Interjection 1: How Healthy Do You Want to Be?

Abstract

Before we take off into the new medicine and move from Part I to Part II, I would like to pause with you for a moment and reflect on two aspects that the German physician and psychiatrist Klaus Dörner and the philosopher Byung-Chul Han have thrown into the spokes, so to speak, like a little stick. Dörner writes: “One can do an infinite amount for one’s health. But that doesn’t have much, often nothing, to do with whether and to what extent one feels healthy—and it’s the latter that counts”. And Han observes, “Today there is a … fear of pain everywhere. Any painful condition is avoided. … Pain tolerance is rapidly declining”. What both warn about is to strive for a state of complete well-being, or suspiciously observing and constantly optimizing oneself—whereby the slightest disturbance in well-being becomes an illness, or at least a symptom that must be treated.