[The hidden nature of health].
This essay starts with a story about my meeting with a local medical culture as a young doctor. The point of the story is that a situation can be experienced and understood in different ways. The kind of knowledge one brings into a situation opens up for or prevents new understanding from developing. The concept of health has lost its content based on the experience and knowledge of everyday life; this content is replaced by concepts from medicine as the science of sickness. Health is linked to "well-being". The nature of health is hidden. It appears as something we are missing when threatened by pain, symptoms, illness or sickness. The medical knowledge of sickness is expert knowledge; the experience of health, on the other hand, is part of the experience of being human. Medical expert knowledge tends to occupy the field where health can be experienced. Medicine practiced as a cultural meeting between persons of equal human standing means that both doctors' and patients' knowledge can be taken seriously. The concept of health can be rehabilitated as a life-world concept. This requires more than just an intellectual effort; it requires the courage to see how our thinking has been shaped through scientific knowledge. This, in turn, requires of us the inner strength to cope with situations we do not understand.
Merok
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Institutt for samfunnsmedisin, Medisinsk fakultet, Universitetet i Tromsø, 9037 Tromsø. eivind.merok@ism.uit.no
D003210:Concept Formation; D006262:Health; D006801:Humans; D019359:Knowledge; D010817:Physician-Patient Relations