What does "healthy" mean to you?

I'm grateful for the opportunity to be part of the Justmeans community and contribute to the health content on this site. In the coming months please follow my posts, and provide feedback on what you like, dislike, agree with and disagree with.  Discussion is never fun when only one voice is heard, so let your's be heard as well!

Health experts and pundits abound, so why listen to me? My goal is to provide informed, practical commentary and insight on the current global challenges of health, healthcare, and health policy, based on some basic principles that I've learned over the past decade working with non-profit, evidenced-based health organizations, and The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, where I received my Masters of Public Health.

Its easy to forget fundamentals when attempting to untangle the complexities of global health, medicine, and healthcare. Things like what it means to be healthy? What is the best way to produce more health? How important are financial concerns and incentives? Which partners should we reach out and collaborate with? And what are the roles of science, policy, technology and informed personal choice? As a "disciple" of evidenced-based decision making, and having written for scientific publications, I believe science and data deserve a special place in that dialogue. But as a student of sociology, and health officer in my local community, I can't forget that each data point represents a person. Science is important, data is important. But science doesn't bring ultimate truth or precise answers, it quantifies uncertainty. The most rigorous health research only tells us that "95 percent of the time the answer lies between X and Y" (the ubiquitous "95% confidence interval"). It doesn't tell us what to do with that information or if that information is even important. Science and data are tools to be wielded with sound judgment and an ethical eye towards the overall goal of advancing human wellbeing.

I also believe that clinical measures of health and disease--HIV status, a diagnoses of cancer, heart disease or malnutrition--are merely surrogate measures for happiness, for that smile on the face of my son and twinkle in his eye. The only reason we care about disease is that it makes us feel rotten and die before we expect to. This is important because today's technology allows some of us living in wealthier countries to detect and measure things that are so small or obscure we have no idea what to do about them. And since we have the drugs and procedures to "treat" them, we are frequently distracted from doing the thousand basic things that we know for sure improve health and save lives around the world. In addition to data, drugs and disease risks, we need to remember our values, compassion, and the real goals of treatments, policies and procedures. For me, it's about keeping the smile on the face and twinkle in the eyes. What is it for you?