In 1946, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared what has become the most famous and simple definition of health as “…a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”
Of note ‘health’ encapsulates all 3 of these dimensions: physical, social and mental. Of particular note - social well-being - is an important aspect of this definition that may not always occur to us in thinking about our health.
The Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion affirms social, economic and environmental aspects of ‘health’. This important Canadian document states that, in order to be healthy, “an individual or group must be able to identify and to realize aspirations, to satisfy needs, and to change or cope with the environment”. In this way, health is seen as a resource or an asset that helps us lead our everyday lives. Health is seen as a positive concept that emphasizes social and personal resources, as well as physical capacities.
I suspect the majority of Canadians who have interacted, at any time, with the health care system has seen it as a ‘disease’ system. I can vouch for this as having been involved in medicine for 40 years but also as a patient. It is about disease - and the definition of disease is being pushed to lesser and lesser entities often driven by the ability of big pharma to generate new or me-too medications of increasing cost with lesser and lesser benefit. Watch American news channels or advertisements for erectile dysfunction or male pattern baldness. Or the number of drugs with ‘man’ as part of their name for any number of conditions.
Health Canada and the Provincial government forgot, it seems, what health actually means. COVID, I think, brought this centre-stage. The last two years were about COVID 24/7, ticker tapes, daily case and body counts (of uncertain accuracy) made to gin up fear in the populace. I am not saying there was not an infection but in retrospect we will see that it was no worse than a very bad flu (in fact what happened to influenza?) and that the risk to individuals, especially when stratified by co-morbidities, was perishingly low for young people.
And yet the mandates will have had negative ‘HEALTH’ consequences for perhaps an entire generation.
Bottom Line: It is a bit nauseating to watch all the politicians and medical elites take victory laps for relieving mandates (of course, different in every province) despite case counts being higher, despite vaccination levels that are also higher than last year, than they were this time last year. It is all a facade and they are realizing it.
Now, they will use ‘the science’ to get us back (eventually) to ‘health’.