Published 15 January 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b136
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;338:b136

Editor's Choice

Health is a human right

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

Alex Jadad and Laura O’Grady’s call for a debate on the definition of health has stimulated fascinating responses to both their editorial (doi:10.1136/bmj.a2900) and their blog (http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2008/12/10/alex-jadad-on-defining-health). I particularly like Richard Smith’s response to the blog, in which he suggests that health is "the capacity to do what matters most to you" (http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2009/01/05/richard-smith-can-poetry-define-health).

Two other responses appear in this week’s Letters. Peter Mansfield recalls the Peckham experiment in London in the 1930s and 1940s, which aimed to investigate the nature of health (doi:10.1136/bmj.b83). An expanded vision of health is unlikely to come from within medicine, he says. "Economic and climatic constraints will force healthy living on us eventually, or we shall perish." Peter Davies calls on us to embrace the wider context of health beyond the absence of disease (doi:10.1136/bmj.b28). "For too long we as a society have allowed politicians . . . [Full text of this article]

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