Health is contaminated with disease, wellbeing is polluted with sickness. As Antonovsky[i] remarked, we are all chronically ill, constantly adjusting to challenges and threats to our health. We keep moving along the continuum between health and sickness, at times slightly less contaminated than at other times. There is no such thing as an ideal state of health, only a temporary reprieve from the onslaught of testing encounters. Through our symbiotic relations with microbes we negotiate our wellness. As members of communities we are filled with encounters, exposed to positive and negative contaminants, physical, relational and social. This contaminated state of health or sickness is the norm and the natural form of life. It is a continuous process of associating with microbial invaders or guests and other pollutants, as well as of interacting with our families, communities and physical and social environments. Health and sickness are a communal process, not an individual one. The dynamic encounters and relationships impact everybody’s health by making us either sick or healthy. They create a diversity of experiences and grant some of us more health privileges.
In “developed” Western societies, interpersonal trauma and social abuse of power and privileges are the leading cause of morbidity and mortality. Historical trauma and chronic stress from structural inequities deplete the individual immunological defense mechanisms and make people sick and die prematurely.[ii] On top of that, climate change and rising temperatures will amplify this unequal burden of disease.
Changing our minds from looking at health as an exemplary individual state to a process of dealing with contamination and relationships is critical. This new communal and process-informed orientation to health and sickness embeds us in our social and physical environments. It holds us accountable to how we treat each other and how we relate to our microbial and natural environment. We share our metabolisms and genetic information with our microbiome. We share through positive and negative encounters and how we treat our environment the burden of disease. The concept of contaminated health helps us develop a new mutualistic, interdependent and ecological outlook towards health. It helps us transform our relationship with our bodies, health and communities.[iii] Going to the gym, meditating, following your health providers’ directions and eating right is still very relevant. The new “ecological” and communal perspective adds a focus and awareness on how we relate to and are impacted by your social and natural environment.
[i] Aaron Antonovsky, Health, Stress and Coping: New Perspectives on mental and Physical Well-Being (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1979).
[ii] Michael Marmot, The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015).
[iii] Pierre Morin, Big Medicine: Transforming Your Relationships With Your Body, Health, and Community (Santa Fe, NM: Belly Song Press, 2019).