A significance of the tacit embodied knowledge, which was explored by Heidegger and Merleau Ponty as a form of everyday coping, is that it gives us an account of lay knowledge that can be juxtaposed to the expert knowledge of the medical profession.

If we are substantially present in the world and engaged with it as embodied beings, then we have some understandings of what makes us ill and causes us to be unwell. This kind of knowing is concerned with interpretation that makes sense of our illness, eg., obesity. Junk food and lack of exercise may be the way we do this--understand the meaning of illness through a narrative.

This is quite different from the clinical understanding of disease which is primarily evidenced based and so a different form of knowledge.