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Wellsprings
medicine

Regimen (Diet & Way of Life as Medicine)

δίαιτα

The physician's chief tools for health were not drugs but the whole ordering of daily life — diet, exercise, sleep, bathing, and air.

Regimen (diaita) is the Hippocratic management of health through everyday living: food, drink, exercise, rest, bathing, sex, and the surrounding air, all balanced to the patient's constitution, age, and season. The treatises 'Regimen' and 'Regimen in Acute Diseases' (late 5th–4th c. BCE) devote far more attention to this ordered way of life than to drugs or surgery, treating the patient's whole environment as part of the cure. This dietetic vision of medicine became the foundation of Western preventive health and of the later 'non-naturals' of Galenic medicine.

Where this idea shows up

6 Greek sources·1 Jewish-canon citation

Where to read it