Our Language is the Perfect Reflection of Our Perception of Health

I kicked off the evening in 33-degree heat with a casual 10K loop up on the Zürichberg. Running without music might sound incredibly boring at first. And it is! But that’s exactly what makes it so fascinating. This monotony, the sheer repetition, and the boredom— which is essentially a massive dopamine withdrawal — literally hack the brain. The prefrontal cortex, responsible for logical, analytical thinking, switches into energy-saving mode, while the Default Mode Network takes over. The dominance of fast beta waves is replaced by relaxed alpha and theta waves. At this point, the system truly begins to process and connect background information, putting creativity into overdrive.

I was actually brainstorming my next blog post during the run—trying to figure out the best way to articulate the radical difference between traditional medicine and osteopathy—when I had a sudden, strange realization about the way we use language every day.

We have two basic states: health and sickness.

When we move away from being sick, we call it healing. The English language is brilliant here: both "health" and "heal" stem from the Old English word hāl, meaning "whole." Healing is literally the process of becoming whole again. It implies time, effort, and a natural progression.

But what about moving from health toward sickness? We say we fall ill or catch a disease. Our language frames this as a sudden, almost violent event — like falling into a hole or catching a thrown object out of nowhere. Even the word disease itself implies a sudden disruption (dis-ease).

And how eerily does this mirror reality! Our language suggests that getting sick is a sudden, accidental event that just happens to us, while healing is a grueling, deliberate journey. Because of this linguistic blind spot, we almost never notice the quiet, mysterious process operating in the background, through which we slowly and imperceptibly lose our health.