Health can be defined negatively, as the absence of illness, functionally, as the ability to cope with everyday activities, or positively, as fitness and well-being. It has also been noted that in the modern world, health still has a moral dimension.
Health is not, in the minds of most people, a unitary concept. It is multi-dimensional, and it is quite possible to have 'good' health in one respect, but 'bad' in another.
Substantial proportions of the population did not see health as the most important thing in life - and these were more likely to be people with more, rather than less, education.
It is certainly not true that the population can be easily divided into those who lead healthy lifestyles, and those who do not: most people's patterns are mixed, with both good and bad areas of life.
The evidence here, as elsewhere, suggests that education is certainly relevant, but more because better education is associated with general differences in patterns of life than because discrete parts of a lifestyle can be changed. Health-change policies which focus entirely on the individual may be ineffective not only because exposure to health risks is largely involuntary, but also, as this study has shown, because of unwarranted assumptions about the extent to which behaviour can, in these circumstances, be effective in improving health.
Healing requires a legitimated, credible and culturally appropriate system.
