Definition of Health

Years ago, when it still enjoyed credibility, the WHO defined health this way:

WHO Definition of Health 1947

“a complete state of physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” (WHO 1947).

For chiropractic in Mataro, health is much more than the absence of symptoms; health depends on the full functioning of the organism.

Ensuring that the brain can communicate with the body through a nervous system free of interference is the primary focus of the chiropractor.

Thus, the brain can control all the systems of the body. There are several factors that determine health, some variable like hormone levels in your system that change according to your age and sex, others more static: norms or determining figures that establish whether we are healthy or not.

Fever

Think of a figure we all use: 37ºC. Normal body temperature. Are you sure? According to the magazine The Week, the normal temperature is 36.7ºC… How could they be wrong? Although generally accepted as correct, this figure came from a study conducted in the mid-19th century by a German physician named Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich, who dedicated his professional life to establishing the normal body temperature for humans.

He used a mercury thermometer, a 30 cm glass tube, to take the axillary temperature of 25,000 people, for 11 minutes each person, at different times of the day, to obtain his data. He discovered that temperature varied from person to person, being lower in the morning and rising in the afternoon according to the person’s activity: ranging from 36.2 to 38º.

Once he compiled all the data, the good doctor calculated the average of all the data obtained by hand… the calculator did not yet exist; the first ones were marketed in 1902. He obtained the result known and accepted to this day: 37ºC. More recent studies have revealed that the average temperature is not only lower than established but also varies among different groups of people.

It is somewhat higher in women than in men, in people of color, in children, and in pregnant women. It is lower in the elderly. The average of all these groups is 36.7ºC. Surprised by the results of their studies, scientists had the opportunity to examine Dr. Wunderlich’s original thermometer: it was miscalibrated… So all his data and results are erroneous! There are more data than we rely on related to health.

Pregnancy

Human embryonic gestation: 280 days. A figure established by the German gynecologist Franz Carl Naegele in 1805. He based it on information from the Bible that gestation is 10 lunar cycles (10×28 days) and calculates it from the first day of the last menstruation (when it is physiologically impossible to conceive).

It is not surprising that it only hits the exact day in 5% of pregnancies. Since then, we know that pregnancies, just like blood pressure and temperature, are not the same and also depend on race (women of color tend to give birth 8.5 days earlier), whether it is the first or second pregnancy, and even the mother’s social status and stress level influence. Another interesting fact is blood pressure as established in 1901: 120/80, with anything below 140 considered normal.

In the U.S. in 2003, a committee of 11 experts was formed to study the issue of hypertension, and they ended up creating a condition called pre-hypertension. The experts believed that any patient with numbers of 120-139 or 80-89 should be medicated preventively as they were in the risk group created by them. It turns out that 9 of the 11 experts had direct ties to major pharmaceutical companies that, with this study, increased their sales of anti-hypertensive medication by 550% in three years.

We should return to trusting our bodies: health comes from the top down and from the inside out, not the other way around. Karel Deprez, DC Mallorca