modern health

Cancer, Depression, Infertility, Diabetes, Obesity, Anxiety, Heart Attack, Arthritis, Abnormalities, Fear and Phobias – every person reading this would know at least one patient suffering from at least one of the abovementioned daunting list of diseases and ailments, and these are to mention only the disastrously terrifying. Otherwise, we have all regularly been victimized by the common cold, high fever, headaches, back pains and the usual ‘under the weather’ feelings. How has health deteriorated to a stage where we have become increasingly accustomed to gulping down medications and pills as a matter of habit and see no wrong in the number of people visiting the hospitals on a daily basis. Living a life with no medical prescriptions cluttering your bed side table has become a strange happening. If all these drugs and injections were to cure anything at all, why has the wellbeing of humanity in general constantly dropped since the past few decades while our medical expenditures have only increased?

Readers, I beg you to open your eyes and clear the fogged lenses with which we have started to view our world. Disease is common, Depression is widespread, the Downfall of Health is ever increasing, but nothing makes these natural. Once living up to 100 years, I hear people merely at the age of 50 giving up on their life and counting down the days to their end. I listen to absolutely mind boggling stories of teenagers suffering from diseases like Diabetes and Arthritis which were, by definition, associated only with age. I see cancer becoming an epidemic with the death toll rising profusely and not leaving any one safe from the tremendous fear of the name. I see doctors being treated like gods and thinking life and death are theirs to distribute. I see people revering hospitals and medicines like potions of immortality and blaming everything but themselves for the suffering around. I see pure havoc.

Where did we go so wrong so quick and stopped being bothered in the process? What does health really encompass and how are we so oblivious to something significantly central to our existence? What have we failed to understand about our bodies, our minds, our hearts, and most importantly, our souls that has caused such deleterious effects on our wellness? I’m sure quite a few of you out there will be looking in the mirror just about now and thinking Óh, but I am perfectly okay’. The question is, for how long? The disease we see manifested in its physical form is the last of all stages of health, much like the container with a rotten apple inside of it. We only see the container deteriorating after the apple inside has entirely decayed. The internal deterioration, therefore, is a process we rarely see or feel, but the repercussions are incredibly alarming for those who don’t understand the phenomenon of health consisting of a whole, not just our bodies. The depressed man will most definitely end up with a life threatening ailment a few years down the road, surprised at the outcome, but living the process since long before reality hit him.

So we all, in one way or another, are patients of our thoughts, our feels, our spirits or, eventually, our bodies. We are in constant pain caused by a decline in the wellbeing of one or another of the aforementioned, and in constant search of a cure for the same as well. The fact, however, is highlighted in the following hadith:
The Prophet (SAW) said:

“There is no disease that Allah has sent down except that He also has sent down its treatment.”

[The Book of Medicine: Sahih Bukhari]

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So, what is the treatment? Was the cure in spending billions of dollars in the hopes of living a few more months or in the terrible fate of living life where medication replaces the air we need to breathe and we become enslaved to a monotonous routine of continuously trying to fix our bodies so we can live a ‘normal, happy life’. If it is as the Prophet (SAW) said it to be, why are we then time and again told ‘there is nothing that we can do further to help’ or that ‘the disease is incurable, we can only delay it’. Where is the promise of a cure to all ailments, what is the answer to the cries of thousands of mothers praying for the health of their children, of the hundreds of children being orphaned every day because of the untimely death of their parents, and of the millions of individuals hoping to die a peaceful death without hospital beds and wired injections?

If we continue living the way those around us do, we will inevitably end up at the same place they are, perhaps even worse. So before you are quick in concluding your health to be A-okay today, take a step to make sure you can still smile and celebrate your good health a decade from now. And ask yourself, are you really okay today? How sure can you be that the hidden process hasn’t already begun?