In the next 50 years, people are expected to face increasingly diverse and complex health challenges.
These are the natural consequence of imbalances related to lifestyle, aging, chronic diseases, climate change, polluted environment, catastrophic collapse of some natural ecosystems, reduced diversity of the gut/skin microbiome, significant territorial mobility of the population, the impact of AI, and other emerging automated technologies penetrating various sectors of life, etc.
For some time now, those of us working in the health sector have realized that without an open, versatile, and systemic approach, we're just spinning in circles, and the results are uncertain, short-lived.
I've learned to view individuals holistically, considering their physical, mental, energetic, and symbolic dimensions.
Recently, I've introduced into the array of healing resources I recommend daily, the necessity of CONTINUOUS LEARNING for adults. I believe it will play a vital role in managing future health states.
For centuries, the belief has been widespread that human education primarily occurs in childhood. There was an assumption that there are three major stages of human life: childhood, dominated by education; adulthood, where work predominates; and old age, which was believed to be a preparation for leaving this world.
Gradually, industrial work dramatically altered the entire content of life, necessitating education to extend beyond childhood. Even the significant development of higher education at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries indicates the necessity of ongoing learning and retraining in adulthood.
I've come across various definitions of education today:
-"transformation of an individual's psychological consciousness" - Jean Piaget
-"changing the meaning of human experience" - Marc A. Quellet
-"altering positive values in human rational behavior" - Ioan Cerghit
In fact, education is the continuous construction and reconstruction of an internal model of knowledge, appreciation (perception), and action in relation to the world in which we live. It's also a process of humanization through which individuals acquire new human qualities that allow them to establish a relatively stable balance with the family, social, cultural, professional, and natural environment.
The necessity of adult education stems from the major imbalances that have occurred since the second half of the 20th century, especially between humans and the surrounding environment.
By introducing change as a means of adaptation, humans find themselves compelled to change as well! Transformation can only occur by modifying one's own knowledge, the system of reality assessment judgments, scrutinizing beliefs, reevaluating thinking patterns and action capacities, discovering and nurturing new existential abilities.
The difficulty of the concept of adult education stems from both the epistemological rupture of our days and the relatively weak understanding of adults, perhaps even of children and young people. Often, training has been based solely on physiology, anatomy, and psychology, overlooking anthropological data.
It seems that educational theory has not yet incorporated the idea that within each individual there is a history of the species' evolution, not just that of the individual or the source family.
Education is the essential form of adaptation of humans to the world and of the world to humans. Adaptation occurs through a three-dimensional internal model of knowledge, receptivity, perception, and behavior.
Our entire activity from birth to maturity consists of constructing such an internal model of the world, which helps us think, act, and appreciate. Since this model is of a given time/space, changing knowledge, value hierarchies, and modes of action require revisiting it approximately every decade.
Adult education involves supporting those major changes in the internal model of the world, under the pressure of internal or external events.
Quality learning today "costs" all kinds of resources, whether done with someone or if you're self-taught (certainly depending on the field and the adopted form). What's freely available on social media isn't learning but rather information.
And from information to integration, understanding, information sedimentation, implementation, transcending the obsolete internal model, there's a PATH, a journey, and without consistent dedication or a talented guide, the process can be arduous and require additional "expense."
Let's see what some of the advantages of implementing continuous learning in the HEALTH sector, for the well-being of the organism, might be:
1.Continuous learning brings updated knowledge about how various factors can influence health. This knowledge can help prevent diseases and maintain an optimal state.
2. Continuous learning can equip adults with self-care skills or how to monitor their health and make informed decisions regarding their personal care.
3. Continuous learning can facilitate adults' understanding and adaptation to changes in the healthcare system, including new scientific discoveries, technologies, or medical services. This improves their ability to access and use those services and to manage their health more effectively.
4. Continuous learning facilitates the acquisition of resilience skills, such as adapting to change and managing stress. These skills subsequently contribute to maintaining an optimal state of health and reducing the risk of chronic diseases associated with maladaptation and resistance to external changes.
5. Continuous learning confronts you with yourself, with your limits, and with patience builds osmosis between who you think you are and who you've come to be, reviving through nervous training the great regenerative capacity of the human being.
6. Continuous learning keeps you cognitively engaged, moves the energy-information flows on the nervous system's highways, potentially preventing nervous degeneration and the onset of a form of dementia, about which the WHO informed us in 2021 that 10 million people receive this diagnosis every year.
7. It would be useful to go to the doctor not to seek HEALING but LEARNING.
Let them teach us about the installed condition, about the dysfunctional organ, and its connections with other structures, let them support us in unlearning dependencies, mental addictions (sometimes well-hidden), and illusions. Instead of leaving with prescriptions, let us depart with new word meanings, with fruitful attitudes in balance, tightly woven over what we thought we knew, had, or were.
This is how I usually SURPRISE my clients, some are enthusiastic, others don't return or return after some time with the remark: "I think I understand what you told me, can we move forward?"...
Without claiming a definitive answer or a comprehensive analysis, I'd like you to bring your perspective on the role of education in shaping the future of health!
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