The Nature of Health: How America Lost, and Can Regain, a Basic Human Value / Edition 1

by Michael Fine, James Peters

Overview

This pioneering work addresses a key issue that confronts all industrialised nations: How do we organise healthcare services in accordance with fundamental human rights, whilst competing with scientific and technological advances, powerful commercial interests and widespread public ignorance? "The Nature of Health" presents a coherent, affordable and logical way to build a healthcare system. It argues against a health system fixated on the pursuit of longevity and suggests an alternative where the ability of an individual to function in worthwhile relationships is a better, more human goal. By reviewing the etymology, sociology and anthropology of health, this controversial guide examines the meaning of health, and proves how a community-centred healthcare system improves local economy, creates social capital and is affordable, rational, personal, and just. "This is badly needed nourishment for a medical system glutted on technology, individualism, profit and the pursuit of longevity. Read and be fed." - Christopher Koller, Health Insurance Commissioner, The State of Rhode Island, USA. "Unique. Surprising. A real eye-opener. Just about everyone who doesn't have a vested financial interest in maintaining the status quo will agree that U.S. healthcare is badly broken. [This book] is making it possible for us to refocus from how to provide healthcare to how to achieve health. Their description of health as successful functioning in community, rather than as a measure of longevity is a definition that can make a reader feel healthier as they take gradually appreciate the power of the concept. On this foundation, it is not as hard as one might think to outline a healthcare system that is equitable, affordable and achievable." - Alexander Blount EdD, Professor of Family Medicine, University of Massacusetts Medical Center.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780367446192
Publisher:	CRC Press
Publication date:	11/25/2019
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Michael Fine, James Peters

Table of Contents

Foreword Robert S. Lawrence vii

Michael Fine's preface xi

Jim Peters' preface xiii

About the authors xvi

Introduction xvii

Part 1 What Health Is Not 1

Demented and Contracted 3

1 The health we have 9

2 The health we buy 15

3 What we measure is not health 21

4 Medications are not health 29

5 Medicine is not health either 37

6 Science is business, not health 43

Hancock County 48

Part 2 What Went Wrong and Why 53

The Happy Victim 54

7 The human tsunami 59

8 The reductive trap 75

9 The trap is sprung 83

10 How longevity kidnapped health 91

11 Medical services and communities 97

12 The zero-sum game 103

Three People, Three Aortas 117

Part 3 What Health Is 125

A. Fib 127

13 What Webster thinks 131

14 Old villages, new lives 141

15 Toward a social definition of health 145

16 Health and community together 151

17 Health and fairness 165

Amish Boy 169

Part 4 What's Next? 173

18 Who gets what? 175

19 How should it look? 187

20 How should we pay for it? 199

21 Which doctors? 213

References 225

Bibliography 237