LIE: I’m responsible for my health

Lie: I’m responsible for my health.

Truth: What is commonly called ‘our health’ is actually inseparable from our soul, which is integrally dependent on God’s own life. So to be responsible for a health that is independent of God, ignores the divine life intended to fill and power it.

It’s Your breath in our lungs
So we pour out our praise, we pour out our praise
It’s Your breath in our lungs
So we pour out our praise to You only.

— chorus to Great Are You Lord, written by David Leonard, Jason Ingram and Leslie Jordan

Two things make this statement — I’m responsible for my health — a lie:

• what ‘my health’ is now commonly understood to be. See What Health is NOT below.
• how I’m expected to be responsible for this misguided understanding of ‘my health.’ See False Responsibility for Health below.

We must carefully consider both of these aspects to see how deceptive this lie has become.

Important: Please stay with me in this article. I am not ‘throwing the baby out with the bath water.’ Our medical systems, both conventional and alternative, definitely have benefits and can facilitate healing.

Ivan Illich, in his article, Brave New Biocracy: Health Care from Womb to Tomb, describes a brief history of what we now call ‘life.’

By the 13th century, and especially in the Franciscan school of theology, the world’s being is seen as contingent not merely on God’s creation, but also on the graceful sharing of his own being, his life. Whatever is brought from possibility (de potentia) into the necessity of its own existence thrives by its miraculous sharing of God’s own intimacy, for which there is no better word than – His life.

With the scientific revolution, contingency-rooted thought fades and a mechanistic model comes to dominate perception. Caroline Merchant argues that the resulting “death of nature” has been the most far-reaching event in changing men’s vision and perception of the universe. But it also raised the nagging question: How to explain the existence of living forms in a dead cosmos?

The words health and life are now almost interchangeable and are becoming increasingly so. And health is nearly interchangeable and synonymous with body.

We could even use the formula:
my life ≈ my health ≈ my body

We must see through this cheapening and degradation of what makes us alive. Perhaps one of the best ways to capture this is by counting the ways in which health has been redefined. Here then are five attributes, tacitly assumed to be true, that are NOT true.

What health is NOT

Here’s a deeper look at what health is not.

1  Health is NOT independent of our own soul and God’s life.

Whereas life used to be thought of as being a sharing of the nature of God, we now commonly think that our ‘life’ is autonomous; that is, that it’s not at all dependent on divine life in any real, practical sense. We breathe, we eat, we sleep, all in an enclosed container, or so we think. For us in the twenty-first century, our life belongs exclusively to us and is determined solely by what we do and don’t do. [See the article: lie: my body belongs to me.]

But Paul says that our life is hidden in God himself:

Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth. For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory. — Colossians 3:2–4

Our ‘life’ is primarily thought of in terms of our physical well being, and physical well being has largely been equated to what we call ‘health.’

But of course we do believe – though it’s been seriously abstracted – that we’re dependent on other humans. But because those human actions have been mostly systematized, we do not feel their humanity. Until the modern era the common man was too dependent, too vulnerable to the vicissitudes of life to ever imagine himself independent or contained. But all that has changed.

For example, our water – the water that we cannot live long without – is delivered to us by a massive complex of water treatment plants, dams, reservoirs, tanks, pipes, filters, monitors, regulatory agencies, etc, of which most have no conception. For us now, water is as universally free and available as air, but of course, it’s not.

But let’s be clear on what we’re talking about here because we run the risk of speaking too much in generalities. What we’re talking about is nothing less than the implementation, the realization, of the original lie – that we could be our own god, absolutely independent, autonomous and sovereign. We now effectively imagine our ‘life’ and our ‘health’ as a self-contained and independent unit. And in doing so, we seriously delude ourselves. In doing so we mistakenly imagine that our breathing, our metabolism, our ability to think, to speak, to listen and understand, and yes, to heal, and many more ‘basic’ human faculties, arise solely from our own being. How these all happen we are content to be ignorant, yet somehow they’re just effortlessly ‘there.’

2  Health is NOT possessable.

Extending the idea of independence, we can also say that our health is not possessable, that is, it cannot be owned as you would an object. We do not and cannot control ourselves, our health or anything that we are. No part of our health or our body is directly controllable or manipulatable. Everything that we do, think, speak, see, hear, imagine – any use of our faculties at all – is done indirectly or ‘automatically.’

For example, take the simple act of walking. When we walk, we do not tell ourselves to walk or make ourselves walk. We simply set off to walk, completely without thinking. Actually, if we would try to consciously force our legs to move in a rhythm, we will either be unable to walk at all, or at the most, only walk rather clumsily.

Try this on anything: eating, writing, speaking, thinking, remembering, sleeping – any conscious act is not done by forcing the act.

Some may object and claim that they can directly force or control their actions, but it will not be a fluent, sustainable, or humanized action. You cannot make yourself think a thought; you can only wait until the thought somehow ‘appears’ or materializes. Or the thought simply manifests itself as you’re speaking the words. Also when we try to remember something, we do the same. We must wait for the memory – somehow, we don’t know how it happens – to pop into our consciousness.

And these are the conscious actions, the actions that we are aware of. Yet most human movements or processes are unconscious. Our bodily functions: metabolism, genetics, heart rhythm, brain function, digestion, blood flow – all are completely beyond our reach and are therefore even more unpossessable.

We do not possess our health; we cannot directly make ourselves more healthy. Rather, it would be better to say that we learn to participate in and practice healthy ways and then slowly our health responds. So this healthy space/domain – beyond our direct grasp – is something that we can choose to participate in. This domain is overseen and inhabited by the living God.

3  Health is NOT reducible or classifiable

Our health is irreducible and unclassifiable, though there are many who try. The scientific and medical worlds break down our bodies – ‘our health’ – into finer and finer parts. For example, the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD), is a medical classification coding system promulgated by the World Health Organization (WHO).[1] The base list (it’s designed to be extended) contains over 14,000 diagnosis codes and is used internationally.

But all this coding and classification assumes that the body is like a fantastic machine. The dream: ‘If only we could identify all the body’s parts, how they malfunction (disease) and how they interact – the drivers, power sources, transportation systems, waste management systems, etc – then we could isolate its problems and potentially keep it working indefinitely.’ But of course, that’s a false dream.

The American Board of Medical Specialties, the “leader in the board certification and continuing professional development of medical specialists” now sports 40 specialties and 87 subspecialties.[2] But such fragmentation ends up working against the body’s built-in integration and unity. More specialization creates more complexity, requires more communication, more hand-offs, more rules, more organization, which in turn creates more risk of errors, confusion, etc. Doctors end up knowing more and more about less and less.

This apparently endless attempt at classification may well culminate in some form of geneticization (an extreme form of medicalization, see the definition below). Genetics may be the false promise and false unity that science inexorably seeks.

4  Health is NOT mechanical/systematic

It is scientism[3] that has reduced everything, including life, to a material-only existence. To mainstream science (which has largely been captured by the philosophy of scientism), the spiritual world does not exist.[4] ‘Only matter matters.’ Inevitably then, the human person is basically reduced to a human body. Therefore we are left with nothing more than the body as an amazing machine.

Of course the body does have some ‘parts’ that do act like a machine. For example, see the amazing machine-like body part — flagellum motors.[5]

But because the body has some machine-like characteristics, does not mean that it is a machine, even a splendiferous machine. Yet medical science has no other framework, no other paradigm. It’s stuck with its insidious materialism that must reduce and dissect the body like a cadaver on a slab.

5  Health is NOT engineerable

Our health care system has taught us that our health is an independently possessable and reducible machine/system. This machine, this biological machine, as it is commonly thought, and because it is a machine, must then require maintenance and repair. But like any complex machinery, it must also be engineerable and re-engineerable. All of the endless deconstruction, classifying, tracing, fragmenting, scoping has actually become a grand reverse engineering project. Reverse engineering is the process by which a product is broken down and taken apart into its component parts to discover how the parts interact and work to create a unified system.

But why else do you reverse engineer something? Obviously to duplicate it and to create a better product. This ultimately is the goal that keeps reappearing in many different guises. It is the false gospel of the transhumanist agenda to remake man, to recreate him in the image of the transhumanist gods.

But as much as the transhumanists would like to re-engineer our biology and merge it with AI, big data systems, etc, it will ultimately fail. It will fail because people, human beings, are not machines or systems or systems of systems. Each person is wildly deeper and more complex – more unfathomable than anyone realizes. Only God knows the complete depth of each individual person.[DBH1] 

False Responsibility for Health

Now that we see how the very definition of health has significantly changed, we also need to see that the clear expectation is that you as an independent, engineerable life must now be responsible for ‘your health.’ The world first tries to tell us what we are, and then tells us how we must be.

Illich gives a short history on the word ‘health’:

The concept of health in European modernity represents a break with the Galenic-Hippocratic tradition familiar to the historian. For Greek philosophers, “healthy” was a concept for harmonious mingling, balanced order. a rational interplay of the basic elements. He was healthy who integrated himself into the harmony of the totality of his world according to the time and place he had come into the world.

For Plato, health was a somatic virtue, and spiritual health, too, a virtue. In “healthy human understanding,” the German language – despite critiques by Kant, Hamann, Hegel and Nietzsche – preserved something of this cosmotropic qualification. But since the 17th century, the attempt to master nature displaced the ideal of the health of a people.

This inversion gives the a-cosmic health created in this way the appearance of being engineerable. Under this hypothesis of engineerability, “health as possession” has gained acceptance since the last quarter of the 18th century. In the course of the 19th century, it became common sense to speak of “my body” and “my health.”

So whereas health used to be thought of as an ability to integrate, to adapt, to live in harmony with; now, it’s thought of as an individual, engineerable possession, and as such, it is considered to be something for which we must take responsibility. Currently this participation in the engineering of our ‘health’ takes two primary forms:

• Medicalization[6]
• Paramedicalization

Medicalization. This form teaches us, conditions us, to take responsibility for ‘our health’ by unquestioningly conforming to conventional medical practice, which presumptuously lays claim as the exclusive manager of our life ‘from womb to tomb.’ It’s the self-certified medical world co-opting, reducing and redefining our life as nothing more than ‘health.’

And medicalization is now in the process of maturing by the adoption of AI and big data analytics. These major shifts in tools and processes will end up exclusively determining what our health and our health care can be and should be.

The electronic health record (EHR) will likely become a digital model of your body, complete with a full breakdown of all physical and mental conditions, genetic propensities, likelihood of diseases, metabolic age, etc – all viewable on your smart device. This digital model will constantly be updated with real-time data collected by various wearables, implantables and household devices (e.g. Alexa devices). These will collect and aggregate your data and roll it into your EHR.

Illich again:

In our world, these boundaries [the boundaries of the traditional Hippocratic practice] have been obliterated. By the early 20th century, the physician came to be perceived as society’s appointed tutor of any person who, having been placed in a patient role, lost his own competence.

Physicians are taught today to consider themselves responsible for lives from the moment the egg is fertilized through the time of organ harvest. They have become the socially responsible professional manager not of a patient, but of a life from sperm to worm. Physicians have become the bureaucrats of the brave new biocracy that rules from womb to tomb.

This medicalization continues to expand into all areas of our lives. Especially now with the advent of preventive medicine, sometimes called ‘personalized medicine,’ nothing is left untouched.

Interventions include:

diet	work	outdoor/climate
sleep	child rearing	sex
exercise	dress	pets
mental stresses	grooming	relationships
leisure	education	technology devices
guns	and more!

To the conventional medical practitioner, no other valid method exists except his science-based protocols. Everything else is quackery and pseudo-science. And because they expect an implicit/blind trust, these well-meaning doctors, nurses, aids, surgeons, and endless specialists, will patronize and even bully anyone who resists or questions their care.

Doctors themselves ultimately become victims of their own mentality. If the body is all there is, they set themselves up to dehumanize others and themselves. Their system makes it harder for them to fight the strong tendency to desensitize themselves to the humanity they constantly face.

Yet, these same carers are reluctant to admit that the third-leading cause of death is that very medical establishment. A 2018 Johns Hopkins study claims that approximately 250,000 deaths per year can be blamed on medical errors.

From a CNBC article dated February 22, 2018:

Other studies report much higher figures, claiming the number of deaths from medical error to be as high as 440,000. The reason for the discrepancy is that physicians, funeral directors, coroners and medical examiners rarely note on death certificates the human errors and system failures involved. Yet death certificates are what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention rely on to post statistics for deaths nationwide.

The article goes on:

Makary [the Johns Hopkins’ study author] defines a death due to medical error as one that is caused by inadequately skilled staff, error in judgment or care, a system defect or a preventable adverse effect. This includes computer breakdowns, mix-ups with the doses or types of medications administered to patients and surgical complications that go undiagnosed.[7]

Ivan Illich wrote an entire book on this subject called Limits to Medicine, Medical Nemesis: the Expropriation of Health. The opening lines to the book are troubling to say the least:

The medical establishment has become a major threat to health. The disabling impact of professional control over medicine has reached the proportions of an epidemic.

Paramedicalization. This form of taking responsibility for health runs parallel to medicalization and teaches us to reject medicalization, and instead piece together a pastiche of natural products: supplements, teas, detoxes, devices, practices and techniques to maintain health or to self-heal.

Paramedicalization seeks to recover old ways and to use organic or natural products: homeopathy, acupuncture, reflexology, applied kinesiology – all to ‘get back to nature.’ Other practices considered to be complementary or alternative medicine include techniques that claim to discern or release the body’s energy. But such practices verge on or may violate God’s prohibitions on divination.[8]

The real problem is that paramedicalization reflects a similar mentality and goal found in medicalization. Both assume that life and health is our own individual, engineerable possession. All that is required to manipulate our health is to find the right formulations and techniques. Where these practices come from matters little as long as they work. And if they work they must be good. This is a related deception.

That said, no one can deny that both forms can produce healing benefits. And truly, God gave herbs, plants, sunshine, etc, as agents of healing. Knowledge of these things is valuable to our communities. And I would even go so far as to say that some pharmaceutical drugs can be beneficial and sometimes needed.

But my argument is not with any particular remedy, whether medical or organic (though organic is preferred in most cases). My argument is not with what or how we’re doing it; my argument is with why? Why blindly/implicitly follow the medicalization of life? Or why collect a pantry of organic products? This is the important question.

Too often we’ve fallen into the trap of believing that we must do everything we can to protect and foster our health and avoid death at all costs. ‘Taking responsibility for my health’– as its commonly understood now – ultimately becomes an idolatrous practice because, in doing so, we exchange our trust in God’s care to trust in the ‘care’ of an all-seeing, all-powerful big data analytics system that tracks our own private, personalized data. The system knows us and foresees our future.

The medical establishment is in the process of transferring to us, not only the responsibility, but also the liability for our health. But we cannot effectively take on this responsibility because the problems as they are described within their framework are simply too large for us. They are insurmountable even if given all of the data to track it. But once we’ve accepted this responsibility and then ultimately fail, we will be blamed for not following their rules and the controllers will walk away with impunity. This liability will eventually be assessed into a personalized social credit scoring system.

To protest or become a conscientious objector to this movement, we must seek the Lord for his wisdom. He alone is our salvation.

Ivan Illich, whom I’ve quoted throughout this article, wrote a thoughtful manifesto that we should consider. See it here.

To keep from falling for this pernicious lie – the lie: I’m responsible of my health – we must see our life differently. We must see it not as my life – an engineerable possession, tweaking it with data and products and practitioners. We must see ourselves as persons whom God cherishes and enlivens with his own Spirit. So don’t cheapen and degrade yourself. Rather freely receive your share in God’s own life through the living Messiah Jesus.

See also the introduction to this category: Lies attacking our self-understanding.

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[1] See https://icd.who.int/browse10/2016/en

[2] See https://www.abms.org/media/194925/abms-guide-to-medical-specialties-2019.pdf

[3] For a basic definition of scientism, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism

[4] This may be changing. A growing movement within modern-day physics mixes quantum physics with a spiritual reality. See for example the book, The Tao of Physics, originally published in 1975.

[5] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flagellum#Motor

[6] For more information on medicalization, see the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicalization

[7] Captured on September 1, 2019 from https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/22/medical-errors-third-leading-cause-of-death-in-america.html

[8] Time and space does not permit to go into this here. This is a related subject that requires its own discussion. See Leviticus 19:26.

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