The object of these essays is to promote good health. The World Health Organisation was very careful to note, more than twenty years ago, that good health is not merely the absence of disease, but overall social, physical and mental well-being. It is an observation that must be made over and over again, for we have been lulled into complacency by the successes of modern Western medicine in the fight against disease. Certainly, the proper treatment of sickness is an important step on the road to good health, but when your sicknesses have been successfully treated, you are only at the beginning of the road, not the end. The battle against disease is by no means over (and it never will be if we continue to look on old age itself as a disease). But today, the average citizen in this country can reasonably expect to reach old age without suffering any unmanageable threats to life and limb. Let us not underestimate how astounding an achievement that is. Consider that in the "Garden of Eden", life expectancy at birth was about fifteen years as is evident from the studies of 10,000 year old burial mounds in several parts of the globe. The skeletons in a 5,000 year old cemetery in Cyprus indicate a life expectancy of 15 years at birth and thirty years at age ten, with only about ten percent of individuals making it past their thirtieth birthday. Even at the height of the Roman Empire, life expectancy at birth had only doubled to about thirty years, and it was not until the early part of this century that it reached sixty years in the most advanced societies. One hundred and fifty years ago, one in every three children was dead by the age of ten. Today that figure is one in every twenty thousand!
Let us also not forget how ferocious disease was when no effective treatments were available, especially during an epidemic. Today we are horrified that AIDS may have killed a thousand people in this island of a million and a half souls. The black plague killed between a third and a half of all the people in Europe. Here are some of John Snow's famous figures for the cholera epidemic in London one hundred and fifty years ago: Southwark and Vauxhall - 40,046 households; 1,263 deaths or 315 deaths per 10,000 households. That is roughly the number of households in the Port of Spain area. That so many people should drop dead in an epidemic is unimaginable to the average Trinidadian.
But as amazing as our progress in the fight against disease has been, and as incomprehensible as those death rates of old might be to the young people of today, it is all quite explicable in the light of modern understanding. John Snow had no idea what was killing all those people in London; he merely noted the distribution of deaths and drew conclusions about the probable source of the disease. We know what ails us, even if we cannot always respond as effectively as we would wish to. In 1994 there was an outbreak of the plague in India - the same plague that killed a half of the people in Europe. Within three months it was totally under control. Truly, knowledge is power!
The interesting thing that we also now know - and which the medical profession has been very reluctant to acknowledge - is that most of our success has come, not through improvements in treatment, but through sensible changes in the way in which we live. With improvements in nutrition and personal hygiene; clean water, more living space, less arduous work, and most of all, the education of women - yes, the education of women! - Mother Nature herself, as the naturopaths love to put it, provided the increased resistance to disease that led to greater longevity. Almost all of the terrible afflictions of old were in decline by the time effective treatments had been discovered. Tuberculosis, for example, was already of relatively little significance in Europe when antibiotics were discovered, while pneumonia, once a major killer, had also declined by about two thirds.
This is not a tribute to naturopathy. Our understanding of diseases and how to control them has come through painstaking scientific research. The real miracles like the elimination of smallpox (and soon, polio) have been achieved through science, and our best hope for the conquest of viral illness, the last major frontier, still lies in the scientific approach.
The important point is that understanding is the key to progress. Now that the infectious diseases have been largely controlled, people are dying of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, accidents, violence and substance abuse, and people have to understand that the only way in which these "diseases" will be conquered is through changes in lifestyle; not fooling around with herbs, cleansers and "alternative" remedies.
These articles attempt to promote such understanding. Our objective is not to discuss what is wrong with you, the reader, but to explain why things go wrong in the first place, and to show how these unfortunate developments can be prevented. Good health lies within you - if you will only take the time to stop and think, and most of all, to change your habits. Change is the real challenge in modern health care, not better treatment. And how do we get people to change? By giving them opportunities to understand.
June 16, 1995
