What is Health
It is easy to find statistics on the billions of man-hours lost from work per year when 7,000,000 people per day are sufficiently sick to require medical care. These statistics tell nothing of those who suffered from minor but painful ailments, or of the millions whose illnesses were severe but who called no physician because they feared the expense or because none could come during the night when the pain was most excruciating.
There are no statistics available for dozens of things which really matter or really hurt; of exhausted mothers who, missing nights of sleep because of a sick child, must still go to an office the next day or drag themselves through mountains of housework, simultaneously caring for other children. No statistics tell of the billions of father- and mother-hours of worry or anguish endured per year; of the billions of spankings given annually to good children whose parents were irritable or frustrated; of the billions of meals mined per year by nagging and scolding; of the billions of student-hours wasted because so many of the 30,700,000 in school attendance receive too few nutrients to keep their minds alert; of the number of parents paying dentists with savings they had hoped to spend on college educations.
I could find no health statistics. What is health? It seems to be something we talk glibly about. We speak of health insurance, meaning sickness insurance; of health benefits, meaning sickness benefits; health plans and surveys, meaning sickness plans and surveys. People talk about health education, health courses, health books; I have taken the courses, read the books; you learn about vaccinations, contagion, and diseases. What health actually is, apparently no one knows; certainly it is more than freedom from disease or ability to go to work. The best definition appears to be one which a small boy used to define money: “It’s something we ain’t got much of.”
The less health we have, the less money we will have. It is said that 60 per cent of the savings of people sixty years old are spent on a search for health; but 60 per cent of the people sixty years old have no savings. Their sickness bills are paid by you and me. Our taxes pay for the county and state hospitals and homes for the chronically ill, as well as for institutions for the insane and feeble-minded. It is your tax money and mine which pays for schools, whether the children attend or not, are mentally alert or not, or the teachers eat breakfast or not.
In addition to the taxes, there are the fund-raising campaigns: the heart fund, the polio fund, the cerebral palsy fund, the cancer fund, and numerous others. Money-raising has become big business, for which experts are trained. To my knowledge, no money has yet been raised for the purpose of what I call prevention. The native races studied by Drs. Price and McCarrison did not “prevent” tuberculosis by early X-rays, or cancer by free clinics where frightened people could be examined; they used constructive methods.
Unless something is done and done quickly toward real prevention, I think we can expect still more irritability, fatigue, mental sluggishness, psychological maladjustment, faulty posture and bone structure, crooked and decayed teeth. We can expect more surgery: more tumors, cancers, gall bladders and prostates removed, more sinuses scraped, more hysterectomies performed. As things are now, I cannot see how an increase can be prevented in the incidence of cancer, ulcers, high blood pressure, heart and kidney diseases, diabetes, muscular dystrophy and atrophy, multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, and many other diseases, some still unknown and unnamed. How sincerely I hope I am wrong I can you hear the arguments being raised? Diagnostic methods are better. People are living longer, we are told, into the heart-disease-, diabetes-, nephritis-, cancer-susceptible age. Granted that these arguments contain some truth, but not all the truth. Before Iron Curtain days, it was known that the Bulgarians lived to be older than other peoples in the world without these diseases. When grains were unrefined in Denmark from 1914 to 1920, people lived longer, into the “disease-susceptible age,” and had fewer of these diseases. Diagnostic methods are better, yes; they are now so good that a tremendous increase in cancer among babies and small children has been diagnosed. A year ago a young woman sat beside my desk, sobbing, sobbing, sobbing. Her three-year-old child, a little girl whose picture she showed me, had just died of cancer; another child of less than two and still another of scarcely five were then dying. She herself wanted to die; she said so repeatedly. Yet she came asking for help for her two dying children. I wish I could have helped her six years earlier.
To my way of thinking, our national health began to decline at the onset of the Industrial Revolution, when families began to move from self-sustaining farms into crowded cities. It declined still further with the invention of machinery for milling grains, and with each new method of processing foods, each new trick for forcing hybrid crops to yield higher tonnage per acre on worn-out soil. New problems arising every year make sound nutrition more difficult to apply, or prevent its application.
The technical knowledge for halting this decline is at our fingertips as never before. Every person wishes to feel well, to stay young; persons aware of sound nutrition are eager to apply it. But we need men and women with courage and willingness to be leaders, to set the example, and to educate, probably in the face of ridicule, cynicism, and criticism. I hope enough fine men and women can be mobilized for this purpose. I believe they can.