Health Determinants and the Health Policy

Overview

Determinants of the health and disease are factors of the human biology, environment, system of health and thehuman behaviour. For the clinical practice not only their identification, but also their effectiveness becomesimportant. Modern epidemiological gnoseology serves to this purpose using methods both on the individual and thepopulation levels. At the same time, all indexes of the population’s health status respond sensitively to two factorsof the social sphere: Differences in the economical standard of the population, classified according the social statusor family income, and on the psychosocial markers of the population groups. Relation between poverty and diseasesis apparent, while relation between the wealth and health is in the modern societies less obvious. Complicated andcomparatively fast sociopolitical, cultural, and psychological changes brought about the feeling that poverty and wealth arenot taken absolutely (though differences among the two has risen) but more relatively. People appreciate more the quality oflife, which is based more on the psycho-socio-cultural „capital", then on purely materialistic values.

Key words:
biological reductionism, neopositivism, correlation, association, individual and population, epide-miological transformation, social status.