What is health?

Western medicine defines health as the “absence of disease or other abnormal conditions”. It’s an idea which when first considered seems to make good sense, but upon closer examination doesn’t really account for what we know about health being a dynamic flux of homeostatic mechanisms. We know that disease begins before we can detect it, and as a result, medical science has invested in an increasingly complex array of sometimes invasive procedures to measure and predict health, such as blood pressure, serum lipids, biopsies, hormone profiles, cat-scans and MRIs.