Is Your Health Obsession Actually Making You Sick?

Over the past few decades, the whole concept of healthcare has taken on a totally new dimension and risen to a higher level. This is a very positive development—after all, health is wealth, which connotes much more than landed and other assets and bank balances. However, it is not so much the taking care of health that marks today’s health nurturing as the obsession that it has been turned into.

This has given rise to numerous healthcare industries that include health drinks, supplements, etc., as well as a mushrooming of gyms and exercise routines that have become a huge industry. While this has led to increased awareness, hopefully improved health status, and employment avenues, this "health industry"—so to speak—has also led to more expenses by way of gym subscriptions and exorbitant health drinks and supplements. Observably, healthcare or nurturing has become an ‘in’ thing, giving rise to some kind of social stratification and stigma. This is one of the offshoots of any obsession.

One suspects that a lot of the obsession with health has to do with looking good—carrying off fashionable apparel, creating good impressions, and facilitating climbing the higher rungs of the corporate ladder. See how the beauty, health, and fashion industries are so closely linked. Obviously, one then wonders about the link between the aspired wealth and this health. The medical industry is not far behind in this obsession with health, which seems to go beyond the normal health indices. But then, what do we laypersons know of normal health indices? Today we are all told to lose weight, exercise, eat greens and coloured food, avoid junk food, reduce stress and tension, sleep 7-8 hours, etc.—all of which leads us straight to the gym and health supplements and the like because they promise so much while simultaneously underscoring our need for discipline and structured daily habits and practices.

One also suspects that this obsession has a lot to do with our ‘modern’ lifestyle, which is demanding and stressful, entailing long working hours. Such a lifestyle throws us off-balance, so we seek answers in gyms and health food and supplements—even in yoga, grandmother’s recipes, and a dig deep into our cultural past to find remedies. All this is very positive except for the fact that we are obsessing so much about our health that it looks like we are debilitating our health.

Here is where the medical industry steps in once again and throws us into the whirlpool of countless scans, tests, and what-have-you, which sometimes leads to overloading of medicines, and mind you, they don’t come cheap. In my experience, these days, doctors one goes to consult don’t have the time to listen to your problems. One look and they decide exactly what the problem is, and it is worse if you are a senior citizen and a woman. One gets the sense that not only doctors but also family members think that senior citizens, especially women, are looking for attention. Not surprisingly, a lot of elders remain silent about their ailments—most actually have removed the words ‘doctors’ and ‘hospitals’ from their vocabulary. Better to bear the pain than endure the humiliation. Come to think of it, a corollary issue is the considering of elders as doddering fools.

Be that as it may, certainly today medical science is conquering the zeniths of healthcare, but for a person in pain and distress, it is always the person, not the machine, that gives comfort and reassurance—so crucial for healing. Moreover, unfortunately, while diagnostic machinery has reached unparalleled heights, we have also reached the depths of our pocket, rendering them inaccessible to the vast majority of the masses. This sort of indicates that with the emergence of highly sophisticated diagnostic machinery, clinical testing has reduced, thus creating a kind of distance between the patient and the doctor. Is it possible that the lack of the ‘human touch’ has impacted patients’ healing experience?

Of course, we know that health and medical care is so commercialized that prevention is now all the more better, nay more crucial, than cure, which also explains the exponential growth of the gym-supplement industry and our obsession with health. But has our health improved? Has medical and healthcare improved? India, we are told, is racing to be the third largest economy in a matter of time, but healthcare is even more inaccessible to the common person, whose income has remained stagnant—worse still, whose unemployed status has rendered her without food, much less healthcare. This tragic paradox is alarming. While it is imperative to constantly upgrade science and technology, there also has to be a way to minimize the distance between the large sections of citizens and this upgrade. We cannot find our solutions in western or developed ways. Our solutions have to be ‘made in India.’

In this haze and maze of health concerns, the other issue we can revisit is our Northeastern lifestyle, age-old socio-cultural practices, including food habits. Ours was a very simple lifestyle rooted in Nature. Our lives were intrinsically linked to Nature’s rhythms of seasonal changes that dictated our cultural, agricultural, and food habits—indeed set the pace for all aspects of our existence and survival. Being rooted to Nature doesn’t mean periodical Nature tourism in rural areas. It means allowing Nature to guide every second of our lives. Today we have forgotten how blessed we are in the Northeast to be born and surrounded with the most fertile land and greenest bounty that feeds our body, mind, and soul.

We never needed to use fertilizers; our cures were found in our fields and forests, and our fresh air, wide open spaces, rivers, streams, forests, hills, and valleys provided us with the best gym. We worked in tune with Nature for our food and all other requirements. Most of all, we were a contented people. But we wanted more, or perhaps we were persuaded that what we had wasn’t enough and we needed ‘development.’

Now, development per se is not a bad thing—in any case, we cannot reverse time—but our health and so many other issues appear to be an imbalance between Nature and our general concept of development, and this imbalance has created obsessions causing disruptions in the body’s rhythm and mind’s equilibrium. There are researches galore on health issues, but none of them appear to be conclusive. In fact, most researches appear to be on-going. So none of us really have an answer on how to reset our bodies and minds to what Nature intended. All we know is that all actions have reactions. Perhaps we should then mindfully consider our actions, especially those egged on by social media, before we are beset with reactions, which cause us more grief than cure. For health to be wealth, it has to be an asset, not a liability.