Really though…what is health? Part I of this topic will focus on the overview of the term, and skim over some of the relevant history
Health, as defined by the World Health Organization(WHO), is a “state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity (1).” This definition has evolved significantly over time to become a more inclusive term for wellness. A strong withstanding opinion of mine is as follows: in a perfect world, everybody would have access to the knowledge and resources to enable them to take full ownership of their health and well being. Obviously, the aforementioned statement is not true, as seen by the extreme disparities in health, not just between developed and developing countries, witnessed within different neighborhoods of the same cities (San Francisco, Palo Alto, and NYC to name a few).
That being said, from a global perspective, the baseline quality of health and well being has progressed significantly for humankind over the last few centuries. s of this metric, by country. Using life expectancy as a metric for progress in health, the chart below shows a solid increase, greater than 200%, in the life expectancy from 1800 to 2015 for those even in some of the most impoverished regions of the world (Special shoutout to India and Niger :’) There are other interactive charts on the host website (https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy), that allow for a higher degree of analysis of this metric, by country.
A key driver of the global life expectancy increase is the advent of health as a science. As many know, there was a “supernatural” approach to assessing problems of the health in the early days of civilization, almost along the lines of divine intervention – outcomes from such treatments showcased a lower degree of success and consistency than what is seen today. *It’s a never ending rabbit hole if we dive into the history health since the beginning of time, so the main critical points (as deemed by me) will be only accounted for*.
Laboratory science (Which has been driven by advances in technology and engineering) has allowed health knowledge to be generated at an exponential rate, which in turn, drives advances in the sciences of public/global health and epidemiology. Such advances are then picked up by policy makers, and used to drive change at the population level (as witnessed already by Scandinavian nations, to name a few). It’s rather fascinating to see how far we’ve advanced in a *relatively short* period of time, and even more fascinating to see how much more progress we may make in the coming few decades and centuries.
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