Our body as a machine

Our body is like a machine. We can liken it to a motor car. Many of us love to have a motorcar. But how many of us are mechanics or car experts, that know what to put right in a car when the car develops a particular problem. Just like you have in the car essential parts like the gear, the clutch, the wiper and so on not to talk of the engine, so also does our body have many parts usually referred to as organs, each of which is very vital to the over-all well being that we call good health.

But as much as we own our body how many of us are experts in all the ways that it functions to give us good health. Can we blame ourselves for that? I will say NO !, But it is the reason that we cannot blame ourselves that make a responsible car owner, who doesn’t know much about the technicalities of his car to know what to do about the maintenance of that car before it comes an embarrassment to him. That is the reason for the servicing of a car.

Car servicing is a pro-active approach to maintaining the health of a car. You don’t want it to breakdown before you become aware of what may be going wrong with the car. This is the approach of preventive being better than cure. As it applies to the car for those who are wise, so it applies to the human body too.

The way it applies to the human body is now becoming the pre-occupation of certain health experts who want to emphasize on the preventive approach to the issue of health than the curative approach. What this means is that even if the average man is not well familiar with the technicalities of his body functions, that must not stop him from having elementary knowledge of what these organs in the body are – what they do and probably how they collaborate with one another to produce certain effects in our body.

To start with, when we talk of our body functions in the general sense of it, it also includes our mind functions because what people don’t know as mind functions, we psychologists must begin to tell you now is predicated largely on the antonomic functions of most of our organs.

Unfortunately so, the tragedy of mind functions is that most people don’t reckon with its serious implications on the entire issue of health. They don’t know how the mind can negatively affect what you call the issue of bodily functions. So psychologists are also waking up to the fact that in discussing the issue of health in a comprehensive manner. We must begin to talk in terms of mind – body relationship.