How We Define Health in an Age of Futuristic Medicine

(© Michelle Sahl 2000)

Introduction

The daily talk shows and print media are rarely at a loss for reporting breaking biomedical news that promises to improve all our lives for decades to come.  Headlines like “Super-Aspirins Slash Heart Risks”[i] and “Cloned Mice Show No Premature Aging After Several Generations” [ii] confirm that the future of health care is now.  The more ‘hi- tech’ our biomedical health care system becomes, the farther from the simple foundations of health we seem to travel.  Who could question the enormous value of these efforts?  The U.S. economic commitment alone is staggering[iii] and provides ample evidence of the worth we have placed in our health care system’s direction. 

One persistent concern remains, however.  Despite our highly regarded current and anticipated biotechnological achievements, the U.S. continues to spend more on health care per capita than any other industrialized nation in the world, yet without clear advantages being demonstrated in our comparative levels of health status.  What then is the goal of our formidable medical industrial complex?  Presumably, our highly financed and futuristically focused efforts aim to improve and maintain the health of our nation’s citizenry.  As such, perhaps we must step back and ask ourselves just what is the concept of health we are aspiring to achieve?

In this position paper, I will present an array of agreed upon, albeit at times conflicting, definitions and concepts of health, which contrast the increasingly abundant products of highly advanced medical care with the basic needs of daily life that contribute to each person’s health.  I will present evidence suggesting that we are entrenched in a ‘can’t-see-the-forest-for-the-trees’ mode, and that our escalating path toward higher levels of ‘health’ care results in an ever-narrowing reductionism in the concept of health, which may, over the long term, cost us dearly.  I begin by stepping back for a view of the historical ‘big picture.’.......