Thursday, November 19, 2009

What Is Health? What Does Good Health Mean?


The English word "health" comes from the Old English word hale, meaning "wholeness, a being whole, sound or well,". Hale comes from the Proto-Indo-European root kailo, meaning "whole, uninjured, of good omen". Kailo comes from the Proto-Germanic root khalbas, meaning "something divided". Medilexicon's medical dictionary has three definitions for health, the first being "The state of the organism when it functions optimally without evidence of disease or abnormality" (click here to read the other two).



World Health Organization's (WHO's) definition of "health"


The most famous modern definition of health was created during a Preamble to the Constitution of the World Health Organization as adopted by the International Health Conference, New York, 19-22 June, 1946; signed on 22 July 1946 by the representatives of 61 States (Official Records of the World Health Organization, no. 2, p. 100) and entered into force on 7 April 1948.


"Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity."The Definition has not been amended since 1948. During the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion in 1986, the WHO said that health is: "a resource for everyday life, not the objective of living. Health is a positive concept emphasizing social and personal resources, as well as physical capacities."

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