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April 2005

By Chris Wolski

In Pursuit of Wellness

While attending the recent APTA Combined Sections Meeting in New Orleans, I was struck by many things—the European feel of the Big Easy, the enthusiasm and openness of the attendees (professional meetings tend to bring out the best in people), and how blurred the lines were between medicine and wellness.

The latter was the most striking to me. Though there were many vendors at the meeting who displayed obvious medical devices (eg, wheelchairs) there were even more who had devices that looked as if they would be as welcome in a fitness center as at a therapy site. It became obvious to me that the idea of rehabilitation as a gateway to continuing wellness is becoming a new, de facto paradigm for many therapists.

While I was having this Archimedian moment, half a world away, the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life had just concluded a meeting on the Quality of Life and the Ethics of Health.

During a widely reported press conference in early February, which served as the meeting’s preamble, members of the academy denounced the Western “religious” obsession with health.

This curious and fascinating press conference—itself held during one of the pontiff’s recent medical emergencies—was as staunch in its Catholicism as it was in its broad humanistic insight. While there is no doubt that we Americans, particularly in places such as Rehab Management’s home base of Los Angeles, are a bit too focused on the superficialities of health—smooth skin, toned muscles, a brilliant smile—good health is also one of the obvious benefits of living in Western society.

During the press conference, Manfred Lutz, a neurologist, psychiatrist, and member of the academy, observed that “if health represents the highest value, then the healthy man is also the true man. And whoever is not healthy, and above all whoever can never be healthy again, tacitly becomes a second- or third-class man.”

Lutz does have a point. Many people outside the medical profession recoil at the idea of the less-than-perfect man or woman, viewing the person in a wheelchair or with other disabilities as not deserving the dignity or respect afforded their “first-class” brethren.

What is needed—and John Paul II’s own rehabilitation and the exercise machines at the Combined Sections Meeting clearly illustrate—is for the conventional meaning of “health” to not only be challenged, but jettisoned from the medical lexicon. Instead, and this is where physical medicine can take pride as being a leader, the ethical focus should be on a much more idiosyncratic, individual term: wellness. With its goal not superficial perfection, but the attainment of one’s highest potential physically, psychologically, and spiritually, wellness guarantees what the Vatican ethicists have called for: a respect for all human life. This yet-to-be defined paradigm has already been put into practice in rehabilitation departments in both Rome and the United States. And what makes this term, as any therapist knows, more robust is that “health” is a pursuit while wellness is a way of life.

--Chris Wolski

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