What Is Health?

This book was written to meet two serious challenges; firstly to help define what we mean by “health”, surely the most important concept in medicine, and secondly to help the public take more responsibility for their own health now that access to their GP is getting so difficult. Over the next few months, you will see more extracts from the book to give you a preview.

Chapter 1

“There is a Ministry of Health and a Department of Health. Surely, in the long view, this should be The Ministry and Department of Public Happiness?”

Lord Horder (1871-1995)

What Is Health?

We are all reapers of a rich harvest of generations of minds far greater than our own when we express ideas we often arrogantly think are primarily our own. It has taken me over forty years working in what is loosely called the healthcare profession, to begin to understand just a fragment of the real question that needs an answer, “What is Health?” 

It may seem so obvious to most of us, that there is no need to ask the question. But when I posed this question thirty years ago to an audience of nurses and other healthcare workers, I discovered that most of the audience couldn’t answer it either! I asked; “Is it what was left after we have got rid of all diseases?” most of the audience shook their heads.

Is the dictionary definition adequate? (Noun. According to the official definition of the World Health Organization, a state of complete physical, mental, and social wellbeing, not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.) They agreed that was getting better, but still not right!  

Before the internet, as Socrates would have advised, when you have a difficult question we should go and discuss it with the experts in that field, but today we have Google, where I found an excellent comment on this question by Harald Brussow;

“Therefore I first went to health authorities like medical doctors and their authoritative textbooks that guided generations of medical students like Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine. In the 18th edition you find ample material on pathogens, even a chapter on the human microbiome, a chapter on women’s health, but no definition of health. Overall, one gets the impression that medicine deals with disease and not health. In a recent meeting, one of my colleagues said that the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) should correctly be called National Institutes of Diseases reflecting this disease focus of medical research. Health is currently fashionable as ‘Global Health’, but again scientists working at institutes like this, or in such programmes, deal mostly with diseases. After this disappointment, the author turned to PubMed, with ‘health’ and ‘definition’ as search terms and got less than 20 papers – a quite surprising outcome for such a central question of the human society. Clearly there is a problem with the definition of the term ‘health’.” 

So, it seems I have not been alone in this quest for an acceptable answer to what at first seemed a very simple question! I believe one reason for this is that we all intuitively know what the answer is, but there is no way of expressing our inner understanding with just a few words. Hence it was my conviction that there was a need to attempt this problem by writing an entire book of over twenty thousand words to try to answer a simple three-word question! I hope dear reader that you will find some satisfaction and resolution to this vital question in this small book.

There is a common misconception that health is achieved through doctors and medicine. The word medicine should tell us the truth, it comes from the Latin word “to heal”, or make whole, though medicine treats diseases but does not make whole.

For over seventy-five years the comprehensive medical service for every citizen, the NHS, has generated unsustainable demand and not the universal health expected. This shocking outcome is principally due to a lack of understanding of what health is, and a remarkable lack of interest in this question by the medical profession. 

This small book is a valiant attempt to take on this challenge, to begin to understand what health is, and how we can all promote it in our own lives. It would appear that governments cannot make us healthy, but that task rests with all of us. Only when we all have the knowledge, understanding and commitment to take more responsibility for our own health will we have the healthy and happy society we want for ourselves and our children.

You may be amazed or shocked by some of the ideas, inspired and motivated by others, and by the end of this book you might even accept the fact that you are truly a miracle! I have spent over fifty years as a health worker searching for the answer to that simple question “What is health?” I hope this book will offer you some of the answers. 

Next month we will look at Chapter 3 “Who are You Really?  I think this will surprise most of you; it shocked me!

If you’d like to read more, you can find “Be Your Own Doctor of Health & Happiness – You Are a Miracle!” directly from the author’s Bookstore: https://totalhealthmatters.sumupstore.com/

Michael Lingard BSc (Econ) DO