The main impression growing out of twelve years on the faculty of a medical school is that the No. 1 health problem in the U. S. today, even more than AIDS or cancer, is that Americans don't know how to think about health and illness. Our reactions are formed on the terror level. We fear the worst, expect the worst, thus invite the worst. The result is that we are becoming a nation of weaklings and hypochondriacs (自疑有病者 ), a self-medicating society incapable of distinguishing between casual, everyday symptoms and those that require professional attention. Somewhere in our early education we become addicted to the notion that pain means sickness. We fail to learn that pain is the body's way of informing the mind that we are doing something wrong, not necessarily that something is wrong. We don't understand that pain may be telling us that we are eating too much or the wrong things; or that we are smoking too much or drinking too much; or that there is too much emotional congestion in our lives; or that we are being worn down by having to cope daily with overcrowded streets and highways, the pounding noise of garbage grinders, or the cosmic distance between the entrance to the airport and the departure gate, we get the message of pain all wrong. Instead of addressing ourselves to the cause, we become pushovers for pills, driving the pain underground and inviting it to return with increased authority. Early in life, too, we become seized with the bizarre idea that we are constantly assaulted by invisible monsters called germs, and that we have to be on constant alert to protect ourselves against their fury. Equal emphasis, however, is not given to the presiding fact that our bodies are superbly equipped to deal with the little demons, and that the best way of forestalling an attack is to maintain a sensible life-style. The most significant single statement about health to appear in the medical journals during the past decade is by Dr. Franz Ingelfinger, the late and former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. Ingelfinger noted that almost all illnesses are self-limiting. That is, the human body is capable of handling them without outside intervention. The thrust of the article was that we need not feel we are helpless if disease tries to tear away at our bodies, and that we can have greater confidence in the reality of a healing system that is beautifully designed to meet most of its problems. And even when outside help is required, our own resources have something of value to offer in a combined strategy of treatment.