2023-10-28 17:00:00
Philosophers always have something clever to say about our lives. That’s why it’s worth taking a look at her work. Today: Hippocrates and his holistic view of health.
Food for thought.
People know his oath, which actually didn’t come from him at all. But only very few people are familiar with Hippocrates’ health teachings. It is still very relevant.
He was born around 460 BC. BC on the Greek island of Kos, as a descendant of an ancient family of doctors. Otherwise, little is known about his life. The most important thing: He primarily gained his healing knowledge on his world travels, which he undertook as a practicing doctor. He later founded a medical school named after him in Kos. But what he certainly didn’t do was write down the so-called Hippocratic Oath.
Its originator is a small medical sect that appeared at the same time as Hippocrates, but was otherwise based on Pythagoras. Nevertheless, Hippocrates and his students left behind a work of 70 individual writings that are of historical importance even without the oath. He died in Thessaly, northern Greece, but it is not known exactly when.
The special thing about Hippocrates: He not only provides doctors with precise guidelines for behavior, but also patients. And here he looks far beyond the horizon of a mere doctor. For him it is clear that health is only born to us to a certain extent, but depends essentially on our lifestyle. According to the principle: the more balance, the less chance of illness.
Health therefore depends on balance in the individual areas of life, such as sleeping and waking, working and resting, eating and drinking, love life and asceticism, mental stress and leisure. Hippocrates is opposed to all one-sided excesses, no matter which direction they take. He regards the celibate virtuous man as no less suspicious and susceptible to illness than the insatiable greedy sack. Hippocrates renounces moral classifications and prejudgments – only a few world explainers and doctors after him have managed to remain so open and unbiased.
Blood pressure monitors, ECGs and EEG, ultrasound and X-ray examinations? Of course, all of this is unknown to Hippocrates, and he doesn’t know anything about bacteria and viruses either. Nevertheless, he is incredibly successful as a doctor – if he hadn’t been, he would have had to expect the worst in his time. Back then, doctors did not have the positive image that they have today. If a patient died despite their therapeutic efforts, they could be stalked and had to run away.
This is one of the reasons why Hippocrates checks carefully before treating a patient whether it makes any sense at all. He rejects cases that do not seem treatable to him, and he also advises other doctors to do the same. Which at first glance sounds cruel. On the other hand: Isn’t it more cruel to deny treatment to a terminally ill patient than to keep him alive using all technical means – as is practiced today?
The recipe behind Hippocrates’ therapeutic successes: He no longer sees illness and health as gifts from God like his predecessors, but he also does not see them as mere consequences of external factors (such as pathogens and poisons), like scientific medicine after him. Rather, he keeps an eye on the whole person and their lifestyle; he tries to understand not only the illness, but above all the person who has this illness. Today something like this is referred to as holistic medicine – for Hippocrates there is simply no other serious alternative to do something for our health.
He doesn’t leave us with the Hippocratic Oath, but he does leave us with sentences like “Obese people are more likely to die than thin people” and “Where there is love for humanity, there is also love for art.” And he shows us that health and illness depend largely on how we bring our lives into balance. Modern psychosomatics and stress research have been able to confirm this theory in recent years. It is actually high time that we incorporate these findings into our daily lives. |jzl Jörg Zittlau
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