People often ask, sometimes anxiously, whether their constitution is a good one — as if some of the eight were healthier than others. The short answer is that your constitution and whether you are healthy are unrelated. This article is about constitution and health: what the type actually tells you, and what it does not.
In Summary
- Research on genes and environment points in many directions, but the common conclusion is both matter, and which matters more is hard to establish or even to separate.
- That holds for education, for wealth, and for almost all disease, where genetic and environmental factors act together.
- Epigenetics adds that how inherited genes are expressed depends on environment.
- Which constitution you are has no bearing on whether you are healthy.
- An inherited state of health can be overcome through adjusting environment and effort.
- What a constitution does give you: when health deteriorates, the probable forms it will take and the probable ways out.
- Think of it as the owner’s manual you consult when the body is in trouble.
- Arrange your surroundings to suit the shape you were born with, and do work that suits you, and you can live healthily in any constitution.
What the Research Broadly Says
Studies of how heredity and environment shape a life reach different results depending on the angle of interpretation and the purpose of the study. But the common conclusion is steady: both matter, and which matters more cannot be established precisely — often they cannot even be pulled apart.
That pattern repeats across very different domains.
Education. Both upbringing and heredity matter. There are studies finding environment more important and studies finding parental background more important.
Disease. For most conditions, environmental and genetic factors act on one another in combination.
Wealth. Inheritance of genes and of property matters, but the emergence of the exceptionally successful depends heavily on environment.
And epigenetics sharpens the point for biology specifically: the genes you inherit matter, but so does how they are expressed under the influence of environment. Acquired effort and inherited material act on each other, and both are important.
The Lesson for Constitutional Medicine
What should someone take from knowing their constitution?
People differ in the innate function of their organs. So when health deteriorates, a constitution tells you the probable range of what can happen, and the probable means of getting out of it.
That is the real use of the system: it tells you what kinds of illness are likely if things go wrong, and what tends to resolve them. It is a map of risk and remedy. It is not a grade.
This is the principle that underlies everything on this site. What is fixed in ECM is the arrangement of the organs. Everything built on top of it — which illnesses appear, how the body responds to food — is probabilistic. A constitution shifts the odds. It does not issue a sentence.
The Short Version
- Which constitution you are and whether you are healthy have nothing to do with each other.
- An inherited health condition can be overcome through adjusting your environment and through effort.
- A constitution is the manual for your body, to be used when it gets into trouble.
- Adjust your environment to suit the shape you were born with, do the work that suits you, and you can live well.
There is no good constitution and no bad one. There is a particular arrangement, a set of tendencies that come with it, and a considerable amount of room to live well inside it.
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