1 UNDERSTANDING HEALTH: DEFINITIONS AND PERSPECTIVES Health is a social, economic and political issue and above all a fundamental human right. Inequality, poverty, exploitation, violence and injustice are at the root of ill-health. People's Health Movement (PHM), 2000 A "toxic combination of bad policies, economics and politics is, in large measure, responsible for the fact that a majority of people in the world do not enjoy the good health that is biologically possible". Commission on Social Determinants of Health (CSDH), 2008, p. 26 KEY CONCEPTS Introduction Health: the clockwork model of medicine Health as the absence of illness Measuring health Health: ordinary people's perspectives Public and private lay accounts Health in cultural and economic contexts Spiritual aspects Health: critical perspective Health as 'outcomes' Health and place: defining collective health Population versus individual health: the heart of public health Conclusion Copyright @ 2015. Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. INTRODUCTION The above quotes sum up the approach to health taken in this book. Through this book we will explore the underlying social and economic determinants of health in detail. But first it is important to understand the many ways in which health is understood and Baum, Fran. The New Public Health, Oxford University Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/latrobe/detail.action?docID=4786467. Created from latrobe on 2022-08-07 01:39:30.
CHAPTER 1: UNDERSTANDING HEALTH 3 used. The word 'health' carries considerable cultural, social and professional baggage, and its contested nature suggests that it is a key to our culture and a word that involves important ideas and strongly held values (Williams, 1983). Using it in different ways gives rise to particular ways of seeing the world and behaving. Definitions of health structure the ways in which the world is viewed and how decisions are made. Health policies, for example, are shaped by policy makers' assumptions about what health is. Most public health workers see health as central to their work and often assume that everyone sees their world revolving around the pursuit of health. The blinkered view this can lead to was brought home to me forcefully when I was speaking to a community audience in Adelaide about the new public health and waxing lyrical about its virtues. I was stopped in my tracks by an older woman in the audience who raised her hand in order to ask me, 'Excuse me dear, what are we allowed to die of?' I had not only assumed health to be central but also that life and health were limitless! Health is a preoccupation of modern society. Crawford (1984, p. 63) views health as a cultural factor and comments: 'Health is a particularly important concept in the modern West. In disenchanted, secular and materialist cultures, health acquires a greater symbolic importance. Health substitutes for salvation and becomes a salvation of its own.' The cultural importance attached to health and illness in Western society has been well illustrated by Susan Sontag (1979), who noted that not being healthy and being ill have often been seen as undesirable and as states