How would you experience optimal efficiency of your healing system? Very
likely you would not be aware of it, because we
tend to pay little attention to our health when it is good. You would recover speedily from
illness and heal from injuries uneventfully. Ordinary stresses of everyday life
might annoy you but would not derange your digestion or blood pressure. Sleep
would be restful, sex enjoyable.
Aging of
your body would occur gradually, allowing you to moderate your activity
appropriately and live out a normal life span without undue discomfort. You would
not contract heart disease or cancer
in middle age, be crippled by arthritis in later life, or lose your mind to premature
senility.
This scenario is realistic and, I think, worth working for. Actually,
the body
wants to be healthy, because health represents
efficient operation of all of its systems. A useful analogy is the engine of a far. When all
components
are doing what they should be doing in just the right way, efficiency is maximal, and operation is quiet,
producing a "contented" purr that you rarely notice. An engine
that calls attention
to itself by sounding noisy and rough, hocking,
and expelling black smoke is not efficient. Since efficiency is the ratio
of work done to energy supplied, the sick engine is working harder to accomplish
less. In a similar way it takes less energy to be a healthy person than to be a sick one, and just as a driver may not pay
attention to the sound of a well-running engine, people may not be aware of the
condition of good health until it breaks down. A program to boost the efficiency of
the healing system will not necessarily produce
immediately noticeable changes. It is a long-term investment in the future of
the body. (Andrew Weil, M.D., ‘Spontaneous Healing’)