What is health?

Health, according to the World Health Organization, is "a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity."

This definition was first adopted in 1946 and it was designed to provide a transformative vision of “health for all”. The purpose of defining the concept of health was to negate academic understanding based on an “absence” of pathology.

Today, our understandings of disease at molecular, individual, and societal levels give very little justice to the current era. Given that we now appreciate the important influence of the genome in disease, even the most optimistic health advocate surely has to accept the impossibility of risk-free wellbeing.

Nonetheless, physical, psychological, and social aspects still remain powerfully relevant to this day. However, the definition should be extended into further two dimensions. First, our environment is extremely important to human health, as we cannot be detached from the health of our total planetary biodiversity. Human beings do not exist in a biological vacuum. We live in an interdependent existence with the of the living world. So, an unhealthy environment will equate to poor health. Second, our inanimate environment is also very important, for example, the sunlight. Thanks to science, we have grown to understand how dependent human wellbeing is on the ‘health’ of the Earth’s systems of energy exchange.

Science has enriched our understanding of wellbeing and has given us means to eliminate a lot of what once passed as human suffering. That said, science has failed to eradicate suffering, despite its enormous power to deliver technologies to improve health. Instead, suffering has changed faces. For example, getting a bacterial infection is no longer a death sentence and can easily be treated with anti-biotics, but being diagnosed with tendinitis can open a path to chronic pain which substantially lower the quality of life. The dimensions of suffering has changed over time, and its the time for observe health from multi-diciplinary aspect rather than drawing up reductive report cards on an individual’s health status. This will open up a more realistic understanding of what it means to be healthy. Simply because now we know that it is possible to have illness with no disease.

The difficulty in obtaining a minimum quantity of health may seem so huge and so complex that it becomes impossible for a single doctor to have any substantial influence to the healthcare society. But if we approach health with more adaptable point of view, then perhaps we may be able to transcend the complexities of disease and offer a very practical mission for modern healthcare industry.

Georges Canguilhem, in 1943, had proposed that health is not something that can be defined statistically or mechanistically. He saw health as the individual’s ability to adapt to their environment. Health varies for every individual and heavily depend on their circumstances.

Health is not defined by the doctors, but by the individual and their percieved needs. The role of the doctor is to help the individual to adapt their conditions. This should be the meaning of the ‘personalised medicine’.

The best thing about Canguilhem's definition of health is that it includes both the animate and inanimate environment, as well as the physical, mental, and social elements of human life. It places the individual, not the doctor, in a position of self-determining authority to define their own health needs. The doctor becomes a partner in delivering those needs.

Flexibility is a valued skill that should be implemented in modern Healthcare. I describe flexibility as the ability to adapt to changing circumstances. This allows us to be agile in the face of shifting forces that shape the wellbeing of individuals and populations.

Health is an elusive as well as a motivating idea. By replacing perfection with adaptation, we get closer to a more compassionate, comforting, and creative programme for healthcare.