The main thing is healthy

The Stapferhaus is the big black building right next to the railway station. It always hosts one exhibition per year, sometimes they run longer. They are correspondingly elaborate. The building is completely remodelled from one project to the next. Modules and variable elements make it possible.

The preview of the new exhibition starts in a waiting room, which I think is a pretty good idea. After all, we carry our health problems around with us and when we've had enough of them, we all sit in a room and wait.

So we wait dutifully like at a real doctor's appointment, then we are called up and guided through a corridor that tells us everything that keeps us humans alive. For example, our heart beats up to 200,000 times a day. We breathe 11 litres of air in the same period. We have 650 muscles and 360 joints at work. And our head thinks up to 80,000 thoughts a day - although I wonder how you can count them.

Our path leads to the diagnosis. This is a very large, very black room with around 5,000 diseases listed on the walls from a textbook - which probably contains more than 30,000. Our bodies are obviously very, very vulnerable.

Scattered around the room are various islands of light with an armchair or couch and a table, each individually designed and when we sit down, we look at a large rectangular screen on which a person sits opposite us and, when we reach for the loudspeaker, tells us their medical history. There is a Long Covid patient, a young woman with anxiety disorders, an older woman with muscle atrophy, an alcoholic, a deaf person who doesn't see her disability as an illness - she was born this way and is coping well with her life. What impresses me is that they have all learnt to deal with their illness and even see the positive side of it: more empathy, more joy in small things, more self-confidence thanks to their successes in battling their disability.

From here, we take the lift up to the diagnosis. I admit, you can get bogged down here, because health is a complex topic. It's about prophylaxis, sport, medication, therapies, public health statistics, all often combined with witty ideas and lots of tactile elements. You can ride a bike, row, and if you want to listen to an interview, you have to do a few pull-ups first. There are food boxes with Smarties and worms and an operating theatre, children get a small red doctor's case and anyone who has looked, read and tried out enough can be gently shaken in rest areas with comfortable seats.

The tour took me about two hours and I still didn't use all the information on offer. As I said, it's a complex topic. I'm most interested in prophylaxis and I'm currently having good experiences. My doctor prescribed me an app because I don't sleep well. I like this kind of help for self-help - just like the exhibition itself.