Health is more than the absence of disease, and it includes a person’s perceptions and experiences of life. It is dynamic, continuous, multidimensional, distinct from function, and determined by balance and adaptation. This new definition broadens the scope of health considerations beyond medical ones and makes it more inclusive of disabilities and chronic conditions.
People have different perspectives about what constitutes healthy living. Some focus on personal choices, such as avoiding unhealthy behaviors like smoking or excessive stress. Others look at broader factors, such as economic well-being or the quality of neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. Whether those factors are directly related to a person’s health or not, they can have a large impact on an individual’s perception of what it means to be healthy.
The emergence of a broadened concept of health has important implications for research, policy, and practice. It is particularly relevant for individuals with disabilities and chronic conditions.
A key element of this new definition is that it shifts the emphasis away from a view that health is a state of perfection. This is a fundamental change from the original constitution of the World Health Organization, which defined health as “a complete and perfect state of physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” (WHO, 1948).
A recent commentary (Larsen, 2022) elaborates on this point. It notes that the original drafters of the WHO constitution inserted the word complete only at the very end as an editing change and that it was not intended to be taken as a statement that health is perfect in all dimensions of functioning.
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