Health Concepts at Work in Interdisciplinary Fields

Much of the debates surrounding the concept of healthHealth in philosophy of medicine has been between ‘naturalism’ and ‘normativism’. Here, the aim is to apply the revisionist naturalists’ recommendation and to look for definitionsDefinition of health in the biomedical literature. Based on our own research experience with neuroendocrinology, neuroimmunology, psychoneuroendocrinology, psychoneuroimmunology and microbiotaMicrobiota-gut-brain research, we speculated that these interdisciplinary fields mobilize notions of health including: (1) health as constancy of internal milieu or homeostasisHomeostasis, (2) health as absence of or due to specific interoception, (3) health as absence of stress or as the result of eustress or hormesisHormesis, and (4) health as result of (immune) defense. To assess which healthHealth concepts interdisciplinary researchInterdisciplinary biomedical research fields studying interacting biological systems mobilize, the PubMed database was interrogated with search strings linking (1) proposed health concepts-related terms and biological systems, (2) health and health concepts-related terms, and (3) health and interdisciplinary researchInterdisciplinary biomedical research fields. Health was mostly encountered in the context of “healthHealth and diseaseDisease” without being further specified. The terms stress, homeostasisHomeostasis and immune were most frequently used in relationship to health, but healthHealth was only clearly defined, referring to homeostasisHomeostasis, in two articles. More articles, however, evoked the biopsychosocial modelBiopsychosocial model of medicine in which “overall healthHealth reflects a high level of intra- and intersystemic harmony” (Engel, Ann N Y Acad Sci 310:169–187, 1978, p. 175). In conclusion, applying the revisionist naturalists’ recommendation to scrutinize the theoretical sense of ‘healthHealth’ throughout the biomedical literature will need to go beyond the level of definitionsDefinition and may therefore not be that straightforward.