THE SCIENCE OF WELL-BEING

People are innately resilient and able to create their own well-being if they learn to live in ways that are healthy, happy, and good. Current emphasis on costly care of discrete diseases for profit neglects more effective means of health promotion and disease prevention. Such emphasis has caused unsustainable damage to both the providers and recipients of profit-driven disease care, which fails to reduce the burden of disease efficiently and equitably. In this article, health and well-being are defined and ways to measure them are provided to facilitate clinical care and planning of effective health promotion and disease prevention. The physical, mental, social, and spiritual aspects of well-being are all strongly dependent on human personality; they are strongly intertwined with one another because health is highly dependent on personal behaviors and the socioeconomic influences. In turn, human personality depends on three systems of learning and memory: associative conditioning, intentionality, and self-awareness. Consequently, health and well-being are creative adaptive processes that can be deliberately enhanced so that individuals and their communities can learn to flourish. In contrast, the medical model of diseases as discrete entities with specific causes is approximate, imprecise, and fails to inform clinicians how they can optimally treat any individual person. Health promotion, disease prevention, and personalized disease care are each necessary components of health care. The science of well-being provides the essential facts and principles that can allow us to prioritize efforts to serve the well-being of others in ways that are effective, efficient, and equitable.