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. Human beings do not exist in a biological vacuum. We live in an interdependent existence with the totality of the living world. The second dimension is in the realm of the inanimate. The living world depends upon a healthy interaction with the inanimate world. Thanks to the science of climate change, we now understand only too well how contingent our human wellbeing is on the “health” of the Earth's systems of energy exchange.

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