What is it about?
This paper describes what health really is. There are five features to be considered: The demands of life, the resources a person has to respond to these demands , the social and the natural surroundings. The resources consist of two components. The first is the gift of life at the time of birth, the second is what the person has made out of it. All of these features work together as a "complex adaptive system". Looking at healthcare from the point of view of this definition of health shows that healthcare considers the biologically given features well but neglects those that are personally acquired. This is an important deficit. Rebalancing medicine could improve healthcare and simultaneously reduce costs.
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Why is it important?
This definition is new. It shows that medicine should be rebalanced in order to simultaneoulsly improve health of patients and to reduce costs.
Perspectives
Currently healthcare is in a crisis worldwide. It focusses on health only from a materialistic point of view and neglects patients a persons. This leads to high costs and insufficient health improvement. More attention to what is important for each individual patient will produce more health at lower costs. More details can be found on: www.meikirch-model.ch
MD Johannes - Bircher
University of Bern
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Defining health by addressing individual, social, and environmental determinants: New opportunities for health care and public health, Journal of Public Health Policy, June 2014, Nature,
DOI: 10.1057/jphp.2014.19.
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