Health and Wellness
Many Christian physicians have set out to define "health" in biblical terms. What I've found is that they usually try to smash together two concepts: holistic wellness (or biblical "shalom") and our modern understanding of biomedical health. It might be helpful to leave health and wellness as two separate things. John Pilch explains in his book, Wellness Spirituality , that for him "wellness is not a synonym for good health, physical or mental. You can be terminally ill, mentally retarded, and permanently disabled, yet still have a high level of wellness… Wellness can be imagined as a line parallel to a health and sickness line. Wellness can coexist with terminal illness as well as with health." He goes on to say that in his experience, the people who have the hardest time with this distinction between health and wellness are healthcare professionals who can only see reality through the lens of their profession. "Such individuals claim that so...