Are you healthy or free from disease?

The term health is multidimensional and vague as well.  Health or being healthy does not mean the absence of disease or absence of preventive, curative and diagnostic services. WHO defines health as an embedded state of physical, mental and social well-being. Well-being is a combination of both subjective and objective components such as standard of living, level of living and quality of life. Health is a state of life with continuation.

The zenith point of health is positive health and the bottom is death. In between positive health and death, we shall find many spectrum such as better health, freedom from sickness, unrecognized sickness, mild sickness and severe sickness. Positive health is state in which the individual capacities for participation in the social system are optimal.  Since positive health cannot be achieved because it is influenced by many peripheral factors including emotional breakdown, which is still a dominant part of our lives.

We generally analyze health only in physical and mental dimensions.  We ignore the other dimensions such as emotional, vocational and spiritual.  Mental health is not emotional health.  We can find that these two dimensions are closely related but in reality they are two different entities. Mental health is all about KNOWING or COGNITIVE POWER, while emotional health is all about FEELING.  The modern era is facing a new challenge in health that is vocational dimension of health. For example, if somebody loses job or if he or she is forced to have a mandatory retirement, there is a maximum chance that he or she will be trapped in vocational health crisis.  Another dimension what most yoga gurus opt is spiritual health. It is all about searching the meaning and purpose in life defying the health and disease.

We can define health but cannot define disease.  Disease has many aspects. Some diseases are because of their extreme nature  such as food poisoning, some are insidious like mental illness or arthritis and some are carriers like typhoid, where individual seems to be healthy but can infect others. There are plethora of diseases from short term to long term and visible to invisible.  Let’s define the terms which connote a state of unhealthiness. Illness and sickness are the two widely used terms. Illness is all about a subjective sate of the person who feels aware of not being well where as sickness is a state of social dysfunction, means the role individual plays when he or she feels ill.  Above all, disease is all about physiological and psychological dysfunction.

Like health, disease has also changed its dimensions. Each decade produces a new pattern of disease. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, respiratory infections, Alzheimer and other dementia, lung cancers and diabetic are new emerging and top rated diseases since 5 years. TB, diarrhea and HIV/AIDS have dropped down rapidly.

Being healthy is a continuous process; it is not a single time achievement, whereas the nature of diseases is an ever changing phenomenon. In future we may define health and disease in our way which suits our ecology, technology and demography rather defining them in a stereotype and rhetoric. We are aspiring for being healthy simultaneously we are less immunized to modern diseases. Such a contradiction!!!!