Clarifying the Idol: A Reply to “The Worship of Health”

Dear Editor,

In his recent editorial, Dr. Carroll identifies the “worship of health” as a social malady that gives rise to excessive risk avoidance or transfer (Carroll 2026). While Dr. Carroll is surely correct in his observation of a cultural anxiety surrounding the prospect of illness, we argue here that this anxiety stems not strictly from the idolatry of health but more precisely from the absence of a shared understanding of what health consists of. We offer below an account of health which should clarify the goal of medical practice and constrain its excessive (idolatrous) pursuit.

Thomas Aquinas noted that idolatry occurs when honor properly accorded to God is diverted toward an alternative, lesser entity (Aquinas 1920, ST II-II, q. 94). A key step in mitigating idolatry is characterizing this alternative entity so that one might pursue it with the right intent, and in due proportion. Dr. Carroll's claim of the “worship of health,” then, warrants a clearer understanding of health so that it can be pursued in accordance with right reason and to the proper degree.

In their book The Way of Medicine, Farr Curlin and Christofer Tollefsen highlight the need for such a shared definition of health in a contemporary context where disagreement surrounding the scope of medical practice abounds. Curlin and Tollefsen draw on the work of physician Leon Kass to define health as “‘the well-working of the organism as a whole,’ realized and manifested in the characteristic activities of the living body in accordance with its species-specific life-form” (Curlin and Tollefsen 2021, 31). This definition posits health as an objective good oriented towards the broader flourishing of the human animal. In Curlin and Tollefsen's New Natural Law account, health is not the ultimate good but one among additional basic human goods that should never be intentionally damaged, though may sometimes be foregone in light of the patient's vocational discernment. Their account, therefore, protects against an excessive and idolatrous pursuit of health at two levels: first, by delimiting health to objective features of human well-working rather than subjectivist accounts of well-being; and second, by recognizing that health is not the summum bonum, but one good among many others, which requires a proper ordering for its right pursuit.

Curlin and Tollefsen's account stands in stark contrast to other definitions of health, such as the World Health Organization's, which states that “health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” (World Health Organization 1948). Such a definition of health seems to lend itself to the sort of idolatry that Carroll is concerned with, as very few aspects of life could be excluded from the jurisdiction of health so conceived.

An objective account of health would strengthen Dr. Carroll's argument because it also provides a normative scaffolding to guide difficult decisions about whether an intervention is oriented toward the preservation or restoration of health, or whether it extends medicine's reach into the management of statistical risk or the illusion of control over mortality. When patients and physicians work from a shared understanding of humans’ well-working, they share a moral obligation to pursue and restore health when it is lacking, but also to avoid interventions that intentionally harm health or distract from its pursuit. Absent such a shared understanding, patients and physicians prove vulnerable to the excessive emphasis on preventive medicine that Dr. Carroll highlights, which manifests as an obsession with risk mitigation and transfer. When health is poorly defined, this creates the conditions for “risk” to be understood as “potential disease,” leading to the type of “cultural iatrogenesis” characteristic of our modern medicalized society that Ivan Illich warned of decades ago (Illich 1974). Paul Scherz has further noted that this pathologized version of “risk” can ironically detract from health by creating the false impression that risk can be fully mitigated or “cured,” thereby generating an unreasonable expectation that fuels anxiety (Scherz 2024).

While we contend that an objective definition of health provides a necessary check against the type of idolatry Dr. Carroll describes, it is not sufficient. Even when one can determine whether a given decision accords with health, such decisions cannot be made in a vacuum. They require an ability to situate the good of health within a broader context of human meaning since, as Alasdair MacIntyre noted, “it is always by reference to some conception of the overall and final human good that other goods are ordered” (MacIntyre, quoted in Hauerwas 2007). This ordering of goods cannot be done in isolation but requires formation within a tradition capable of ordering goods by reference to a final end, such as Christianity, which offers insight into when goods such as health are pursued reasonably rather than excessively. While Carroll calls for us all to “listen and read carefully,” we would add that such listening and reading ought to be a communal, rather than an individual, undertaking, one that is best undertaken before a moment of crisis. Such a formation is not simply intellectual but requires the embodied narratives and practices of prayer, liturgy, scripture, and the sacraments through which the Christian tradition forms its members to rightly order health among the goods of human life. Formed in this manner, the Christian becomes capable of trusting, as biblical scholar Kavin Rowe writes, that “God's care for us in the face of death's cosmic power cannot mean we trust God to protect us from all harm; it means trusting in God to resurrect us from the dead” (Rowe 2023, 126). In the practices of the Church, Christians come before the One who always lies beyond all human mastery, which in turn trains us to live with faith, hope, and charity in the face of illness and death.