What is health?

Healthcare tends to think of our health as binary–either you’re sick or you’re not. In reality, our health is in a constant state of change. Some of our behaviors improve our health, while others impair it. We define health as the spectrum of wellness to disease and the transitions that produce these changes.

But this spectrum is not one-dimensional–we don’t simply move toward or away from wellness or disease. Rather, health is multidimensional where we may simultaneously move away from a disease state but toward another. For example, you may have great cardiovascular fitness but suffer from depression. While perfect health does not exist, understanding our phenome can help us optimize our health—bringing us as close to wellness as possible.