Reflecting About Health: Various Viewpoints and Personal Belief

This essay about health is a reflection of my personal beliefs about health both individual and community. This essay is going to discuss the different viewpoints on health, my beliefs concerning health and diseases, and how my involvement in the healthcare system may have altered my views on health. Furthermore, the essay looks at the troubles that the system of healthcare faces, from point of view of the need in the rational use of scarce resources, and look at controversy between individual and societal responsibilities for health.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) defines health as: “The enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition.”

The comprehension of health as an idea implies different for varied people. Some believe that being healthy is a state of freedom from diseases. However, some believe that this meaning is limited. It is quite complicated to define health. There is no prevalent explanation of health.

My personal understanding of health was built over many years of spiritual practices and hard work on my perception of the world, relationships between humans and Earth and Space. I spent plenty of time reflecting on why people have some diseases or how the human mind impacts the body. Personally, I continue to believe that everything regarding humans is connected. It is a kind of philosophy which says that wellbeing is harmony.

Nevertheless, being a student in the healthcare system allows me to expand my interpretation of the human body, consciousness, and wellbeing in its entirety. The discovery of the human body along with the mind promotes a deeper understanding of what is health. If reflect generally our health consists of diet, physical and mental activity, habits, rest, communication and interaction with the environment and people around us. There is no doubt that diet plays one of the most important role. Having clean water, consuming essential nutrients, including delicious fruits, which full of vitamins and taste, already maintain our health. Not only diet is important for us but physical and mental activity also impact us in a beneficial way. Physical activity is a kind of lever that starts the whole mechanism of our body.

On the other hand, health might be culturally recognized newly to Indigenous Australian and differently to western countries and countries of the third world. For instance, Indigenous’ belief is that the concept of health and wellbeing bound to family, society, and relatedness to traditional land. They rather defy the individual as a separate person. According to Keleher and MacDougall, comprehension of health is established upon the broad meaning of health that recognizes the range of economical, community and environmental factors that promote health. It seems that society is the focal point to gain the expedient concepts of health. Keleher and MacDougall argue that society’s future is the major step to understand health. Different studies illustrate that health is bound to a state of wellbeing and diseases. The belief of western cultural country such as Australia is of the opinion that health is the absence of illnesses or pathogens in an individual.

The notion of health has various ways to interpret. The meaning of health is affected by socio-cultural features such as age, gender, ethnicity and also culture. Number of investigations demonstrate that men and women have a different proportion to seek health information. Females are more tend to seek information about health than males. Beside this rate is a consecutive factor impacting the health of the individual. Most of the people living in the rural area link wellbeing and health with productive access to healthcare and able to get health services in time.

Regarding public health, the Ottawa Charter presents eight main points of wellbeing for all. It includes tranquility, home, education, food, wage, stable eco-system, tenable resources, social justice, and equity. It is possibly said that wellbeing is similar to comfort. Each of us unconsciously strives for comfort and quality. Due to a connection between all aspects of human life, there is a huge pressing on us from beyond our control features. According to the Ottawa Charter, the target of health promotion is achievement equity in health. Its action focuses on reducing differences in modern health status and establish equal convenience and resources to allow all people to achieve their adequate health potential. This includes a protected foundation in an auxiliary environment, approach to information, life skills and opportunities to control health in a beneficial way. People are no able to reach their fullest health capacity unless they are able to control circumstances that determine their health.

Healthcare sources are becoming progressively deficient and the restriction is a modern reality in the healthcare system. The ethical position of deficient resources in healthcare is dubious; nevertheless, the controversy is that all individuals, despite the reasons for their diseases, possess a right to enter the healthcare system. The law of the World Health Organisation [WHO] claims: “…the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being”, in this case, rights might be assumed as the authority, which collects the taxes from the community, providing secure that all individuals in the community will be able to enter a system of certain basic level of healthcare.

Wellbeing might be a dispute to be an individual responsibility. Individual health is influenced by many aspects, including the existence of heritable circumstances and the lifestyle of each person such as smoking and being overweight, through a lack of physical activity or an unbalanced diet, for instance, is more tend to become ill than those who make healthier lifestyle choices. There is another reason to be made that people with self-inflicted diseases should obtain a lower priority approach to the healthcare system than patients whose diseases are not self-inflicted.

On the other hand, some have no choice due to poverty or low class in the community. Modern life provides a plethora of opportunities to earn enough for a quality life. Yet along with benefits, modern lifestyle gives disadvantages such as high competition, rush, and isolation. To look at the usual citizen it could be seen that he or she is in a continuous rush for career success or even forced to survive in modern conditions. Due to the lack of time, modern people suffer from mental illnesses, depression, isolation, and illnesses related to an unbalanced diet. It is easier and cheaper to consume fast food or street food but at the same time it slowly kills us with poor composition, stale products, and unwashed hands of stuff.

However, people respond to their life and wellbeing despite difficulties. Individuals make a choice to smoke, consume spirits or drugs. In this case, those people deprive more conscious people of the opportunity for better health. It could be illustrated by an example of two individuals who live in the megapolis. The first one is the usual office worker with middle income and family. The second one is depressive and alcohol addicted. Once the second one has a blurred mind and he knocks the first one by car. So then the family of the first individual has to pay medical bills. Due to the crash, the office work loses his work and his family becomes a lower class in the community. The chain of negative consequences only increases. Thus, the individual responsibility to health tightly impacts and intertwines with community health.

Even if people took part in risky behavior which more tends to be a reason of their ill health, the standards of social justice prevail, meaning that these people have a moral right to approach healthcare system in civilizations in which healthcare is provided to all individuals. The phenomenon that these people engaged in hazardous behavior that might be caused to develop the disease is not enough per se to form the base of disavowing the approach to the healthcare system.

It is critical that personal responsibility for health and wellbeing be emphasized within the broader context of social liability. Theory of social justice, regarding wellbeing, in spite of the need to be accepted within the context of two particular standpoints: first is that the authority’s responsibility for granting healthcare, as a primary human right, and the individual’s obligation for supporting their own health, as a duty to themselves to be healthy and to society to not become trouble.

The contemporary understanding of wellbeing developed into formal in 1948 by the World Health Organization (WHO), including the interpretation of health in its Constitution. The explanation was suggested by Dr. Andrija Štampar, a known academic from Croatia in the field of social medicine and nation health and one of the establishers of the WHO. This generally assumed interpretation claims that wellbeing is a condition of entire physical, mental, and social wellbeing and not only the lack of illness or infirmity. This explanation contributed for the first time that, as well as physical and mental health, public prosperity is an integral aspect of overall health because health is tightly connected to the social environment along with living and working conditions.

To determine health in strategical and functioning terms was vital for founding policies and programs to maintain and improve health, and it considerably managed to surpass the broad rooted definition that health merely means the lack of disease. The Ottawa Charter from the First International Conference on Health Promotion, in 1986, claims that health is established in the context of everyday life together with the environment, where individuals live, love, work, and play. Hence, active and interactive recognition of health was brought in. The aim of health promotion is to fuse the way for appealing the national determinants with the resolution and obligation to motivate and foster the individuals and the society for their active approach toward wellbeing and ambient healthy lifestyles.

During the last few decennaries, the WHO explanation of health has been progressively refined and supplemented by the fourth measuring such as spiritual health. Generally speaking, moral health includes a sense of realization and gratification with our own lives, the system of values, confidence and dignity, presence along with self-awareness, calm and tranquility with active emotional balance, both internal and toward the surroundings, morality together with veracity, self-denial, positive emotions, sympathy and willingness to help and support others, liability with assistance to the common good, and fruitful organization of everyday life troubles and demands as well as community stress.

The healthcare system of Australia ranks well internationally, as shown in extending high average life expectancy and a low rate of infant mortality. These achievements are under threat as Australia’s health system is extended by an aging population, the increasing burden of chronic diseases, and the progressively outmoded organization of our health services. The disparity in health between most and least advantaged individuals persists and is the sentinels that emphasize that there is no place for self-content or inertia in reforming the healthcare system in Australia.

The aging people in Australia defies the capability of the services healthcare to support wellbeing, organize serious and continuing diseases, and afford support for those who are frail and disabled. Preventable leads possibly do not reach out adequately to individuals which are most at risk, and maintenance for the chronic diseases is focused in the pointed care sector, with suboptimal bonds to general practice and community care. Regulating services in the cause of preferably primary, secondary and tertiary prevention, and more quality care for individuals with serious and continuing diseases, some of whom possibly could be in need of support for years, is inhibited by the distinct and competing investment made by the federal and state authorities and the private sector to the financing and supply of health services.

And lastly, the question of whether wellbeing is eventually the liability of the individual bases on your distinct viewpoint concerning the question of welfare and how far the authority should be responsible for individuals. From my point of view, welfare should be accessible to those who truly are in need of access to this instead of individuals who seek to take benefit from the welfare system. Personally, health and wellbeing is an individual liability and those who miscarry to shoulder this duty should be required to take upon themself a part of the expenses of the medication or therapy for their subsequent ill-health.