Explaining Health Across the Sciences

550 Pages·2020·7.831 MB·English

by  Jonathan Sholl, Suresh Rattan

Healthy Ageing and Longevity 12
Series Editor: Suresh I. S. Rattan
Jonathan Sholl
Suresh I. S. Rattan   Editors
Explaining
Health Across
the Sciences
Healthy Ageing and Longevity
Volume 12
Series Editor
Suresh I. S. Rattan, Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Aarhus
University, Aarhus, Denmark
Rapidly changing demographics worldwide towards increased proportion of the
elderly in the population and increased life-expectancy have brought the issues,
suchas“whywegrowold”,“howwegrowold”,“howlongcanwelive”,“howto
maintain health”, “how to prevent and treat diseases in old age”, “what are the
futureperspectivesforhealthyageingandlongevity”andsoon,inthecentrestage
ofscientific,social,political,andeconomicarena.Althoughthedescriptiveaspects
ofageingarenowwellestablishedatthelevelofspecies,populations,individuals,
andwithinanindividualatthetissue,cellandmolecularlevels,theimplicationsof
suchdetailedunderstandingwithrespecttotheaimofachievinghealthyageingand
longevity are ever-changing and challenging issues. This continuing success of
gerontology,andespeciallyofbiogerontology,isattractingtheattentionofboththe
well established academicians and the younger generation of students and
researchers in biology, medicine, bioinformatics, bioeconomy, sports science, and
nutritional sciences, along with sociologists, psychologists, politicians, public
health experts, and health-care industry including cosmeceutical-, food-, and
lifestyle-industry. Books in this series will cover the topics related to the issues of
healthy ageing and longevity. This series will provide not only the exhaustive
reviews of the established body of knowledge, but also will give a critical
evaluationoftheongoingresearchanddevelopmentwithrespecttotheoreticaland
evidence-based practical and ethical aspects of interventions towards maintaining,
recovering and enhancing health and longevity.
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13277
Jonathan Sholl Suresh I. S. Rattan
(cid:129)
Editors
Explaining Health Across
the Sciences
123
Editors
JonathanSholl SureshI. S.Rattan
Philosophy andHistory of Ideas Department ofMolecular
Aarhus University Biology andGenetics
Aarhus,Denmark Aarhus University
Aarhus,Denmark
ISSN 2199-9007 ISSN 2199-9015 (electronic)
Healthy AgeingandLongevity
ISBN978-3-030-52662-7 ISBN978-3-030-52663-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52663-4
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Preface
We all have some notion of what a healthy person is or have felt more or less
healthy ourselves. And yet, there has been an endless debate about what exactly
‘health’ is and how it should be defined. Perhaps part of the difficulty is that most
standardtextbookdefinitionsofhealthdefineitintermsofanabsence:theabsence
of disease. As a result, it seems quite difficult to have a science of health, or for
health to be considered a scientific concept, since it is supposedly tracking what is
not present. On the other hand, what is perhaps the most well-known definition of
health outside of the clinical realm comes from the World Health Organization:
healthisastateofcompletephysical,mental,andsocialwell-being,andnotmerely
the absence of disease or infirmity. This at least gets around the issue of defining
health in negative terms, but it leaves the concept horribly vague and difficult to
quantify scientifically. Is anyone ever completely healthy?
Is this all there is to be said about health? Should we just abandon the concept
entirely? Perhaps we have not been asking the right questions. When the medical
sciences are investigating the phenomenon we call ‘health,’ are they not also
trackingthepresenceofsomeproperties,processesorabilities?Wouldn’tthislatter
questionforceustoclarifywhattheobjectofthehealthsciencesactuallyis?These
questions, among many others, were in our minds as we set out to conceive of an
interdisciplinarybookon‘health.’Throughaseriesofconversationsbetweenus—
one a philosopher of medicine and the other a biogerontologist—we narrowed
down how we might tackle this problem of understanding and even explaining
healthbybringingtogetherasmanydifferentperspectivesaswecould.Wewanted
to transport the interdisciplinary conversations we were having into the context of
an edited volume where experts in their fields, be they scientific or philosophical,
wouldbechallengedtoreflectontheimplicationsoftheirobjectofstudyforhowto
understand and explain health. Now, this is not a question that is often asked
outside of the more likely setting of philosophical discussions, and so it required
somenudgingonourbehalftopushthecontributorsoutoftheircomfortzones.The
result is also an interdisciplinary one, though less in terms of collaborations on a
giventopicandmoreintermsoftheoverallcompositionofthepresentvolumewith
itsmixofscientificandphilosophical contributions.Thismixproducedinteresting
v
vi Preface
challenges and discoveries due to the different expectations of writing in science
and in philosophy. We hope that the final composition provides the reader with a
diversity of perspectives that complement one another despite their different
methods, jargon, topics, and presentation styles.
The volume has been divided into three parts (and a conclusion): one on
explaining health from within specific disciplines, one exploring health from the
perspective of a bodily system, part, function, or the environment in which
organisms are found, and the final part looking at more clinical or practical per-
spectives. Part I develops the more general evolutionary, biological, and philo-
sophical dimensions of health as discussed in the respective disciplines. Here, the
aim is to take a bird’s-eye view of health from within an entire field, whether it is
evolutionary, molecular or systems biology, or debates within philosophy, and to
try to unearth some general insights. The philosophical contributions focus on a
rangeofissues,suchaswhethertherecanbeageneraltheoryofhealthandhowthis
pertains to interdisciplinary fields, what philosophers have to say about mental
health,andeventherelationbetweenhealthyagingandauthenticity.Byandlarge,
the issues raised in these chapters are not ethical ones, but rather issues related to
the concepts and models used in the health sciences.
Shiftingfromentirefieldstomorespecificdisciplineswithinthesefields,PartII
delves deeper into the structural or systemic aspects, functional aspects, and
organismic and environmental aspects of health. The chapters focusing more on
localized fields or descriptions present some of the distinct characteristics of a
healthy body by, for instance, focusing on a specific part, such as the heart, the
mouth, or the microbiome, or on a specific function, such as sleep or sexuality.
These internal fields are then complemented by broader organismic and environ-
mentalperspectives.Thereisreflectiononhowhealthiscorrespondinglystudiedin
non-human organisms, such as the famous model organism C. elegans, and an
analysis of the various challenges facing attempts to unify ‘health’ across life’s
diverse forms. The final chapters explore social relations and even public health
explanations,providingaccountsoftheexternalfactorssocrucialtounderstanding
health. Part III looks at health from a clinical or practical perspective, with a
particular emphasis on the prolongation of health over time, i.e., from health to
healthy aging. There iseven a reflection of the ancient human dream (or illusion?)
of immortality. In these chapters, we find interesting discussions not only about
what health is, but how it can be promoted, e.g., through the strategic use of
low-dose stressors as described by the notion of ‘hormesis.’ Finally, Part IV is the
conclusion where the editors organized many of the key insights contained
throughout the book and extracted some original conclusions and thoughts for
future research on health.
Despite these separate parts, the fact that ‘health’ is a topic that requires inter-
disciplinary thinking meant that we could not neatly divide the book into science
versusphilosophy.WhilethephilosophicalchaptersarelargelycontainedinPartI,
therearealsocontributionsbyphilosophers,orevenphilosophicalcontributionsby
scientists, scattered throughout the other parts. It is in this sense that the compo-
sition of the book exhibits interdisciplinarity.
Preface vii
Theoverarchingaimofthisvolumeistherebytoinform,inspire,andencourage
intellectuals from various disciplines to assess whether explanations in these dis-
parate fields and across biological levels can be sufficiently systematized and uni-
fied to clarify the ever-elusive phenomenon of health. While the result of this
volume is a long way from providing a single or unified explanation or even a
theory of what health is, we are confident that it is at least one small step in the
journey to do so.
Aarhus, Denmark Jonathan Sholl
Suresh I. S. Rattan
Contents
Part I Health Concepts Across Disciplines
1 Understanding Health from an Evolutionary Perspective . . . . . . . . 3
Thomas B. L. Kirkwood
2 An Evolutionary Analysis of Health . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Kenneth R. Arnold, James N. Kezos, Grant A. Rutledge,
Thomas T. Barter, and Michael R. Rose
3 What is a Healthy Body? A Biodemographer’s View . . . . . . . . . . . 35
S. Jay Olshansky
4 Biological Health and Homeodynamic Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
Suresh I. S. Rattan
5 Healthy Biological Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Robi Tacutu, Dmitri Toren, Eugen Ursu, Gabriela Bunu,
and Teodora Bucaciuc Mracica
6 Health in Philosophy: Definitions Abound but a Theory Awaits. . . 79
Jonathan Sholl
7 Mental Health and Well-Being in Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Dominic Murphy, Caitrin Donovan, and Gemma Lucy Smart
8 Health Concepts at Work in Interdisciplinary Fields . . . . . . . . . . . 115
Jan Pieter Konsman
9 Health, Ageing, Authenticity and Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
Desmond O’Neill
ix
x Contents
Part II Health Across Systems
10 Healthy Mouth: An Odontological Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
Tine Hjorth
11 Cardiovascular Health . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
Ole Faergeman
12 Characteristics of Healthy Blood. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
Geetika Garg, Sandeep Singh, Abhishek Kumar Singh,
and Syed Ibrahim Rizvi
13 Immunity and Health . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199
T. Fülöp, A. A. Cohen, A. Larbi, and J. M. Witkowski
14 What Is a Healthy Microbiome?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
Antonis Karamalegos, Mireya Vazquez-Prada, and Marina Ezcurra
15 Molecular Biomarkers of Health. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
Jan O. Nehlin and Ove Andersen
16 The Dynamic Pathosome: A Surrogate for Health and Disease . . . 271
Peter Lenart, Martin Scheringer, and Julie Bienertová-Vašků
17 The Sleep Prism of Health . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289
Jean-Arthur Micoulaud-Franchi, Julien Coelho,
Kevin Ouazzani Touhami, and Pierre Philip
18 1974 and All That: A Tale of Two Approaches to Healthy
Sexuality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317
Andreas De Block
19 Health in Non-human Organisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 333
Henrik Lerner
20 Healthy Worms. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347
Rikke Hindsgaul Harders, Katrine Vogt Møller,
Maria Grymer Metz Mørch, Matthew S. Gill, and Anders Olsen
21 An Environmental Perspective on Health . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371
Evgenios Agathokleous and Edward J. Calabrese
22 Social Relations and Health . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 383
Robert Zachariae
23 Kinds of Explanation in Public Health Policy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 405
Alex Broadbent and Benjamin Smart
24 Shaking off the Linear Regulatory Constraints on Human
Health. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 417
Jaap C. Hanekamp and Edward J. Calabrese