By Danny Yarnall
The very definition of health is up for debate.
PMC scholar Cara Kiernan Fallon and PMC Co-Director Jason Karlawish recently authored editorials for for the American Public Health Journal and STAT that support an update to the definition of human health made seven decades ago at the World Health Organization’s (WHO) inception.
“We thought about the ways current public health initiatives for ‘healthy aging’ reflect a contradiction in terms, and then we turned to the definition of health,” said Fallon, who is also a Bioethics Fellow at UPenn.
The WHO currently describes health as a “state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” The pair argues as medical science prolongs lifespan and improves quality of life while living with the disease, “healthy” has taken on a new meaning. They recommend the definition be expanded to include noncommunicable disease and special considerations for the elderly, as more than two-thirds of adults 65 or older live with more than two diseases.