Explaining Health Across the Sciences

This edited volume aims to better understand the multifaceted phenomenon we call health.

Going beyond simple views of health as the absence of disease or as complete well-being, this book unites scientists and philosophers. The contributions clarify the links between health and adaptation, robustness, resilience, or dynamic homeostasis, and discuss how to achieve health and healthy aging through practices such as hormesis.

The book is divided into three parts and a conclusion: the first part explains health from within specific disciplines, the second part explores health from the perspective of a bodily part, system, function, or even the environment in which organisms live, and the final part looks at more clinical or practical perspectives. It thereby gathers, across 30 chapters, diverse perspectives from the broad fields of evolutionary and systems biology, immunology, and biogerontology, more specific areas such as odontology, cardiology, neurology, andpublic health, as well as philosophical reflections on mental health, sexuality, authenticity and medical theories.

The overarching aim is to inform, inspire and encourage intellectuals from various disciplines to assess whether explanations in these disparate fields and across biological levels can be sufficiently systematized and unified to clarify the complexity of health. It will be particularly useful for medical graduates, philosophy graduates and research professionals in the life sciences and general medicine, as well as for upper-level graduate philosophy of science students.

Uniquely combines perspectives from scientists and philosophers of medicine/science on the subject of health Includes a wide range of topics and highly interdisciplinary contributions to help readers gain as thorough understanding of health due to Addresses the critical challenge of an integrative theory of health by starting from cutting-edge scientific theories and philosophical methods

Inhalt
Section 1: Health across disciplines

Biology1. Evolutionary understanding of health - Tom Kirkwood2. Evolutionary explanation of health - Michael Rose3. Biodemographic perspective on social health Jay Olshansky 4. Biological health and homeodynamic space Suresh Rattan
Sociology/psychology5. Epidemiological view of health Alex Broadbent, & Likhwa Ncube6. Healthy society Uffe Juul Jensen7. Public health Carsten Obel8. Social relations and health Robert Zachariae
Philosophy9. Philosophical concepts of health Jonathan Sholl & Maël Lemoine10. Interdisciplinary health Jan-Pieter Konsman11. Health and authenticity Des O´Neill
Section 2: Health across systems
Biological structural aspects12.Healthy nervous system - Vittorio Calabrese13. Healthy face Tine Hjorth14. Healthy immune system15. Immunity and health - Tamas Fülöp, Jacek Witkowski16. Healthy heart Olé Færgeman17. Healthy skeletal system Moustapha Kassem18. Healthy blood Syed Rizvi19. Molecular biomarkers of health Jan Nehlin20. Healthy genome Robi Tacutu
Functional aspects21. Healthy sleep Jean-Arthur Micoulaud-Franchi & Julien Coelho22. Healthy sexuality Andreas De Block23. Healthy mind Robert Zachariae24. Healthy psyche Dominic Murphy and Caitrin Donovan
Ecological aspects25. Healthy organism Anders Olsen26. Health in non-human animals/organisms Henrik Lerner27. Environmental perspective on health Ed Calabrese
Section 3: Health in practice28. Healthspan versus lifespan Eric Le Bourg29. Health and immortality Ilia Stambler30. Health versus frailty Arnold Mitnitski31. Health in clinical practice Marios Kyriazis32. Health and pro-longevity interventions Alex Vaiserman33. Regulatory understanding of health Ed Calabrese34. Health in AI-driven healthcare J.C Bjerring and Jacob Busch
Section 4: Bringing health back together35. Reflections/Conversations on integrated explanations of health with short response to question:Can there be an integrated science of health? (to be compiled by the editors based on the response of all authors).