiness.
4. Life consists of chemical, physical, mental, spirit, and community processes. Health includes not just the physical living thing. It includes processes of the mind, spirit, and community and the environments in which they reside.
5. Illness is a hole in your health. All illness is the result of severe imbalance or imbalances in healthiness – which can rage from deficiencies, and excesses to the presence or absence of necessities of healthiness and blockages to healthiness.
6. A simple, elemental illness, or an illness element is the result of a single present cause, or a single chain of present causes and is cured by addressing the present cause, the cure cause. There are three basic illness elements:
A causal illness element has a present active cause, a process or verb cause.
A attribute illness element is caused by a thing, or the lack of a necessary thing that disrupts healthy life processes.
An injury illness element is an injury with a cause in the past. An injury is a hole in body, mind, spirit or community. The injury is an attribute, the cure cause of the illness. When the injury is healed, the illness is cured. If the cause is still present, there exists more than one illness element.
A complex illness exists when one illness causes another. It is set of illness elements: causal illness, injury illness, and attribute illness, with a single causal chain. A complex illness can consist of a causal, attribute, or injury illness causing another similar or different illness. It requires a cure for each illness element.
A compound illness is a case of a set of illnesses with similar signs and symptoms, but different causes. A simple, common example is depression. Depression can have many causes. When a disease has multiple independent causes leading to similar symptoms, then multiple cures – multiple cure actions – are required.
Most diseases cannot be diagnosed until the consequences are severe enough to warrant medical attention. As a result, most diseases are complex or compound illnesses.
A chronic illness has a chronic cause. Every type of illness can be chronic, when the cause is chronic.
7. A causal cure addresses the process cause of an illness. Process causes are often long causal chains – and successfully addressing any cause in the chain can produce a cure.
8. A healing cure cures an injury illness. Healing is a curative process that is active before, during and after an illness. Healing progresses irrespective of the illness, irrespective of most treatments – unless the treatment specifically affects healing. Healing is seldom perfect, and can lead to negative processes or attributes.
9. Attribute illnesses are cured by transformation. By transforming the attribute into healthiness. Transformation often requires healing to complete the cure. There are many ways to produce a successful cure by transforming any causal attribute.
10 A chronic illness can only be cured by addressing the chronic nature of the cause.
11. Preventative and Curative actions can be holistic or reductionist. Actions that are neither being less likely to prevent or cure any illness. Holistic actions are actions that add to the wholeness of health. Reductionist actions function against illness by reducing healthiness, with the assumption that healthiness can recover after the illness is cured. Unfortunately, much of the current practice of medicine uses reductionist practices without any hope of a cure.
The Healthicine Creed is a one page summary of the concepts of healthicine. http://healthicine.org/wordpress/the-healthicine-creed/
These are fundamental principles of healthicine, as I have explored and defined them to date. I am happy to discuss comments, suggestions, etc. to help us refine these principles.
to your health, tracy
revised (minor edit) Oct 23, 2012
revised (clarify unhealthiness as inverse of healthiness) Feb 27, 2013
revised (include process and environment, clarify and simplify concepts) June 28, 2015
updated to introduce language for ‘elemental illness’ February 2016.
updated to add healing and transformational cures. Sept 2017.
updated to clarify complex vs compound illnesses, and chronic illnesses in 2017
Revised February 2018 to clarify the concepts of causal (verb) illnesses and attribute (noun) illnesses.
Revised October 2020, a general overhaul.
