Nanomedicine. 15/25. Health needs and scientific innovation.
Defining health.
Is health synonymous with welfare? If they are not equivalent, how do they differ?
There are at least two approaches to health-related thought: this can be understood as the normative functioning of the whole body and, implicitly, the absence of any condition or illness that results in a performance sub-policy in reference to defined as "health care." Those who understand the health of this so do not reject the idea that the terms "social", such as employment subject stress or living in a war zone to take its toll, affecting the health, but the focus and point of intervention is always placed in the body (say, to address the hypertension caused by a high stress job or experienced clinical depression for the victims of the war.) According to the medical model, all sub-normative functioning belongs to a "patient" that is prescribed medical treatment to recover (or attempt to obtain) the regulatory function.
A second more comprehensive approach to understanding health can be described as a model "social", which recognizes that welfare is mental and social health are necessary for physical well-besides the absence of disease or physical. According to the social model is not required that a person is a patient with a sub-body functioning normally suffer from diminished health. A woman who is a victim of sexual discrimination at work can have a body free of physical illness, and yet not considered healthy according to the social model. Since early 1948, the World Health Organization considers the social and mental welfare is necessary components of the health.5
The implications of adopting a model over the other are enormous and are more obvious at points of intervention. For example, using the social model, the possible interventions to help a victim of social injustice (say sex discrimination) to achieve health may include civil litigation, protest, legislative reform, among many others-all action can bring about social and mental well-being if he can change, this would be the optimum, the social structures that led to injustice existed. Of course, from the medical model can cope with the absence of social welfare, "is treating the effects on the body (hypertension, depression and anxiety are among the possibilities) or trying to" cure " the patient's condition related to poor social health. In the medical model, one of the "cures" possible for a paraplegic who is a victim of discrimination and social injustice could be a medical intervention "bionic legs instead of buildings accessible, for example.
The nanoscale technologies we now offer interventions that aim that our bodies will be stronger, more skilled, more durable. Transhumanists, who profess the notion that even the healthiest body can be improved through technology, envision a new way of thinking about health. For them, the human body performs sub-policy-unless that body is "enhanced" with technological refinements. Social welfare may also be important for transhumanist, but performance is achieved by intervening in the body.
One of the obvious difficulties of transhumanist approach is that optimal health status change constantly depending on what the "refining industry" made available in the market. We know of the dizzying pace imposed by the refinements of the software of computers and cyberspace can be isolated if we do not buy the latest escalation. How many of us are ready for Homo sapiens 2.0?
