By Joshua Campbell, Ghent, Belgium
Are we sicker than our eyes would have us believe? Are we very good at band aiding our ill conditions and making it seem like all is ok? These are questions I have been pondering on ever since I moved to Belgium from a small town in New Zealand.
When I was growing up in NZ it was common to see only one hospital in each city, with the exception of a few bigger cities like Auckland which has three and this makes sense given its population is over one million. However, in Ghent, the city I now live in, a city of only 300,000 people, there are a whopping four large hospitals each with the full catalogue of services and specialists that you would expect in any large hospital.
In addition, Ghent also has 6 health centres, each with numerous doctors and other specialists on top of the already large number of general doctors and other specialists practising in their own clinics around the city. And if that was not enough, there are also night doctors, dentists and pharmacies and if you really are stuck, it is only a short trip to another city close by, which like Ghent has yet more hospitals and specialists there.
This as you can imagine was vastly different from what I experienced growing up, yet is the norm for people here in Europe. Most do not even seem to question that such access to health care is a warning sign for humanity. The healthcare here is fantastic, no question, in fact it is excellent and I am not criticising this in any way, but what I am asking is: why do we need such a large range of healthcare services just to function as a society?
Naturally, there were a number of questions that came flooding in when I realised the extent of health care here in Ghent and Belgium in general. Firstly, was the question of how so many health specialists could compete for business!? And how all these hospitals were able to fill beds and afford to keep themselves running. Obviously with the large numbers of people using these facilities, there must be a demand for so many to begin with, for them to even have been built. And hence my next question; if the demand is so high, there must be a high level of sickness, disease or illness within the community to justify such a demand, so is this a sign that this society is sicker than it looks?
I walk around Ghent and I see that most people are not bandaged up, on crutches or having to be wheeled round in wheel chairs. No, on the surface society seems to be doing well. But one of the things that struck me when I first came here was the incredibly high number of pharmacies. There is one on almost every street! All with a full range of basic and specific drugs and medications available for use. And again, if so many pharmacies are able to not only survive but do well in one single city, then there must be a high demand for them and that means a high demand for drugs, given that with so many pharmacies, a single pharmacy is serving only a fraction of the population.
It makes me wonder: if these medical facilities were not there in the many and varied ways in which they currently are, would we be able to cope? The evidence of so much illness and so much disease would be unavoidable and perhaps in such a state we could not hide the fact that as a race we are very sick.
I have observed that there is very little in modern-day life, with so many technological advances, that ought to be making us sick by circumstance alone. By this I mean that we have so many tools at our disposal to make life so much more physically supportive than was available even 50 years ago and because of this we should be less sick. Yet it is apparent there is more, yes more, sickness now than there was back when my parents were my age and this is not just true by statistics alone but also in the fact that so much has changed even in the twenty years since I was born. I can remember going to the doctor and talking about anything and everything, and yet feeling like the doctor was not rushed off his feet with patients to treat, nor overwhelmed by the ways of the system, or by complications that seemed to only get worse and not truly better, or that the health budget of the nation was bursting at the seams like it is today. Nowadays it feels like doctors and health systems are just getting by and one day they may not be able to cope, especially if we keep getting sicker.
So, why are we getting sicker when today we can have so much at our finger tips, literally to the point where we can order a taxi, a pizza and search the web on anything and everything, all from the ease of our phone!?
What if the downward trend in our health is related to our way of living? The two are not exclusive, as what we do more than anything is to live life. Recently, I have become more aware of the importance of self-responsibility in life and how it is not common for us to live much, if any, true responsibility for the quality of our well-being. There is a ‘life happened, fix me up’ mentality that is common in society, and I am starting to question whether it is this approach to life that is the cause of our worrying health trends.
This is indeed a much needed topic for us all to consider, for there is clearly more to living truly well and healthy than just mere function, as we are very good at restoring function in healthcare but clearly the overall state of our health is not great. Perhaps it’s time to take off the layers that have us believe that our state of health is ‘ok’ and start to question whether there is more to how we are living than would otherwise meet the eye.
Without the wonderful care of modern medicine, we would be looking and feeling a lot sicker… medicine is doing a great job, but it is also starting to ail and fail, because of the increasing burdens we are placing on it. It is propping us all up to continue living our unhealthy ways, patching us up and allowing us to go back out there and continue doing what made us ill in the first place, and protecting us from the full consequences of our choices. But we cannot continue like this forever…
Perhaps it is time for us to start taking responsibility for our choices and to live in a way that keeps us largely healthy and well, thus reducing the burden on our health care systems.
Read more:
Medicine and Serge Benhayon 
Do we now live in a way that we expect to get fixed by the medical system and rely on the system rather than taking care and being responsible for ourselves? If there is a demand there will always be a supply.
Joshua this is interesting in what you have observed in Ghent and questioning why there are so many hospitals and chemists in small town, compared to where you originally lived, New Zealand.
And if we did not have the fix us up services, as in the medical and pharmaceutical services, what would this mean to us. Would we actually take responsibility of our own health and wellbeing more? A hard question for most people to answer. And yet for a few, it wouldn’t be a problem especially if we have included this in our daily life.
I know the way I live has changed and for the better, and even though it isn’t perfect, I take more responsibility in everything I do and be. What would the world look like if we all did our bit towards taking care of our own health and wellbeing?
It feels like we are protecting the illusion that everything is ok when under the surface we are simply getting more and more sick. How sick do we have to get as a society before we admit to the reality of life as it is and how we have made it?
Michelle it’s like that saying when we’re often asked, ‘how are you’, and the common response is, ‘I’m ok’, when deep down inside we are not. Who actually wants to hear that you are not ok, when they themselves are struggling. How can we truly care when the marker of our health and wellbeing keeps being moved and exhaustion is within the many and that standard is now our norm and we accept it…
‘Who actually wants to hear that you are not ok, when they themselves are struggling?.. and I could add when who themselves can’t admit that they are struggling? With the pictures we have of how we think life should be, we quickly dismiss the truth of our fragility and vulnerability.
Yep we sure are sicker then we look, crazy how our life styles are built around covering up how we really feel and what is going on.
Reading through the blog I was wondering how we might treat our bodies if the medical system wasn’t there to support us, would we take our daily choices to care for ourselves more seriously knowing the consequences if we harmed our body in any way?
‘Are we sicker than we look?’ This is an interesting question to explore. What also comes to me is what we accept now as normal. Years ago stress was not commonly spoken about and no one admitted to being stressed but now stress is well known and most of the population within the world have either experienced this at some point of their life or live with it pretty much most of the time! Some even say that stress is a healthy thing! So how are we living then that our health is getting worse not better? In the UK it is quite normal for there to be at least 1 pharmacy on every high street normally there are about 2 or 3 as well as the never-ending amount of coffee shops which keep appearing …. which again tells us something about how we are living. Definitely room for improvement here!
“… why do we need such a large range of healthcare services just to function as a society?” A good question Joshua. If the health facilities were also about prevention, including good nutrition and making improved lifestyle choices, I’d have no qualms. However they pick up the pieces after we wreck our lives. There is still denial by many doctors of any ‘evidence’ that lifestyle changes improve outcomes, yet there are so many ‘bodies’ that can say different.
This is such a great blog in terms of picking up on what is really going on. However much as a society we try to deny that we are sickening the proof is very much in the number of band aids we are using. We absolutely need to start questioning why we prefer the band aid to the healing.
You have to wonder about the doctors who deny the impact of lifestyle on health, maybe they don’t want to look at their own lives and take responsibility, or could they be invested in the status quo? It’s hard to say, but it’s definitely a topic that needs to be discussed further.
So the question then becomes why do we so utterly refuse to see the wood for the trees?
Yes the ‘R’ word! heavens it is a challenging word if we are not prepared to be honest with ourselves about just how powerful we are with our own health outcomes.
When you look at maps of health services across an area, you can see patterns related to health and wellbeing. The functional way of living is killing us and putting an unsustainable load on an inadequate health system.
It seems that we have become so used to having a low level of vitality that our perspective of what true health is has changed.
Our health is a reflection of our life and our choices that shape our life. It’s so simple and yet many do not put 2+2 together to see the interrelationship between them. But nor did I until I started reconnecting to that which is living life, my body. Life in the mind blinds us to so much.
In our area, there are quite a lot of chemists but they never look as though they get enough customers to warrant staying open and yet there are always at least three members of staff. They must be very busy dealing with prescriptions for those who cannot get out and about which in itself is an indication of how sick people are but unseen.
The need for more doctors offices, chemists and hospitals has definitely increased over the years. This is one area where the supply and demand is growing faster than the government can keep up with, in the UK at least.
I would agree with you Julie
I was talking to a patient recently and they had come from one of the city hospitals to a smaller hospital to recuperate after an operation. They told me that the hospital was so busy that people were lying on trolleys all over the place as they waited to be seen and the nursing staff was at full stretch trying to cope. I have many conversations with patients who say the same thing it would seem we need more medical staff and more hospitals so that we can cope with a society that is very sick. It is because we have such an amazing health care system we don’t see how sick we really are.
We are very good at advancing technology, medicine etc. but do not equally care for the responsibility that we all hold and carry.
I have always had this sneaky feeling that this society is designed to function by keeping people unwell, in need and fear of many things just to be able to survive, so that they keep offering people whatever to cover up the tension and be numbed, and many of us are quite happy being a willing consumer in that set-up. It is sickening.
Yes, it does seem that we are not encouraged to understand how we can contribute to our own health beyond fads and spurts of health ‘balanced’ by fun and indulgences.
The chance of getting cancer has gone up by 26% in Australia in the last 36 years and this is despite the strong reduction in smoking which is one of the largest causes of cancer. In other words, the true increase may be much more than 26% – in a single generation.
An extremely revealing article Joshua… You have just taken an insight into one small city observed, and reflected upon the anomalies, and the glaringly obvious… like the number of pharmacies… And of course this can be extrapolated all around the world.
Today I was having a conversation with someone about the signs of a developing nation. One thing that is considered to measure this is access to nutrition, yet there are many countries in the developed world where people are malnourished because of the amount of junk food they choose to eat. Another thing that is considered to measure development is access to health care, education and so on, but are we really developing when we are getting sicker and sicker, where mental health issues are increasing and where we are teaching our kids function over quality. Sometimes it seems to me that the more simple life is the more space we potentially have to work on that quality, but ultimately a developed nation doesn’t necessarily mean a more evolved one.
The fact that there are so many great healthcare services now is wonderful on one hand but on the other hand what does it say about the way we are living and the choices we are making?
So true JennyM and what would be possible if we took the same care of our health as we do our ability to checkin with our phones? What would happen if we combined great healthcare services with great individual health care and commitment to live love.
A great point raised here. Our obsession with phones would be our obsession with true health and vitality!
We want to live as we like and want to be fixed and helped so we can carry on on our way of doing what we want.
With so many pharmacies, this must mean that there are also a lot of pharmaceutical drug companies too, which opens up a discussion about what is really going on the behind the scenes if how we look is not true to the reality of the actual health our bodies are experiencing.
Yes and who is funding the research into the medicines we take and I’d like to question the so-called ‘side effects’ of many drugs. Yet simple lifestyle changes are not prescribed by doctors as they have no real training in nutrition etc. Why not start with the simple – and cheap things first? It does come back to responsibility – how much we want to make changes for the sake of our health. I know many who after conventional cancer therapies just go back to their old way of living. No wonder we have metastases.
That our ill health can be disguised between a mask of looking ok to the untrained eye, is a sign of how far we have drifted from our true norm and how we have settled for a great lessening when we are deserved of the more we in-truth are.
That is true but it can’t be hidden from the trained or the aware eye and the more aware we become, the more we see these changes.
The question of ‘are we sicker than we look’ is a definite yes. All you have to do is look at the statistics of chronic illness and major health conditions to know that the man you work with or the person serving you at the shops may look ok and still be functioning but has every chance of having at least one of these conditions. And as a nurse having seen just how many pills people come to hospital with, before their acute condition is treated, I have seen just how much we are being propped up by pharmaceuticals.
This is a great observation and question: what would our health be like if we did not have so much medical support? But also how well would we be coping if we did not have so many coffee shops, and how would people fare if they did not have access to their cigarettes and alcohol? And let’s not forget the excess of entertainment that we use to switch off from daily life with…. The list is endless. We have to be honest here. The world we have created is not working.
I love how you bring it up because it can become so normal to have indeed four hospitals in Ghent and a whole lot of additional health care specialists spread over the city. It is like the frog that does not notice it is being cooked when the water heats up slowly. I love to question these things and bring awareness of what is truly going on.
The propping up with medical drugs is indeed a cover up of the state of or health and well-being. Not suggesting we take them away but if we were to truly feel where our bodies are at and be honest then we may consider to look at healing the root cause at the same time. I have learnt this with Serge Benhayon and how he approaches life and our relationship with our bodies and it sure is a way that has healed and dealt with the issues at its root.
I discovered tonight while having a conversation with people who came from Iran and who now are living in the West of Europe that they actually didn’t know what ‘burnt out’ meant until they came here as there was not such a condition over there, and there is no word in their language to describe it either.
Interesting to see my country, Holland has a similar situation, through your eyes. And yes on the surface it looks like the streets are not crowded with crippled people, but indeed if you go under the surface most people are suffering from some kind of illness, disease or chronic physical, emotional or mental pains. It is part of life. And pills keep it manageable. I am a supporter of health care (current system of curing people) ánd I am supporter of preventive medicine which is not given equal attention – it is slowly getting more ground and needs to be given more attention. What are the daily choices we make that mounts up to all these pains? How can we support each other to start at the root cause instead of waiting till it is way out of hand and we indeed need several hospitals to support us of all the after-effects?
England has pretty much the same picture, our healthcare on the whole is marvellous yet many of us in the UK don’t recognise our responsibility to our own health and there is an unhealthy general conception that we get ill and the doctor will deal with it. This kind of cultural thinking puts an even more heavy burden on our already struggling heath care system.
Perhaps as a society we focus more on how we look than the actual honesty of how we feel and live.
We are indeed experts at covering up our conditions – even everyday things like being tired. How often do we say “I’m fine, I’m good” …when we honestly feel exhausted, burnt out, stressed etc.
Absolutely we are sicker than we look… and then there are those who take a zillion supplements and say they are healthy too! Why take so many if we are truly well?
Not only can we take the burden off our health care services by taking care of our selves we can inspire others that there is another way to live.
Hi Joshua, I think you would find that there are excessive pharmacies everywhere in Australia also. I live in a small suburb of a country town and in this whole area there are 8 chemists in the CBD and two in the small suburb of that town and one of this is a huge chemist warehouse. And this area is not as highly populated as in Europe! People are taken aback if you are not on medication if you are over 60.