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This edited volume aims to better understand the multifaceted phenomenon we call health. Going beyond simple views of health as the absence of disease or as complete well-being, this book unites scientists and philosophers. The contributions clarify the links between health and adaptation, robustness, resilience, or dynamic homeostasis, and discuss how to achieve health and healthy aging through practices such as hormesis. The book is divided into three parts and a conclusion: the first part explains health from within specific disciplines, the second part explores health from the perspective of a bodily part, system, function, or even the environment in which organisms live, and the final part looks at more clinical or practical perspectives. It thereby gathers, across 30 chapters, diverse perspectives from the broad fields of evolutionary and systems biology, immunology, and biogerontology, more specific areas such as odontology, cardiology, neurology, and public health, as well as philosophical reflections on mental health, sexuality, authenticity and medical theories. The overarching aim is to inform, inspire and encourage intellectuals from various disciplines to assess whether explanations in these disparate fields and across biological levels can be sufficiently systematized and unified to clarify the complexity of health. It will be particularly useful for medical graduates, philosophy graduates and research professionals in the life sciences and general medicine, as well as for upper-level graduate philosophy of science students.
Used across the public health field, this is the leading text in the area, focusing on the context, participants and processes of making health policy.
Science is a way of knowing about the world. At once a process, a product, and an institution, science enables people to both engage in the construction of new knowledge as well as use information to achieve desired ends. Access to scienceâ€"whether using knowledge or creating itâ€"necessitates some level of familiarity with the enterprise and practice of science: we refer to this as science literacy. Science literacy is desirable not only for individuals, but also for the health and well- being of communities and society. More than just basic knowledge of science facts, contemporary definitions of science literacy have expanded to include understandings of scientific processes and practices, familiarity with how science and scientists work, a capacity to weigh and evaluate the products of science, and an ability to engage in civic decisions about the value of science. Although science literacy has traditionally been seen as the responsibility of individuals, individuals are nested within communities that are nested within societiesâ€"and, as a result, individual science literacy is limited or enhanced by the circumstances of that nesting. Science Literacy studies the role of science literacy in public support of science. This report synthesizes the available research literature on science literacy, makes recommendations on the need to improve the understanding of science and scientific research in the United States, and considers the relationship between scientific literacy and support for and use of science and research.
This interdisciplinary monograph in philosophy of medicine examines models of explanation in health science and their relation with current medical trends, such as personalized and person-centered medicine. Medicine has provided challenging case studies for the general philosophy of science that have prompted rethinking of a wide range of philosophical notions – such as scientific law, theory and evidence – and contributed to the elaboration of pluralistic approaches to modeling, causality and explanation. The health sciences have increasingly recognized the role of philosophy of medicine as both a field of conceptual and methodological reflection, capable of addressing practical issues, and hence relevant for a proper understanding of the construction of medical knowledge, modeling practices, therapeutic strategies and preventive decisions. 'Explaining Disease' contains various case studies in medicine to describe the assumptions underpinning the construction of explanatory models of diseases. It shows the impact different explanatory strategies can have on practical matters, which in turn affect clinical evaluation and therapy and public health decisions. The book concludes with a few open-ended reflections to foster more thorough consideration of the role of philosophy of medicine can play its dialogue with the health sciences.
We rely on environmental health scientists to document the presence of chemicals where we live, work, and play and to provide an empirical basis for public policy. In the last decades of the 20th century, environmental health scientists began to shift their focus deep within the human body, and to the molecular level, in order to investigate gene-environment interactions. In Exposed Science, Sara Shostak analyzes the rise of gene-environment interaction in the environmental health sciences and examines its consequences for how we understand and seek to protect population health. Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic observation, Shostak demonstrates that what we know – and what we don’t know – about the vulnerabilities of our bodies to environmental hazards is profoundly shaped by environmental health scientists’ efforts to address the structural vulnerabilities of their field. She then takes up the political effects of this research, both from the perspective of those who seek to establish genomic technologies as a new basis for environmental regulation, and from the perspective of environmental justice activists, who are concerned that that their efforts to redress the social, political, and economical inequalities that put people at risk of environmental exposure will be undermined by molecular explanations of environmental health and illness. Exposed Science thus offers critically important new ways of understanding and engaging with the emergence of gene-environment interaction as a focal concern of environmental health science, policy-making, and activism.
After its unparalleled rise and expansion over the past century, medicine is increasingly criticized both as a science and clinical practice for lacking scientific rigor, for contributing to overmedicalization, and for failing to offer patient-centered care. This criticism highlights serious challenges which indicate that the scope and societal role of medicine are likely to be altered in the 21st century. Somogy Varga's ground-breaking book offers a new perspective on the challenges, showing that they converge on fundamental philosophical questions about the nature and aim of medicine. Addressing these questions, Varga presents a philosophical examination of the norms and values constitutive of medicine and offers new perspectives on how to address the challenges that the criticism raises. His book will offer valuable input for rethinking the agenda of medical research, health care delivery, and the education of health care personnel.
Physical Activity and Health, Fifth Edition offers expert knowledge based on the latest scientific evidence from physical activity and health research along with a variety of instructive elements that assist and encourage students in developing a personalized physical activity and health plan. The goal of the book is to introduce concepts and to develop the skills and interest to make physical activity a life-long habit. This text equips students with the information, skills, and practical know-how to gain control of their health and decide what to do and how and when to do it.
Science and technology are embedded in virtually every aspect of modern life. As a result, people face an increasing need to integrate information from science with their personal values and other considerations as they make important life decisions about medical care, the safety of foods, what to do about climate change, and many other issues. Communicating science effectively, however, is a complex task and an acquired skill. Moreover, the approaches to communicating science that will be most effective for specific audiences and circumstances are not obvious. Fortunately, there is an expanding science base from diverse disciplines that can support science communicators in making these determinations. Communicating Science Effectively offers a research agenda for science communicators and researchers seeking to apply this research and fill gaps in knowledge about how to communicate effectively about science, focusing in particular on issues that are contentious in the public sphere. To inform this research agenda, this publication identifies important influences â€" psychological, economic, political, social, cultural, and media-related â€" on how science related to such issues is understood, perceived, and used.