Defining health/illness: societal and/or clinical medicine?

Abstract

Medicine is becoming more and more 'technologically' powerful. To protect patients, doctors and societies from misuse of this power it is necessary, as before, to indicate, as clearly as possible, the very purposes of medicine. Providing precise definitions of the fundamental concepts of medicine such as 'health'/'illness' ('disease', 'sickness') becomes in this context a crucial issue. The literature review was commissioned to identify key approaches to defining 'health'/,illness'. The collected definitions were classified according to the criteria: the positive/negative character of the definition, the naturalist/normativist approach; analytic/synthetic (constructive or precising) type of definition, the goal-oriented/ideal-oriented definition. The Venn's diagrams were used to visualize the relationship existing between studied terms. Using the concept of a triad of disease-illness-sickness, the positive definition of ailment was introduced. It was indicated that the paradigmatic role in medicine plays the term 'illness' rather than 'disease'. The World Health Organization's definition of health was critically evaluated and instead of it, a harmonistic definition was proposed. In conclusion, the wording of a harmonistic definition presented in the article should be considered as a starting point for further considerations. Several directions of such considerations were proposed.