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Wellsprings
medicine

The Non-Naturals (Six Manageable Factors of Health)

τὰ οὐ φυσικά

Six levers a physician can pull — air, food, sleep, exercise, excretion, and emotion — to keep the body balanced before it ever falls ill.

Greek physicians, above all Galen, taught that health was not a matter of luck but of management. They identified six external factors — the air you breathe, what you eat and drink, your sleep and waking, your activity and rest, what your body takes in and lets out, and the movements of your emotions — that a person could adjust to stay in balance. Called the "non-naturals" because they were neither part of the body's own nature nor diseases in themselves, these factors became the backbone of preventive medicine and regimen for well over a thousand years, from the medieval Arab and Latin physicians down to the dawn of modern hygiene.

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4 Greek sources

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