What is health?
Health is the level of functional or metabolic efficiency of a living being. In humans, it is the general condition of a person's mind, body and spirit, usually meaning to be free from illness, injury or pain. The World Health Organization (WHO) defined health in its broader sense in 1946 as "a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity". Although this definition has been subject to controversy, in particular as having a lack of operational value and the problem created by use of the word "complete", it remains the most enduring.
According to the World Health Organization, the main determinants of health include the social and economic environment, the physical environment, and the person's individual characteristics and behaviors.
More specifically, key factors that have been found to influence whether people are healthy or unhealthy include:
The concept of the "health field", as distinct from medical care, emerged from the Lalonde report from Canada. The report identified three interdependent fields as key determinants of an individual's health. These are:
More specifically, key factors that have been found to influence whether people are healthy or unhealthy include:
- Income and social status
- Social support networks
- Education and literacy
- Employment/working conditions
- Social environments
- Physical environments
- Personal health practices and coping skills
- Healthy child development
- Biology and genetics
- Health care sevices
- Gender
- Culture
The concept of the "health field", as distinct from medical care, emerged from the Lalonde report from Canada. The report identified three interdependent fields as key determinants of an individual's health. These are:
- Lifestyle: the aggregation of personal decisions (i.e. over which the individual has control) that can be said to contribute to, or cause, illness or death;
- Environmental: all matters related to health external to the human body, and over which the individual has little or no control.
- Biomedical: all aspects of health, physical and mental, developed within the human body as influenced by genetic make-up.
The way of life
In epidemiology, the way of life, habit of life or form of life is a set of behaviors or attitudes that people develop, which sometimes are healthy and other times are harmful to the health. In the developed countries the lesser healthy ways of life are those that cause the majority of the diseases. These are the factors that influence in the way of life:
- Consumption of toxic substances: tobacco, alcohol and other drugs.
- Physical exercise
- Nocturnal sleep
- Stress
- Diet
- Personal hygiene
- Food manipulation
- Activities of leisure or interests
- Interpersonal relations
- Environment
- Sexual behavior