![kristof Gabriel carina van hooymissen [my ancestor lieven once brewed the beer saint-michael]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuf5AId3Z3RVqmJkfVPVXsz_-LO89rYUHadTXsJnXUtENc6Q3DYO4cH6Ii3cJfHvIOyYLuyB4usNk9rXPfKXqGqnUPGe6D30imXQzsKAEvPnR478_6_CpifikjSMW-V0GLBp8BWPUB_B32/s250/Red+PIll.jpg)
I was born and raised in a family of doctors. My mother was a gynecologist, my father a dentist, and my aunt and uncle were also physicians. If someone suddenly fell ill, immediately there was a phonendoscope, medications, consultations, and everyone knew what to do. Treatment was given naturally, as part of family life. In this sense, the entire health system was inside my home. There was care, attention, and closeness.
This is exactly the feeling that should exist between a doctor and a patient, a sense of being members of a single family. Without that, there is no real trust. Today, however, doctors cannot afford such an attitude. They are overloaded and overwhelmed with patients. No gifts or gratitude can change the fact that they are simply swamped. The system itself disallows genuine human connection.
Therefore, we need an entirely different system, one that does not emphasize medications, but the person, similar to the approach of ancient Chinese medicine. Health care should encompass a person’s entire life. It should be a true life technology: how a person is born, what they breathe and consume, how the environment influences them, how their body reacts to all this as a biological system within a larger surrounding system. It should include how they live, get married, give birth, grow old, and pass away.
This entire sequence of a person’s life needs to be viewed as a system in equilibrium with nature. For that, a person must be integrally connected with nature, living according to its laws, understanding what it demands and how they must tune themselves into mutual interconnection. Just as harmony within the body means health, and balance in nature means environmental health, so too there must be homeostasis between us and our environment.
Today we disrupt that balance. We disturb not only nature’s equilibrium, but also our internal balance, and most importantly, the balance between ourselves and the surrounding world. We do not correspond to it at all. Nature operates by the law of self-stabilization: you receive as much as you give. This is how balance is maintained. We, however, are in complete opposition to this principle. We relentlessly consume nature and give nothing back but pollution and destruction.
Everything depends on human education, primarily environmental education. By “environmental education,” I do not simply mean how people relate to the still, vegetative, and animate levels of nature surrounding us, but primarily to humans. Therefore, I call it “integral education” because in order to change humanity’s attitude toward nature and society, we need to change the human being. We live in a society that constantly influences us negatively, and we influence it in the same way. Our egoism, i.e., our desires to enjoy at the expense of others and nature, urges us to consume, to dominate, and to earn—and even steal—at any cost, without giving anything in return. Therefore, both the individual and society as require correction.
The conclusion is that the the human being must change. We are the source of all the problems in the world. Unfortunately, this point receives almost no attention.
On one hand, the global crisis is pressuring us, and it will continue to do so. Nature has no doubts. When imbalance becomes too great, species disappear. Humanity could face the same fate. Environmental, social, and economic crises are intensifying. Our lack of balance with nature leads nowhere good.
On the other hand, we possess a method that explains how to change the human being and make him an integral part of nature. Then we will begin to see nature—still, vegetative, animal, and human—as one single organism. Interestingly, this is also the foundation of Chinese medicine. It does not treat a person as an isolated unit, but as part of a comprehensive, interconnected system.
If we adopt this view, then both doctor and patient will change. The doctor will no longer simply prescribe medication, and the patient will no longer simply demand relief. Both will understand that healing begins with restoring balance between the human being and the whole of nature.
