DO YOU feel healthy? Regardless of your answer, what are your reasons for your response? Did you say no because you are carrying some extra weight, feeling weak or have had more colds than anyone else this year? Or did you say yes because your blood pressure is good and you walk 10,000 steps a day? Maybe you said yes because you feel happy, in spite of any health conditions you may be experiencing.
The truth is that we often talk about improving our health, but figuring out what it actually means to be healthy is surprisingly difficult, as we discover in our cover feature 鈥淎re you healthy? A new wave of tests promises the ultimate check-up鈥�. There is a straightforward reason. For decades, our medical institutions have focused on the question of 鈥渉ow do we treat disease?鈥� rather than asking 鈥渉ow do we promote and maintain health?鈥�
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This is down, in part, to a psychological bias we all share: we like to solve our problems by adding something, rather than taking something away. When it comes to health, it is no different. We feel ill, so we buy a test, get a prescription or take a pill. We don鈥檛 often consider what it is that we can stop doing to prevent ourselves from getting ill in the first place.
Things are changing though. Having begun to realise that some of our classic assessments of health, such as body mass index, are flawed, attention is turning to which physiological processes might offer us the ultimate insight into what it means to be physically and mentally well.
This is leading to new tests that we can take today to give us a better idea of our current 鈥� and future 鈥� state of health. That researchers are increasingly seeing health not as a passive process, simply a happy consequence of an absence of disease, but as an active state that can and should be studied and maintained in its own right, is an encouraging shift in mindset. Applying the precision we level at diseases and their treatment to the phenomenon of 鈥渉ealth-care鈥� will no doubt help us all turn to 鈥渄isease-care鈥� a little less often.
