The term health is quite elusive. And there is no solid definition to describe and calculate it.
Today in our modern life doctors and other health professionals use a wide mixture of concepts to derive some questions. And using those questions we determine the health status of an individual or community or a state as a whole.
According to WHO health is defined as below
“Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”
As more research being done on health, we start to see that without good health it is impossible to have a great society.
So, to put emphasis on health we have declared health as our fundamental right, an integral part of development, and above all made it a world-wide social goal to influence leaders of nations to put more political thoughts into the matter.
And so, today it's an international goal to ensure quality health for everyone.
And for that, the state of positive health was proposed which implies the notion of “Perfect Functioning” of the body and mind. It considers health biologically as a state where all the cells, tissues, and organs are functioning at optimum capacity and inharmonious way with each other; psychologically it is considered as a state in which the individual feels mastery over his environment and has a sense of perfect well-being within him; and socially it is a state in which the individual is found to participate in community events and tasks.
But the truth is this state of positive health can never be achieved by a human. For the demand and desire of humanity knows no bound. And humans will never be able to perfectly adapt to their environment. That’s why the dream of Positive health will always remain a mirage.
And so, to ensure a parameter for good quality health an alternative approach conceptualizes positive health as a normal state based on statistical averages, not as an ideal state.
As a result, different country developed different values of ideal height, weight, life expectancy, and other things for people’s capabilities, body structure, and many other things vary from group to group.
To measure the health, the quality of life an individual is living we use many sorts of theories, calculations, and data analysis. Two easy way of doing so is calculating the Physical Quality of Life Index (PQLI) and Human Development Index (HDI).
Physical Quality of Life Index (PQLI) –
PQLI uses three health indicators to reach a composite index viz. infant mortality, life expectancy at age one, and literacy.
But this doesn’t take into consideration of Per Capita Income. This is useful because there are many countries out there that have high income but very poor individual health.
Human Development Index (HDI) –
HDI is a composite index that focuses on three basic dimensions of human development – to live a long and healthy life measured by life expectancy at birth; the ability to acquire knowledge measured by mean years of schooling and expected years of schooling; and the ability to have a decent standard of living measured by Gross National Income per capita in Purchase Power Parity (PPP) $.
The value of HDI ranges from 0 to 1 with 0 being the worst and 1 being the best possible health. This value also allows a country to measure the achievement they had in the health sector.
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