Valles SA. Philosophy of Population Health: Philosophy for a New Public Health Era.

Abstract

ABSTRACT This book analysis some features and consequences of the emerging field of Population Health Science, which some authors define as Public Health 3.0. It is a mode of reaction against the biomedical model of health which was hegemonic in the twentieth century. It recognizes the World Health Organization’s (WHO) definition of health ‘as a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’, that health is empirically social and most of its determinants are social and economic ones; population health interventions are ethically inseparable from social empowerment and health research and health promotion must, coherently with these ideas, contemplate health as a social phenomenon too. Community-based participatory research is a pressing need for a change in the field of public/population health.