When Did Health Stop Being a Royal Priority?

Royal Beginnings

When a child is born, we say, “As long as it’s healthy, that’s all that matters.”

But adulthood tells a different story, one where health begins to compete with ambition.

From the beginning, we decide what is most important about life: health.

As a medical student, I attended the opening of the Emma Kinderziekenhuis in 2015, inaugurated by King Willem-Alexander. It felt like a public acknowledgment that care itself is a royal act.

Staff spoke softly. The wards were bright and colourful, reminders that even in illness, life can still be celebrated.

The design itself became medicine, reducing fear and restoring joy.

Yet, somewhere between ambition and adulthood, that joy is traded away.

The Adult Trade-Off

Once grown, this recognition fades. Adults rarely receive the care that honours their full reality.

Many turn to overwork, neglecting the value we once placed above all else.

Yet in a time of accelerating change with inflation, technology, and shifting housing realities, effort still creates stability, and skilled work still deserves reverence.

That dedication becomes the grace beneath everything we call progress.

Yet when effort extends beyond personal balance, survival begins to masquerade as success, efficient and reactive, and no longer alive to choice.

This loss of agency, the belief that we can influence circumstances, has real consequences.

Medicine thaught me that low perceived control is linked to higher cardiovascular risk, largely mediated by the stress response itself.

The Physiology of Powerlessness

In the short term, stress is good fuel. Cortisol sharpens attention and mobilizes energy. It’s adaptive and in service of what we aspire to.

But when exposure becomes constant, the same system begins to harm.

Chronic exposure to cortisol stiffens blood vessels.

And perception can follow the same path, becoming less open, less adaptive.

We remain engaged, yet detached, participating fully in systems that no longer reflect what truly matters personally.

We begin to move through life as passengers instead of participants.

For most people childhood is a brief chapter; adulthood is the long one.

The same autonomy children feel when painting on hospital walls is the same lost when adults stop participating in their own lives.

What if medicine again embraced participation, agency, and meaning and health itself became the true measure of success?

The New Royalty: Agency as Medicine

Agency, when body and mind allow, is a core health behaviour, as essential as medical treatment.

It’s found in choices: for one, reaching out to socialize; for another, rising early; for another, drinking in moderation.

Such choices restore our sense of what truly matters.

Royal care isn’t found in titles or ceremony.

It lives in the everyday agency to live one’s own meaning of health, a dignity that endures through every age and condition.

It asks us to hold the same reverence and beauty once given to life’s beginning.

Even the briefest joy in time is medicine itself.

If childhood care can teach joy in illness, adulthood can teach agency in healing.

That is the new royalty, one that is chosen.