What is Health, Anyway?
One of biggest theoretical problems in global health is defining health. No, really. Is health just not being sick? Is it not being disabled? What if you are disabled but have no illnesses? What about the elderly - they're not in optimum condition, but they aren't automatically sick. Is health being at your maximum state of fitness, or just good enough? Are you healthy if you're 20 pounds overweight? 20 pounds under? What about 50? What about mental health? Does that count?
The WHO, which is good at stuff like this, has a definition of health. "Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity." This definition was adopted in 1946, and came into force in 1948. (Sorry, I don't know the difference either between "adopted" and "came into force.") The definition has not been changed in any way since 1948.
The phrase "The WHO definition of health is..." has launched a thousand grant applications. It's a useful definition because it includes anything you need it to, from psychological care for refugees to food aid for rural Bolivia. It's a definition of a state that can never be achieved; an aspiration. That leaves an awful lot of room for us to try to make things better.
The definition of health, though, is primarily a theoretical problem. In practice, we don't need a definition of health to do our jobs. We just define our objective every time. We want to improve the nutrition of rural Bolivians, or we want to decrease the incidence of PTSD among refugees. You don't need to definite optimal health in order to tackle health problems.
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