Medyczne i personalistyczne rozumienie zdrowia

Abstract

Despite the fact that health is one of the fundamental categories of human existence, there is no definition of its essence which does not arouse controversies. It is a complex reality in itself and hence one can look at it from different points of view. However, two definitions seem to dominate in papers concerning the subject: the clinical and the medical ones. The former one especially emphasizes the normative “parameters” of a healthy organism. It plays an important role in diagnosing a man’s health and in the clinical procedure. Its value also consists in the fact that it allows starting a fairly accurate therapy or showing that it is unnecessary. The natural limits to this definition are set by individual considerations of particular cases and limitation of the field of vision basically to man’s body structure. The medical understanding of health gives wider perspectives. Its quality is not only decided by the clinical indices, but also by social and cultural ones. They sometimes have an important meaning in setting the blurred border between health and illness. However, what is the most important, the medical understanding of health also stresses extra-clinical factors that accompany the problems of health’s protection and promotion. Hence its value consists in the fact that it not only defines particular therapeutic actions and points out general directions of prophylaxis and prevention, but it also emphasizes the responsibility of social-political structures for the health of individuals and the society. Its weak point is that it is vulnerable to utopian approaches to the problems of health and its protection. The personalist definition obliges one to look at the problem of health from the perspective of integral anthropology. Here health also is not only full biological functionality and structural effeciency of the human organism. It requires taking into consideration the state of all elements constituting a person as a person, and especially fulfilling all the clinical norms, consciousness of the self, selfpossession, accomodation abilities in the environmental dimentions, playing social roles, a fairly good frame of mind. Since health is not a consummer good, the participation of each of these factors in defining health has its own proportions that are the conditions for self-expression in the cultural and axiological circle, proper for the person. Hence the personal factor plays a role that is not less important than the biological structure for the quality of health and its promotion. This is especially important when, for some reasons, the possibilities of clinical medicine have been exhausted and the man’s mental-spiritual sphere should take over the whole weight of the rations able to release optimism, a minimally necessary degree of life satisfaction and the experience of inner freedom from the paralysing effect of the illness. In the personal dimention this ability should be considered the most important factor deciding about a man’s health.