What is Health and Where is it Going?

How do we define our health?

Our mastery over health is a challenging and at times confusing one.  Is health a bicep curl, or a leafy green salad (with dressing on the side, of course).  Is health how we feel, or the way we live?  Solving the often illusive and ambiguous riddle of health and defining it appropriately has quite a few health professionals and community leaders befuddled.  In defining health, there are many factors to include and consider, however, not all of them are measurable.  This poses a problem for researchers and clinicians alike.  How can we treat, evaluate, educate and/or prevent an intrinsic value?  Do to so, we need qualities no short of magic to accomplish this.  Or, we can look at innovative ways to define health that allows us to measure how populations and individuals alike integrate health in their lives.  This blog will delve into a series of ideas and also define health so it may be easier to measure.  How we define health is key to finding ways to create a healthy community, population and beyond.

Fitness magazines, and personal trainers lead us to see health as fitness, the higher the concentration of lean, dense muscle, the healthier, supposedly, we are.  Though there are correlations between fitness and positive health outcomes, this is not a direct causation for health.  Pharmaceutical companies promote health and their products, by introducing medicines as forms of health management, or treatment.  This in and of itself is fine, however, treatment often times is a dollar short and a day late, when it comes to prevention.  Physicians, clinicians and health professionals alike focus on treatment as well, and have made wonderful strides to ensure patients and their numerous symptoms at treated.  In the book What Doctor's Think by Dr. Jerome Groopman, he suggests that doctors are asked to be superhuman more often and are required to accomplish tasks that put both the doctor and patients at risk.  All these factors define health in ways that exclude, restrict and segregate populations; like the elderly, poor, etc.

As we look at the image for this blog, we see an interesting diagram, something that stands out as odd, or concerning.  If care (or the access to it) ranks so little on what makes us healthy, why do we spend so much on it in the first place?  Also, if behavior is so important to health (which I completely agree), why do we spend so little on advancing or progressing this area?  These are very interesting and defining questions, so let's work to find the solution.

In this diagram, our environment is twice as important than our need for health services, likewise our genetics rank the same.  Also, on the left, health is defined by what we can control and the factors that we can't; which measure out to about thirty percent (genetics, and access to care).  The right model, emphasizes or defines health by what we have little control over, ranking behavior (and we'll assume "other" falls into our controllable) and other as twelve percent.  A quote comes to mind when looking at this model, William Glasser, refers to choices being a form of control, thus if we have limited choices in how we define and access health, we have limited control.  Though, I'd rather not, go "Big Brother" on the matter, but its interesting how little variation there is in what we spend on our health as a society.  We can see a much more balanced model on the left that gives us control to define health as we see fit, and as science confirms, contributes more fully to our overall health.

Having structure is one thing, and I'm completely okay with that.  However, confining structures reminds me of Henry David Thoreau's, "An unjust law, is no law at all" idea.  Structure that limits, excludes and weakens, isn't much of a structure, as much as it is a institution or confinement.  Our abilities are the essentials to health even from a holistic approach.  What we are able to do, should be the absolute definition that measures our health.  Our ability to run, live, work, play, socialize, love, pray, grow, and recover, truly defines our health.  So to define health we simply need to measure our ability to do.....

A life you don't live is still lost.  - John Rzeznik