Health | Definition & Importance | Britannica (2025)

health, in humans, the extent of an individual’s continuing physical, emotional, mental, and social ability to cope with his or her environment.

This definition is just one of many that are possible. What constitutes “good” health in particular can vary widely. The rather fragile individual who stays “well” within the ordinary environment of his or her existence may succumb to a heart attack from heavy shovelling after a snowstorm; or a sea-level dweller may move to a new home in the mountains, where the atmosphere has a lower content of oxygen, and suffer from shortness of breath and anemia until his or her red blood cell count adjusts itself to the altitude. Thus, even by this definition, the conception of good health must involve some allowance for change in the environment.

Bad health can be defined as the presence of disease, good health as its absence—particularly the absence of continuing disease, because the person afflicted with a sudden attack of seasickness, for example, may not be thought of as having lost good health as a result of such a mishap.

Actually, there is a wide variable area between health and disease. Only a few examples are necessary to illustrate the point: (1) It is physiologically normal for an individual to have a high blood sugar content 15 to 20 minutes after eating a meal. If, however, the sugar content remains elevated two hours later, this condition is abnormal and may be indicative of disease. (2) A “healthy” individual may have developed an allergy, perhaps during early childhood, to a single specific substance. If the person never again comes in contact with the antigen that causes the allergy, all other factors remaining normal, he or she will remain in that state of health. However, should the individual come in contact with that allergen again, even 20 or 30 years later, he or she may suffer anything from a mild allergic reaction—a simple rash—to severe anaphylactic shock, coma, or even death, depending upon the circumstances. Thus it can be seen that, unlike disease, which is frequently recognizable, tangible, and rather easily defined, health is a somewhat nebulous condition and somewhat difficult to define.

Moreover, physical condition and health are not synonymous terms. A seven-foot-tall basketball player may be in excellent physical condition (although outside the range of normality for height) but may or may not be in good health—depending, for example, on whether the individual has fallen victim to an attack of influenza.

There are further problems in settling upon a definition of human health. A person may be physically strong, resistant to infection, and able to cope with physical hardship and other features of his or her physical environment and still be considered unhealthy if his or her mental state, as measured by behaviour, is deemed unsound. Mental health can itself be defined variously. Some say that a person is mentally healthy if he or she is able to function reasonably well and is emotionally and behaviorally stable. Others define it as the absence of mental disorder.

In the face of confusion about definitions of health, it is most useful, perhaps, to define health, good or bad, in terms that can be measured and interpreted with respect to the ability of the individual at the time of measurement to function in a normal manner, with respect to the likelihood of imminent disease. These measurements can be found in tables of “reference values” printed in textbooks of clinical medicine, diagnosis, and other references of this type. When an individual is given a health examination, the examination is likely to include a series of tests. Some of these tests are more descriptive than quantitative and can indicate the presence of disease in a seemingly healthy person. Such tests include the electrocardiogram to detect some kinds of heart disease; the electromyogram for primary muscle disorders; liver and gall bladder function tests; and X-ray techniques for determining disease or malfunction of internal organs.

Other tests give numerical results (or results that can be assigned numerical values—such as photometric colour determinations) that can be interpreted by the examiner. These are physical and chemical tests, including blood, urine, and cerebrospinal-fluid analyses. The results of the tests are compared with the reference values, and the physician receives clues as to the health of the patient and, if the values are abnormal, for the methods of improving the patient’s health.

A major difficulty in the interpretation of test results is that of biological variability. Almost without exception, reference values for variables are means or adjusted means of large group measurements. For these values to have significance, they must be considered as lying somewhere near the centre point of a 95 percent range—i.e., the so-called ordinary range or, with reservations, the range from normal to the upper and lower borderline limits. Thus, the 2.5 percent below the lower limit and the 2.5 percent above the upper limit of the 95 percent range are considered areas of abnormality or, perhaps, illness. Some areas have wide 95 percent ranges—blood pressure, for example, may vary considerably throughout the day (e.g., during exercise, fright, or anger) and remain within its range of normality. Other values have ranges so narrow that they are called physiological constants. An individual’s body temperature, for example, rarely varies (when taken at the same anatomical site) by more than a degree (from time of rising until bedtime) without being indicative of infection or other illness.