Defining Health

I think the World Health Organization's (WHO) longstanding definition of health as "a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity" is still a useful example of how health can be defined (WHO, 2020). In particular, because it opens up a window into the history of how health has been defined for years. That being said, I don't think the definition itself is relevant today. The fact that absence of disease is a requirement for health makes being healthy largely unattainable for many. Bradley et al. (2018) aptly describes health as "not being binary – either you have it or you don’t." Another criticism of the WHO's longstanding definition is the requirement for complete health across three domains. As Huber (2011) stated "most criticism of the WHO definition concerns the absoluteness of the word "complete" in relation to well-being," referring to the all-or-none requirements for health itself.

Card (2017) provides an alternative and more current definition of health as follows:

"health is the experience of physical and psychological well-being. Good health and poor health do not occur as a dichotomy, but as a continuum. The absence of disease or disability is neither sufficient nor necessary to produce a state of good health."

An aspect of Card's definition of health that I quite like is that it includes an element of subjectivity. This is because, as Card (2017) says " a person's experience of well-being is inherently subjective." The domains of health included in Card's definition of health, physical and psychological, are presented broadly; I like this aspect of the definition because unlike the WHO's definition of health Card's provides room for interpretation. Another contrast to that of the WHOs definition of health is the notion that a person can have an underlying disease or a medical condition and still in fact be healthy. Lastly, I quite like that Card refers to health as being on a continuum; this personalizes health for an individual, enabling the pursuit of individualized goals (Card, 2017). While I've touched on aspects of Card's definition of health that I believe to be favorable, I do wonder how effective health could be measured at a population level using it. In particular, because it largely relies on a person's subjective experiences.

References

Bradley, K. L., Goetz, T., & Viswanathan, S. (2018). Toward a Contemporary Definition of Health. Military Medicine, 183(suppl_3). https://doi.org/10.1093/milmed/usy213

Card, A. J. (2017). Moving Beyond the WHO Definition of Health: A New Perspective for an Aging World and the Emerging Era of Value-Based Care. In World Medical and Health Policy (Vol. 9, Issue 1, pp. 127–137). Blackwell Publishing Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1002/wmh3.221

Huber, M. (2011). HEALTH: HOW SHOULD WE DEFINE IT? BMJ: British Medical Journal, 343(7817), 235–237. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23051314

World Health Organization (2020). Basic Documents Forty-Ninth Edition. https://apps.who.int/gb/bd/pdf_files/BD_49th-en.pdf#page=6