Health

What do people often write on birthday cards? „Happy birthday, a successful new year, and stay healthy above all!” Health seems to play an important role for a good or even happy life. A famous German Philosopher – Schopenhauer – said once: “Health is not everything, but without health everything is nothing". These are examples for the importance health has for many people.

If you try to describe health in a few words, you will discover that this is difficult. Maybe one of the reasons why a general definition is difficult is that everyone has very personal perceptions of health. Personal experiences and individual character traits play an important role in everybody’s definition of health. Please find some notions of health in the overview below. Some definitions focus on the physical functioning of the “human machine”, others define health as the absence of illness. Others define it more globally and focus on human well-being under varying experiences and viewpoints (e. g. our own body, emotions, relationship to other people).

The differing perceptions of health can be related to differing behaviour patterns. People who feel that they have no influence on their health, because it depends on coincidence or higher powers, will probably not fight to improve and maintain their health. But people who feel that their health is at their own responsibility will probably tend to avoid damaging behaviour and will try to support their health actively.

The World Health Organization (WHO) created the best-known definition of health: “Health is a situation of complete physical, social and mental well-being and not as the absence of illness or ailment.” (World Health Organization 1946)

Important in this definition is the holistic claim. In those years, it was not self-evident to put the mental and also the social well-being on one level with the physical well-being as a condition for health.