- Biological and ecological
- Medical and psychological
- Sociocultural and aesthetic
- Metaphysical and religious
The four categories, and the determinants of health presented within them,
are not intended to be entirely independent of one another, nor exhaustive.
INQUIRY INTO HEALTH‘Health’ pertains to a state of being, but it also names a conceptual ru-
bric, encompassing themes such as freedom from incapacitation, vitality
sufficient for successful action, and feelings of well-being. ‘Health-care’ is
a related rubric covering traditional and contemporary systems of medi-
cine, preventive routines and treatment methods, and social issues such
as the economics of health insurance. What we call ‘health-care’ in con-
temporary scientific medicine more often amounts to ‘sickness care,’ in
that medical intervention is more often applied after illness has devel-
oped, rather than beforehand to cultivate the person’s inherent vitality
and to diagnose and prevent potential problems. Åyurveda emphasizes
preventive methods and cultivation of health as a positive state, and pro-
vides a complement to the more crisis-oriented biomedical model. While
the biomedical model gives most of its attention to the theory and treat-
ment of disease, Åyurveda shows more concern for the active cultivation
of health. Health is defined as follows in the preamble to the Constitution
of the World Health Organization:
Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and
not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.^4This definition has the strengths of recognizing the several domains of
human life in which health is important, and of regarding health as a pos-
itive state, not merely a concept whose meaning is established in relation
to illness or disability. Complete well-being or perfect health is generally
thought to be an unrealizable ideal. We tend to think of healthiness as a
matter of degree, for the complex web of relations among material and
biological factors seems to obviate the possibility of the body’s perfect
form and function. Each of us, writes Susan Sontag in Illness as Meta-
phor, “holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the king-
dom of the sick.”^5 Yet perfect health is an ideal that physician Deepak
one line longmeanings of health in ̄ayurveda 47