Your Health is Governed by Your Environment: Prof. BM Hegde (Transcript)

Full text of renowned cardiologist Prof. BM Hegde’s talk: Your Health is Governed by Your Environment at TEDxIITHyderabad conference. In this talk, Professor Hegde breaks down misconceptions about health, and leaves us questioning what health actually means.

Listen to the MP3 Audio here:

TRANSCRIPT:

Professor B.M. Hegde – Medical Scientist, Educationist & Author

Well, knowledge advances, wrote Karl Popper way back in 1950s, not by repeating known things but by refuting false dogmas. This is how knowledge advances.

For example, it was said by Ptolemy in the second century that the sun goes around the Earth, which was followed for 500 years, up until Copernicus came and said, no the other way around. So this has been going on like this.

In medicine, and in the area of health, this myth is perpetuating for nearly 2000 years now, from the time of the reductionist science of Descartes.

What is health? There’s a definition by called Alma-Ata definition of health. Health is absence of this disease, that disease, all kinds of diseases.

If you analyze this, it’s just a business definition. Because if you want to know whether you’re healthy or not, it was go for a checkup. And that’s a big business, because you’re checking up the whole population of the world if you really can. Because if you are treating only the ill people, it’s only a few million on a given day.