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Describe health part 2

  Science has contributed to our understanding of wellbeing through an ingenious apparatus of techniques that reveal not only the causal pathways of ill health but also evidence for their amelioration. But the language of science can be inhibitory. For example, the notion of suffering is no longer fashionable. It is not a scientific word; it seems vague and old-fashioned, harking back to a time of clinical impotence, when patients had to endure and tolerate pain without respite or relief. Science aims to deliver the means to eliminate much of what once passed for human suffering. But as the opening article in our Series on health in the occupied Palestinian territory shows, dimensions of suffering, especially at the community level, are measurable and often severe. Science has not eradicated suffering, despite its enormous power to deliver technologies to improve health. Being more humble about the experience of individuals, rather than simply drawing up reductive report cards of their
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What is health part 1

  Health is not a “state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being”. And nor is it “merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. The first part of this formulation is enshrined in WHO's famous founding constitution, adopted in 1946. It was supposed to provide a transformative vision of “health for all”, one that went beyond the prevailing negative conception of health based on an “absence” of pathology. But neither definition will do in an era marked by new understandings of disease at molecular, individual, and societal levels. Given that we now know the important influence of the genome in disease, even the most optimistic health advocate surely has to accept the impossibility of risk-free wellbeing. That said, the conjunction of the physical, psychological, and social remains powerfully relevant to this day. Indeed, this framework should be extended in two further dimensions. First, human health cannot be separated from the health of our total planetary biodiversity. H
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