“Before healing someone, ask them if they are willing to give up the things that made them sick.”
— attributed to Hippocrates
When something in our body feels wrong, we usually do something very simple: we try to make the discomfort go away.
A headache? A painkiller.
Insomnia? Something to help us sleep.
Heartburn? A pill to shut it down.
This is not a critique. It’s simply who we are now.
We live in a culture that has taught us to remove the symptom so that we can keep going.
The problem is that, in doing so, we often stop asking a question that initially feels uncomfortable:
Why did this symptom appear?
And more importantly:
What in our life is producing it?
In this framework, healing does not mean changing.
It means continuing more or less in the same way—just without the pain.
This logic was already being criticized decades ago by Ivan Illich, who spoke of a form of medicine increasingly oriented toward managing symptoms rather than restoring people’s capacity to interpret their own experience (Medical Nemesis, 1976).
And this attitude does not concern the body alone.
It also shapes how we look at ourselves, at others—and, increasingly, at the planet.
Take, for instance, one of the issues that is rightly gaining more and more space in public debate: mental health.
In recent years, we’ve talked a lot about it.
Anxiety. Depression. Stress. Burnout.
Yet these states are almost always treated as individual problems—something the person must solve, perhaps with medication, therapy, or a bit of willpower.
We rarely ask whether this distress might be telling us something about the context we live in.
About the pace, the expectations, the organization of work, of relationships, of time itself.
This shift—from the collective level to the individual one—has also been noted by Mark Fisher, who showed how suffering is often depoliticized and transformed into personal responsibility (Capitalist Realism, 2009).
Distress is managed, not listened to.
It follows the same logic as the pill: remove the signal so that we don’t have to question the system that produced it.
In medicine, this way of thinking has become dominant: care as a service, the patient as a consumer, the body as a machine to be repaired.
The result is paradoxical: the more tools we have to “heal,” the more dependent we become on them—and the less capable we are of understanding what the body is trying to tell us.
From another perspective, Thierry Janssen has insisted precisely on this point: the symptom not as an error to be eliminated, but as a message to be listened to—an expression of a broken relationship between body, psyche, and environment (La maladie a-t-elle un sens ?, 2006).
The point is the gaze we have learned to adopt.
The same gaze that leads us to treat discomfort as a problem to be silenced, to isolate the symptom from the context that produces it, to search for a quick solution that does not require us to change how we live.
When this gaze becomes cultural, it doesn’t remain confined to personal health.
It becomes the way we interpret reality as a whole.
And this is where the discussion naturally expands.
Because we treat the planet in exactly the same way.
When we talk about the ecological crisis, the central theme is almost always one: temperature.
+1.5 degrees.
+2 degrees.
+3 degrees.
These numbers matter, of course.
But reducing the health of the Earth to a single indicator is a bit like judging a person’s health solely by their fever.
Fever is a real signal. But it is not the disease.
Meanwhile, beneath that number, many other things are happening:
forests disappearing, soils losing fertility, oceans acidifying, species declining or vanishing.
In recent years, some scientists have tried to describe these limits as planetary boundaries (planetary boundaries: thresholds beyond which the major balances of the Earth system begin to destabilize (Rockström et al.).
One of the most serious—and least discussed—signals concerns insects.
In many parts of the world, even in protected natural reserves, insect populations are collapsing.
This phenomenon has been described clearly by Oliver Milman, who speaks of a true silent collapse of the ecological foundation on which terrestrial ecosystems rest (Overshoot, 2020; articles in The Guardian).
In some cases, losses reach 70–80% in just a few decades.
This is a massive problem, because insects are not an annoying detail of the ecosystem.
They pollinate plants, maintain soil fertility, and keep food chains in balance.
And yet we talk about them very little.
Partly because there is no “insect thermometer.”
There is no simple number to show on a chart.
And partly because we often perceive them only as a nuisance, not as part of a vital web on which we depend.
We tend to see only what we know how to measure easily.
And to ignore what is diffuse, relational, silent.
The same happens in medicine: the more we rely on values on a screen, the less we listen to the person.
And in environmental science: the more we specialize in single indicators, the more we lose sight of the whole.
The guiding paradigm is the same: divide, isolate, reduce.
Body, mind, environment as separate compartments.
But neither a body nor a planet works that way.
They work through relationships.
And when relationships break, crisis does not always arrive as an explosion.
In fact, that is precisely what makes it more dangerous.
It often arrives as subtraction: less life, less resilience, less balance.
A world that slowly empties out, stops breathing—while we keep calling it normal.
The question attributed to Hippocrates, then, does not concern individual health alone.
It concerns all of us.
Are we willing to change what made us sick—as individuals and as a society?
Or do we just want the pain to stop bothering us, so that we can continue as before?
Because true healing is not the application of a technical solution.
It is the widening of our gaze..
It is learning again to see the connections between ourselves, others, and the environment that sustains us.
Recognizing that life is not a machine to be optimized, but a fragile balance to be inhabited together.
And that no pill—neither for the body nor for the planet—will ever be able to replace this awareness.
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