Health

The balance of effort we expend in each area of our lives is our choice. The balance that is our choice is the only healthy balance.

To lower the costs of healthcare, health knowledge should be available by more means than solely the health practitioner. First and foremost we are the most eminent experts in our own symptoms – no one knows our symptoms as well and as intimately as us, nor can anyone know as well as us how well we are – the key is to enable us with our unexcellable knowledge of our own conditions to discover all we can about them, including what treatments are most beneficial, and then enable us to attain those treatments.

"Fundamentally, a society that asks questions and has the power to answer them is a healthier society than one that simply accepts what it’s told from a narrow range of experts and institutions. If professional affiliation is no longer a proxy for authority, we need to develop our own gauges of quality. This encourages us to think for ourselves."
p191, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson (2007)

This was not written with the health system in mind, but it applies just the same.

Of most ill to our health is the prevailing ethos of the wrong way, pursuing power and money with harm. With ignorance of fulfilment without harm as purpose, this ethos and the structures and systems it creates, lead to it being our de facto purpose.

People with misguided purpose are ill and find no happiness. The contravention of no harm that accompanies the pursuit of power and money amplifies the ill such that all of us are affected by it.

The lack of understanding of fulfilment as purpose and no harm as principle is the fundamental basis for the damage that occurs to ourselves and our environment.

If we want to be healthy then we must understand that our purpose is to fulfil our potential without harm. We must reject purposes and systems that conflict with this, that cause harm.

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[Excerpt from The Common Purpose Manifesto]

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