IELTS Academic Reading Practice 23

All over the world, people have their own distinct idea about what the idea of health means to them. Over the course of time, these meanings have shifted as well. In modern Western society, where the idea of health and how to be healthy are always expanding and being reassessed, these shifts are more apparent.

In most of Western history, the physical aspect of health has been regarded as the most important, especially in recent years. That means that people associate being healthy with the smooth mechanical operation of the body, while a breakdown in this physical machine would indicate poor health. As suggested here, the definition of “health” could be described as a body free of disease or other problems within medical terms. From this standpoint, health would be promoted by receiving appropriate medical treatments intended to both treat and prevent physical ailments. Examples of health promotion in this sense could be advocating for the provision of clean water, or for improvement of sanitation and housing standards.

Towards the end of the 1940s, the World Health Organisation (WHO) challenged this physically and medically oriented view of health. In 1946, the WHO released a statement, “health is a complete state of physical, mental and social well-being and is not merely the absence of disease.” At this point, more emphasis was placed on defining health in terms of  a person’s entire well-being, including the factors of mind and spirit in addition to the physical body itself.

Disease and illness prevention grew more popular in the 1970s. This movement emphasized the role of individual lifestyle and behavior choices in terms of overall health. A prevention approach targets certain risky behaviors, such as smoking, lack of fitness and unhealthy eating habits, which are especially likely to increase the chance of developing diseases. To promote health, it was believed that medical health care would be supplemented and improved alongside health promotion programs and policies aimed to advertise and inform people about healthy behaviors and lifestyles. For the wealthier classes of society, this individualistic healthy lifestyle approach to health was rather affective. However, this approach was of little help to those struggling in situations of poverty, unemployment, underemployment or harsh life conditions. The problem with both these previous models of health were that they largely ignored the social and environmental conditions affecting the health of people.

In the following decades of the 1980s and 90s, the approach of treating lifestyle risks to promote overall health fell out of favor. Although lifestyle variables are still taken into consideration, more people began to see health as being related to contexts within social, economic and environmental factors. This broad approach to health is known as the socio-ecological view of health. The broad socio-ecological view of health was endorsed at the first International Conference of Health Promotion held in 1986, Ottawa, Canada, where people from 38 countries agreed and declared that: The fundamental conditions and resources for health are peace, shelter, education, food, a viable income, a stable ecosystem, sustainable resources, social justice and equity. Improvement in health requires a secure foundation in these basic requirements. (WHO, 1986)

This statement makes it clear that there is much more involved in promoting health than previous approaches accounted for. Health promotion goes beyond just encouraging healthy individual behaviors and lifestyles and providing appropriate medical care. Variables like poverty, pollution, urbanization, natural resource depletion, social alienation and poor working conditions must also be addressed in terms of their effects on human health. It’s important to understand the contexts within social systems, the economy and environment which affect health, as well as these contexts in relation to each other. It appears as though they are interacting and interdependent. These complex interrelationships between the contexts indicate which conditions promote health. The broad socio-ecological view of health has suggested that promoting health requires enough attention to social, economic and environmental contexts.

Those attending the 1986 conference in Ottawa helped to develop a charter, one based on the socio-ecological view of health, which was intended to lay out new instructions to promote health. Known as the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion, it is still considered vital to the way people view health promotion today.