Dr. Alan Rozanski

Why We Misunderstand What Health Really Is

Before we can build health, we need to recognize a simple but overlooked problem:

Most of us don’t actually know what health is.

We speak about it confidently, but in everyday life our definition is surprisingly narrow. If nothing hurts, we assume we’re fine. If tests are normal, we feel reassured. Health becomes something we notice only when it begins to slip.

This assumption quietly shapes how we approach our lives.
We wait rather than build.
We react rather than strengthen.
We equate “not sick” with “well.”

In the next three essays, we’ll examine how this misunderstanding takes hold:

1. Why modern medicine focuses more on disease than health —
   scientific progress has made us extremely precise at identifying illness, while paying far less attention to what actually creates health.
2. Why we stop noticing health when it’s present — when the body functions smoothly, health fades into the background of awareness.
3. How healthcare reinforces the “not sick” definition — when tests are normal, we are often told we’re healthy, even if our vitality is quietly declining.

Before we can answer what health truly is, we first have to understand why we’ve been thinking about it the wrong way.