Spiritual_Wellness_Holistic_Health_and_the_Practic

60 Philosophical Foundations of Health Education
I won ’ t go into great detail about then - theories, but one or two ideas are instructive.
They suggest that since the beginning of human time, we have had to condense the enormous
amounts of information available in the environment into manageable dimensions.
We ’ ve had to develop a kind of mental shorthand. They call this creating caricatures of
reality. Because we can ’ t deal with all the stimuli in any given experience, we tend to
retain the elements of reality that are most proximate and simple to understand. We
haven ’t developed long- term memories or much tolerance for complexity. We tend to
trivialize things and make them local. The media, of course, has made the whole world
our neighborhood, and events in the far corners of the globe are experienced as if they
were next door. We quail at the news of terrorist attacks thousands of miles away, highly
unlikely to occur to any of us — they become a kind of public obsession and dominate the
news — while we ignore much more salient occurrences such as slow but significant
increases over time in the number of homeless Americans, or the gradual thinning of the
ozone layer — tragedies that really are occurring in our own backyards.
We respond to the immediate and simplified caricature of a menacing terrorist and
overlook the dull statistics that indicate over time the development of fundamental
societal problems. Our learned response is to notice and personalize discrepancies,
emergencies, scarcity, anything we are told is “ news. ” We have to develop a new way
of thinking to live up to the challenges of the future. We have to give up being short -
term thinkers and develop the long view, to analyze situations rather than personalize
them. We have to look far enough back in time to understand our development as a
society and to see the trends that are evolving that help or threaten our quality of life.
We have to plan for long - term solutions as opposed to expecting the sitcom 30 - minute
resolution for serious societal problems.
For those of us in public health and education, this means we have to help people to
give up the search for instant cures and for preventive panaceas. We have to stop behaving
as if organized medical care is responsible for longevity and enhancing health status. We
all know that the changes in death rates and levels of health we have seen over the past
decades have been a result of better sanitation, better nutrition, changed behavior, and better
environmental conditions, and not new developments in medical technology. The general
public, however, doesn ’ t get this. They ignore or fail to see that improvements come
from gradual non - newsworthy changes in behavior and the social and physical environment.
We have to help people forego the hype. Hype has become the hallmark of modern
life, and we consistently confuse important issues with unimportant ones.
We have to help people to understand and rectify the human predilection for using
simple caricatures. We have to help them to take the long view, analyze statistics,
understand different cultures, think probabilistically. This is an especially important
role for those of us working with children.
THE LOOK OF THE NEW HEALTH EDUCATION
What will health education look like when it is created by health educators whose
thinking has caught up with the new world we are living in? Health education will be