There are several concepts for the definition of health, the first that addresses health is a concept that refers to an unstable equilibrium of the human being, its biological organism and its body (understood as representations of the same), in conjunction with biological, environmental, cultural and symbolic, allowing each addition to growing human being, enhance their potential in terms of their own interests and those of society in which it is immersed.
When any of these items are changed every other altered for a new balance of human beings. Such change may be transient, and process restarts intermittently before or fleeting casualty occurred in any of the above factors. The responses selected by the human face of these external or internal stimuli are many and varied according to their skills.
Health is therefore more than a state, an ongoing process of restoration of balance, a process that when some of the factors involved change and that change is maintained over time, the human being takes a fixed answer, which was sometime prior adequate to restore balance, but at the turn, leads to an inflexible catastrophic state that may be incompatible with life (Canguilheim 1982). This view implies that to maintain this balance requires a range of socioeconomic, environmental, biological, and health care that are brought together to sustain this equilibrium, which translates into the ability to live as an individual, to produce, reproduce and recreate the culture, understood as the sum of production, and institutions that human life away from the animal.
Other schools of thought, consider health as a state that has or is lost, and that possession implies the full use of the physical, mental, social and spiritual, for authors such as Barro (1996), health is an asset of productive capital and generator of economic growth. Mushkin (1962) and Grossman (1972) state that health and education are determinants of human capital, these authors express a double connotation of being a consumer and capital goods.
Theoretical developments on endogenous economic growth, have introduced human capital as a key, including health as a capital input to economic output of a country, as people, as productive agents, improve with investment in these services and provide a continuous performance in the future. Therefore consider the consumption of intermediate products in health is an investment in human capital, whose main purpose is economic development of individuals and the social whole, this view ignores respect for human life, the ability to re – production and re-creation of institutions essential for the maintenance of culture.
The individual regains biological balance of your body and your body, demanding care services, which are intermediate goods whose office is limited in relation to the actions of regulators and health sector managers. In this process of health service provision, involving on the one hand staff, equipment and other items directly involved in the medical act and the other, the administrative infrastructure that creates and maintains the conditions that make possible the realization of the act.
The proper response of the care system requires both human and technological inputs for the treatment of diseases, to carry out health policies, which means of course a high capital investment. This study aimed to evaluate the efficiency with which those inputs are handled in order to prevent and redress the balance, considering the socio-economic factors relevant municipalities as factors that determine the capacity to invest in these resources.
Classically defined health as opposed to the disease. Thus, health is “the organic state of being normally performs all functions, while disease refers to” more or less severe impairment of health “.
In ancient times the equivalent of being able to develop healthy daily activities. Someone with a capacity for work and family and social relationships was considered healthy, but suffer some of the processes we now consider diseases. It was a very pragmatic notion that by the definition of healthy compatible with the suffering of some discomfort, provided these are not decisively affect the ordinary activity.
With the advent of scientific medicine is generalized vision physiologist, dominated by negative criteria to consider that health is the absence of disease. We looked for underlying injuries as causes of disease. Health status is defined negatively as the absence of a “disease entity”, ie a structural lesion or a functional disorder to measure.
In the second half of last century began to adopt a health perspective that transcended this binomial. In 1956, Rene Dubos expressed a two-dimensional conception of health, regarding both physical and mental well-being: “Health is a physical and mental reasonably free of discomfort and pain, which allows the person in question perform effectively for the longest time possible in the environment where it is located by choice. ” Also in the 1950s Herbert Dunn provided a description of health that included the three major aspects of the same: organic or physical, psychological and social. This incorporation of the social dimension was gaining a greater stress in subsequent years.
The greatest exponent of this broad perspective of the concept of health is the WHO definition contained in its Founding Charter on 7 April 1946 and originally conceived by Stamper (1945): “Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social, not just the absence of disease or infirmity. ”
This is a definition that was extremely innovative, as it opened the door to a more subjective and less “rules” of understanding health. Try to include all relevant aspects in life, by incorporating three basic aspects of human development: physical, mental and social. In addition, find an expression in positive terms, starting from an optimistic approach and demanding.
Among the criticisms that has suffered this definition, not least the view that health equates with some notion of happiness, making it too utopian and unrealistic. Not facilitate the measurement of health in accordance with the parameters used. His subjectivity makes the WHO definition does not provide metrics for measuring health. Certainly, this definition has a limited operational capacity, as, for example, everyone affected – even if not personally – by the tyranny, injustice, inequality or social exclusion can not be included in the definition and should being labeled insane.
Some critics, like Milton Terris, have challenged this absolute sense of wellbeing that incorporates the WHO definition and have proposed removing the word “full” of it. In health and sickness, there are varying degrees of involvement and should not be treated as a dichotomous variable. An alternative proposal, which respects the accomplishments of this definition, would advocate a sentence like:
“Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social development, with full operational capacity, not just the absence of disease or infirmity.” There are other readings of the definition of health, such as that defined as “Getting the most high level of physical, mental, social, and operational capacity enabling social factors that are immersed in the individual and the community. ”
An examination of different conceptions prevalent health should not ignore the definition proposed in 1976 in the Xe Congres of physicians and biologists Catalan Language: “Health is a way of life increasingly autonomous, supportive and joyful.” It can mean “self” as the ability to lead a life with minimal dependencies, as well as increased responsibility of individuals and the community about their own health. Concern for others and the environment would collect in the term “solidarity”, while “joyful” retrieves the ideal of an optimistic view of life, human relationships and the ability to enjoy its possibilities.
Tags: body, Definition, definition of health, health
