Published 9 January 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b28
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;338:b28

Letters

How should health be defined?

Why the definition of health matters

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The definition of health is important.¹ There is a biomedical component to health, but it exists in a setting that includes biological, personal, relational, social, and political factors.^{2 3}

For too long, we as doctors have been timid about defining health, and mostly operated at the level of "absence of disease." For too long, we as a society have allowed politicians to get away with shunting health off to a "medical domain," thus avoiding focus on the large scale social and political forces that create health and illness.⁴ We need to rediscover the force of Virchow’s statement: "Medicine is a social science and politics is nothing but medicine on a grand scale."

In my essay I propose: "Health is best seen as an ongoing outcome from the continuing processes of living life well. Living life well would be defined in terms of wealth, relationships, coherence, fitness, and adaptability. Disease avoidance would . . . [Full text of this article]

¹ Keighley Road Surgery, Halifax HX2 9LL

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