17.1. Health as scientific concept
Science and the centuries-old healing practice accumulated numerous, convincing, and indisputable data on the nature of human being, the essence of diseases, and the parameters of health. Moreover, they learned how to diagnosticate and treat the diseases, including those that had been recently considered as incurable. However, the conceptual problem of health and its conditionality is still urgent and actual. Specifically, the disputable questions are what the health is and which factors affect the healthy state of a human being. The unresolved character of these questions cannot but affect the lifestyle of modern people, family life, and the whole society.
The study of vital problems on the nature of health can be fruitful only due to the consorted efforts of professionals from various fields of knowledge presenting the natural and social sciences. A rather wide circle of philosophical and specific scientific disciplines examine and generalize the problems of health and disease.
Philosophers examine the phenomena of health and disease in order to clarify the boundaries of human freedom and the sphere of personal choice of a certain type of human existence. Here, the 'health' is viewed as a form of actualization of the bodily potencies that provides the maximum possibilities for self-actualization (self-realization) of human being. From philosophical viewpoint, the personal attitude to health is 'inalienable responsibility for self-being'. The health was examined as the object of philosophical and sociological study in the works of I.I. Brekhman, (1982), V.P. Kaznacheev (1996), Yu.P. Lisitsyn and A.V. Sakhno (1998), L.G. Matros (1992), P.D. Tishchenko (198б), G.I. Tsaregorodtsev and S.Ya. Chilin (1992), and B.G. Yudin (2001).