Modern medical science has struggled to develop a solid definition for “health” and “illness”
Not only has the word “normal” always been elusive, modern medical science has never provided a workable definition of “health” or “illness”—in either the physical or the mental realms. Many have tried and all have failed. Take, for example, the World Health Organization’s definition: “Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of infirmity.” Who among us would dare claim health if it requires meeting this impossibly high standard? Health loses value as a concept when it is so unobtainable that everyone is at least partly sick.
The definition also exudes culture and context-sensitive value judgments. Who gets to define what is “complete” physical, mental, and social well-being? Is someone sick because their body aches from hard work or he feels sad after a disappointment or is in a family feud? And are the poor inherently sicker because they have fewer resources to achieve the complete well-being required of “health”?
More realistic modern definitions of health focus not on the perfectibility of life, but on the lack of definable disease. This is better, but there is no bright-line definition of physical disease and certainly nothing that works across time, place, and culture. How do we decide what is normal in continuum situations like blood pressure, or cholesterol, or blood glucose, or bone density? Is a slow-growing prostate cancer in an old person best diagnosed and treated aggressively as disease—or left alone because neglect may be much less dangerous than treatment? Is a very short child just short or in need of hormone injections?
References
- Frances, Allen. (2013). Saving Normal CHAPTER 1. What’s Normal and What’s Not? (p. 25). New York, NY: HarperCollins.
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Type:🔴 Tags: Philosophy / Semantics / Medicine Status:☀️