The emerging Science of Health Behind Feeling Great

Food for thought! How do we measure a happy and healthy life? Or why is medicine the dismal science?

I am not sure that the comparison of human health with a battery (see image below) was a good choice. This does not make me feel great! 😊

"... Studies have shown that how healthy we feel is often a surprisingly good predictor of how long we’ll live — sometimes even better than clinical tests. That’s led scientists to suspect that behind our gut instincts are real biological signals that modern medicine just hasn’t learned to detect yet. If researchers could identify the factors that give rise to these feelings of vitality, they say, it could change how we take care of ourselves. ...

Until recently, the prospect of defining and measuring health as a distinct biological state — rather than merely inferring it in the absence of disease — was seldom discussed in medical circles. ...

In a new paper ... they lay out the most detailed framework to date for understanding optimal health — or “intrinsic health,” as they call it — offering both a conceptual foundation and a roadmap for how scientists might learn to measure it. ...

intrinsic health is a “field-like state,” a kind of emergent property that arises from the dynamic interplay of systems involved in energy processing and communication across all levels of physiology — from molecular signaling within cells to coordination amongst organs. When energy is flowing freely and metabolic pathways are buzzing with crosstalk, they argue, we enter a state of “dynamic equilibrium” that enables our bodies to adapt seamlessly to changes in our environment ..."

From the abstract:

"The health sciences largely focus on disease. However, the interconnected determinants of diseases suggest that we need a science of health, a framework to examine the biology of homeodynamics in a changing environment and how this affects the health we value.

We build on first principles and recent discoveries on biological system dynamics to develop the concept of intrinsic health, a field-like state emerging from the dynamic interplay of energy, communication, and structure within the organism, giving rise to robustness/resilience, plasticity, performance, and sustainability. Intrinsic health is a quantifiable property of individuals that declines with age and interacts with context. We propose a measurement framework and describe how it will contribute to achieving the shared goals of medicine and public health."

The Secret Science Behind Feeling Great | Columbia Magazine "Columbia biologists propose a more holistic framework for measuring health — asking not what ails you, but what makes you thrive."

Intrinsic health as a foundation for a science of health (open access)

Fig. 2. A comparison of evolutionary fitness and intrinsic health.

Fig. 3. Intrinsic health as a field-like state.

(A) Intrinsic health emerges from the energy, communication, and structure of the body at multiple interacting hierarchical levels, from molecular to organismal.

Fig. 4. A measurement framework for intrinsic health.