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WillowOne's Positions

Health

Overview

Health is the condition of a body and mind functioning well enough to do what their owner wants of them. The World Health Organization's 1948 definition, "a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease", sets the bar so high that nobody has ever been healthy; the working definition most people use is nearer to "nothing is currently stopping me".

The word does two jobs that are easily confused. It describes (this organ is failing, this blood count is low) and it prescribes (you should eat less of that). The second use smuggles in values, and a great deal of bad argument about health consists of treating a preference as if it were a diagnosis.

Notes

  • Healthy is not the same as normative. That a trait or behaviour is unusual does not make it unhealthy, and that it is common does not make it healthy. Left-handedness, homosexuality and atheism have all been treated as disorders because they were minorities. The test for a disorder is whether it harms or impairs the person who has it, not whether it departs from the average.
  • The same error runs the other way in the alternative-medicine aisle, where "natural" is treated as a synonym for healthy (Appeal to Nature). Arsenic is natural; insulin is not. See Naturopathy, Detox, Dietary Supplements and Homeopathy: medicine that works is called medicine.
  • Health is a means, not an end. A life organised entirely around prolonging itself has forgotten what it was for, which is the point of Assisted Dying and part of the point of Cannabis: the person whose body it is gets to decide what trade-offs are worth making.
  • Public health is a different thing from personal health, and the two can conflict. Vaccination (Anti-Vaccine) is the clearest case: the benefit is partly to other people, which is why the arguments about it are arguments about obligation and not only about evidence.
  • The Placebo effect is real, which is why "it worked for me" is not evidence that a treatment works. The question is always whether it works better than nothing dressed up to look like something.

Also see

#evidence