What Is “Health”?

A Complex Philosophical Question

Mar 11, 2025

lone road going to mountains — Photo by Diego Jimenez on Unsplash

Now, here’s a research question for a master’s thesis.

What is “health”? What is “healthy”?

There are few words thrown around as much as, or more than, the words “health”, “healthy”, and “unhealthy”. We all go about like we really know what they mean, but do we?

These words are abstract, unspecific, and have general assumptions baked into them, and we assume that our assumptions are correct.

On the one hand, the idea of health is often subjective and open to interpretation. If someone “looks” healthy, they are. If they maintain a “healthy” bodyweight, they must be. Can someone who has a clinical or chronic condition still be healthy?

On the other hand, there are recognized biomarkers that measure “health”, like fasting glucose levels, total blood cholesterol, Hemoglobin A1C (used as a measure of long-term blood sugar). To complicate matters, you can find experts—even physicians and PhDs—who will argue about these metrics, their values and cutoff points, and where the healthy and unhealthy ranges are.

Then, marketers, influencers, and products all tout how certain things are healthy and others are unhealthy, but putting everyone’s feet to the fire, would any one of them really be able to define and communicate what these words truly mean?

It’s like one of the worst games of Telephone. The message degrades with each passing breath.

And it looks like there’s not a lot of consensus even in the medical world about what health is.

One researcher

…first went to health authorities like medical doctors and their authoritative textbooks that guided generations of medical students like Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine [a renowned medical textbook].” [There’s, of course,] “ample material on pathogens, even a chapter on the human microbiome, a chapter on women's health, but no definition of health. Overall, one gets the impression that medicine deals with disease and not health.

The author goes on to describe how one colleague “said that the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) should correctly be called National Institutes of Diseases reflecting this disease focus of medical research.” He also “turned to PubMed with ‘health’ and ‘definition’ as search terms and got less than 20 papers – a quite surprising outcome for such a central question of the human society.”1

Several researchers investigate the apparent rhetorical question of the definition of health and start with the World Health Organization’s definition: That “Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”2 Again, though, how do we define well-being, especially without comparing it to illness?

Another researcher, Norman Sartorius, observed three definitions of health are acknowledged and used but then examined the problem and consequences of each3:

The first is that health is the absence of any disease or impairment. The second is that health is a state that allows the individual to adequately cope with all demands of daily life (implying also the absence of disease and impairment). The third definition states that health is a state of balance, an equilibrium that an individual has established within himself and between himself and his social and physical environment.

By the first definition, as Sartorius explains, only those in the medical profession can “declare” that a person is healthy or unhealthy, which can be tricky and a slippery slope because some observable symptoms or clinical criteria must be met in order to assign someone as having a disease, illness, or condition and thus healthy or not. Many people who have an illness or disease feel absolutely fine and show no symptoms until they cross some critical threshold. On the other hand, someone may be plagued with symptoms that have no apparent root.

The second definition is also problematic because in real life there are not such stark delineations. There are many people who have no observable symptoms of any illness or disease and yet still have trouble with the demands of daily life, such as the simplest activities of daily living. By contrast, someone may have a disease or illness with a multitude of symptoms but may get on just fine with their lives.

The third definition of health—an equilibrium or balance of and in a person as well as with their physical and social environment—is also difficult to quantify. However, this definition is more fluid and flexible, best suited to the individual. As Sartorius notes, to achieve balance in a physical environment, a person first needs to have an internal equilibrium, “that makes them get the most they can from their life despite the presence of the disease.” Still, though, a person may not have any abnormalities in their physiology—that is, no physical disease—but they may not be in balance with themselves and/or their environments.

Another medical book also explores these questions in a chapter called “The concepts of ‘health’ and ‘disease’”.4 The author examines and critiques the definitions of health of other researchers. Here are two of them:

Health is “a dynamic state of wellbeing characterized by a physical, mental and social potential, which satisfies the demands of a life commensurate with age, culture, and personal responsibility.”
It is the “ability to adapt and self-manage.”

The author also describes the five key dimensions of an outcomes framework of the UK’s National Health Service, used to measure institutional progress. Most of these dimensions are related to disease, illness, injury, and even death, but one dimension is helpful to focus on: “enhancing the quality of life for people with long-term conditions.”

The key phrase in this key dimension is “enhancing quality of life.”

For my part, I “feel” healthy, and as far as I know, I’m free of disease. Does that make me healthy? I would concede that I’m not unhealthy, but is not being unhealthy the same as being healthy? Or is being without disease a minimum condition or requisite of being healthy?

Ideally, we want to be without illness, injury, or disease, physically and/or mentally, and if we have some chronic or acute condition, we want to manage it as best as we can, do as much as we can, work to improve.

I like the following nuggets we’ve come across. Health is:

Being in balance with ourselves.
Being in balance with our environments, physical and social.
Our ability to adapt.
Our ability to self-manage and be independent.
Our efforts towards reaching our potential.

Hopefully, it’s obvious that there are foods and behaviors that are healthy and unhealthy, but there are many shades of grey, many of which are even neutral. If something is adding to or helping us maintain one of these five areas, let’s call it healthy. If something’s interfering with any of these areas, let’s call it unhealthy.

Let’s also acknowledge that we often defer the definition of health to others and their subjective interpretations. We often trust that something’s healthy because they say it’s so.

We also compare ourselves to others, comparisons we have no business making. We should compare ourselves only to ourselves. We should compare where we are with where we were and think about where we want to be.

But be fair, too. Comparing yourself now is likely not an apples-to-apples comparison with your teenage-self. Be fair and realistic.

At the risk of slipping and falling into a pool of epistemology, let’s keep it simple.

Health is something that we must actively work towards and maintain, sometimes maybe even fight for. We should never settle or think that we’re “good enough”. We should not be impressed with ourselves. We should recognize our efforts and achievements, but we should also keep working towards our potential, even if that means we have to eke out successes a few drops at a time.

Like many things in life, health is a journey and not a destination.

There’s no end point. No goal line.

It’s the horizon.

The Flexitorium by Joseph Anthony

Discussion about this post