First, do no harm

Returning to the concept presented at the beginning of this paper, in an era when for many people the quality and longevity of life have never been better, why are there increasing levels of dissatisfaction with life? According to Thomas (1974), "there is something fundamentally, radically unhealthy about all this. We do not seem to be seeking more exuberance in living as much as staving off failure, putting off dying. We have lost all confidence in the human body. The new consensus is that we are badly designed, intrinsically fallible, vulnerable to a host of hostile influences. We live in danger of falling apart at any moment and are therefore always in need of surveillance and propping up." Certainly health educators cannot accept all the blame for this contemporary fad; however, they may contribute to the phenomenon by implicitly suggesting that people are entitled to some idealized level of health and wellness which includes halcyon days immune from the pain and ravages of life in the real world.2+ Henry David Thoreau offered a perceptive view of how life should be experienced when he wrote: "I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)