Philosophical Foundations of Health Education (Philosophy of Education Research Library)

Despite the impressive array of technological achievements mustered by medical science, the health of the general population in most of the industrial world has not substantially improved during the present century. In this book the author shows that even by the measure of morality, we are not healthier than we were; we have simply substituted one form of social disease or social pathology for another. The authors argue that the failure of public health arises not from a failure of medicine, but from deficiencies in the philosophical assumptions upon which it rests. They suggest an alternative approach to health care which derives from a profoundly ecological and holistic philosophy of nature and show how the advancement of community health depends upon incorporating the best of the aims of conventional medicine into a comprehensive programme of health education in which the responsibility for health is inextricably knit with a new consciousness of ecological stewardship.