Valles SA. Philosophy of Population Health: Philosophy for a New Public Health Era.

Abstract

This book analysis some features and consequences of the emerging field of Population Health Science, which some authors define as Public Health 3.0. It is a mode of reaction against the biomedical model of health which was hegemonic in the twentieth century. It recognizes the World Health Organization’s (WHO) definition of health ‘as a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’, that health is empirically social and most of its determinants are social and economic ones; population health interventions are ethically inseparable from social empowerment and health research and health promotion must, coherently with these ideas, contemplate health as a social phenomenon too. Community-based participatory research is a pressing need for a change in the field of public/population health.