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Epidemiologists emphasize that the "one cause – one effect" understanding is a simplistic mis-belief. [53] Most outcomes, whether disease or death, are caused by a chain or web consisting of many component causes. [54] Causes can be distinguished as necessary, sufficient or probabilistic conditions.
Health care, or healthcare, is the improvement of health via the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, amelioration or cure of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in people. Health care is delivered by health professionals and allied health fields.
Specific to public health policy, a determinant is a health risk that is general, abstract, related to inequalities, and difficult for an individual to control. [2] [3] [4] For example, poverty is known to be a determinant of an individual's standard of health. Risk factors may be used to identify high-risk people.
The ability to read and understand medication instructions is a form of health literacy. Health literacy encompasses a wide range of skills, and competencies that people develop over their lifetimes to seek out, comprehend, evaluate, and use health information and concepts to make informed choices, reduce health risks, and increase quality of life.
The Health Capital Theory underpins the importance of preventive care across the lifecycle and provides a framework for understanding the variances in health and health care that are experienced. It treats health as a stock that provides direct utility. Health depreciates with age and the aging process can be countered through health investments.
The concept of the "health field," as distinct from medical care, emerged from the Lalonde report from Canada. The report identified three interdependent fields as key determinants of an individual's health. These are: [14] Biomedical: all aspects of health, physical and mental, developed within the human body as influenced by genetic make-up.
In 2004, the World Health Organization calculated that 1.5 billion disability-adjusted life years were lost to disease and injury. [41] In the developed world, heart disease and stroke cause the most loss of life, but neuropsychiatric conditions like major depressive disorder cause the most years lost to being sick.
Toxicology studies how environmental exposures lead to specific health outcomes, generally in animals, as a means to understand possible health outcomes in humans. Toxicology has the advantage of being able to conduct randomized controlled trials and other experimental studies because they can use animal subjects.